highlight: CYCLES AND RHYTHMS

by Jacquet Kehm

This past Thursday night, Pittsburgh Sound + Image held a special screening of “Cycles and Rhythms”, a touring program from Revolutions per Minute Festival, a Boston-based & artist-run experimental film festival showcasing poetic new works that “explore the formal and conceptual possibilities” of 16 mm film. Benny Shaffer, who organized the showing here, mentioned during the introduction that 2023 is the 100-year anniversary of the 16 mm format. Even a hundred years in, there is no doubt how beautiful and flexible the medium remains, as the films screened made clear that artists today are still taking joy in surveying its boundaries.

9 films were screened, ranging from 1 minute and a half to 20 minutes in length. It was a good variety, though largely more experiential in nature than concerned with narrative or conventional storytelling. Cycles and rhythms made themselves apparent as themes formally, in the droning or static-crackling soundscapes, the pacing, the shakes and wobbles of the film, and in content, with phases of the moon, the tide, mundane and repetitive urban happenings. Highways of headlights. A trip to the grocery store, trying to find the milk, having a panic attack.

A short lyrical piece, Winter’s First Moons by Kathleen Rugh, started off the event, and while straightforward enough (the film’s title is a literal description of what’s shown), the playfulness of the effects—with multiple moons of different sizes zigzagging about the screen at times, closeups capturing a certain night’s clarity, the variety in focus—made sitting with something as taken for granted as the moon surprisingly delightful.

Amusement Ride by Tomonari Nishikawa was one of my favorites. It’s also straightforward on one hand: We’re within the structural workings of some ferris wheel-like contraption (it’s never depicted in full), moving as they move, in this chunky, turn-based fashion, but captured so kaleidoscopically it all feels like so much more. It’s a geometric array, all this cross-hatching of struts and supports. It’s many geometric arrays, as somehow there keep being new views. Some kind of Gundam guts slot machine. We fall forward in its gears for six minutes. A bunch of white painted metal become vast metaphor.

Another highlight was Lilan Yang’s film Everything Comes Full Circle. The special sauce for this film involved “inkjet printing on clear film spliced together with perforations made with a laser cutter”. Some kind of halftoning? The ink continues to melt each time it is played, and will eventually become a full on glob. The film itself, contentwise, is a bit of a delirious fugue, and I’m not sure how many runs it’s been through, but at this point its visual quality has become a Seurat painting of windmill gyrating amoebas—immersive van Gogh eat your heart out, truly. There’s whisps of a narrative, a speaker reminiscing “I might’ve fallen in love with you, because you talk too much,” while the scenes move through Paris, or far more likely just a place with a lot of establishments in red neon lights that say Paris, in lanes of traffic light aureoles, lots of photons milling about. Then it’s the American West qua a Sunday on la Grande Jatte. Intensely bright, looking at… cactus pears. It’s a sunrise, one telephone pole, a Sunoco truck. Still horizons, dismal sunfilled swirling liminal. The empty time of the expanse. Ah, yes.

My biggest takeaway from the program was how effective film is for defamiliarization. Capturing an actual image of something in the world and through some material sorcery—be it double exposure, superimposition, other tricks passed from master to apprentice or pulled out of the ass—bridging it to a new physical reality. There’s a unique way that the filmmaker’s manipulation of real light has powers to transpose a whole new set of emotions to something known and well worn. It’s really something to experience when done well.

The program was a bit more “abstract” than some (which is a weird designation we have to get past / help elaborate for others) but I think it was still highly accessible. It was full of feelings to sit with, and a lot to ponder ‘how they pulled that off’ technically. I’m far from a cinephile but I encourage anyone to follow Pittsburgh Sound + Image and attend their events. I’ve gone away happy each time and I’m impressed by the breadth of their offerings, and while it was a treat to have a touring festival visit, I particularly appreciate the focus they put on local filmmaking and its history. The impression is they keep overturning stones and finding forgotten goodies in the field. Their passion is clear, and when you go to a screening, you’ll feel it, too.

Jacquet Kehm is an artist based in Wilkinsburg.