Florida's Film, Television and the Arts Magazine
A Raging Rebuttal Against A.I. at the Sydney Film Festival
The 73rd Sydney Film Festival, as I experienced through their smaller lineup of digital screeners, is particularly engaged with academic explorations of variable depth and ambient psychedelic imagery. The depth is of note because it works in parallel to the amount of labor behind the academic exploration because it is shown to vastly different levels of perceived authenticity. As human effort and creation becomes more valuable in the face of generative AI, seeing the processes of life become even more invaluable than the end result as products become synonymous. By prioritizing analog and physical skillsets, the films incorporate an inherent humanity. Tipping my hand a bit, but Chronovisor is comfortably the best film that I saw at the festival because of the intensity with which it portrays such ideas and methods of labor.
Phenomena
Koyaanisqatsi on the microscopic level is just as unaffecting as the 1982 film with its droning electronic music in service of pseudo-philosophical bullshit portending to revolutionize how the universe is observed. Phenomena is a mildly educational journey through the elements and forces that make the world go round, as director and narrator, Josef Gatti, and his father, Mark Gatti, put together extensive experiments that provide psychedelic visuals. Although the images are quite stunning, the context around them is worth a quick glance and an intense eye-roll. The film is a 90 minute long platitude, refusing to find actual material substance despite the attention to detail in the craft. The educational elements are elementary at best, lacking any real specificity. The montages of the experiments conducted by Gatti are overextended and lose any connection to the physical world after the first 30 seconds. The film is clearly attempting to serve a few audiences, stoners who showed up for Godfrey Reggio’s documentary over 40 years ago and children with zero understanding of science. At best this provides foundational knowledge, but that would be too kind because it constantly takes the anti-intellectual route and pretends to be ethereal by providing the simplest facts imaginable. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” A nuanced dialogue about the forces at play is completely out of the conversation in favor of drivel. By cynically dulling down every ounce of educational content to its most derivative form, there is little content to partake in besides Gatti’s experiments.
Philip Glass is the saving grace for Koyaanisqatsi, but Phenomena does not have that structural backbone. By featuring existing music from Nils Frahm and an original score by Rival Consoles, the film centers itself firmly in rave culture with its ambient electronic beats. The acid pop jams blend into the image rather than allow for any additional meaning to bubble to the surface. Glass’ scores resonate because they find patterns and with slight alterations, profundity. Rival Consoles’ score is erratic. Any hope of finding meaning consumed by the flurry of images and lack of rhythm. Perhaps Gatti’s goal was to create something that is, per 2001: A Space Odyssey, “The Ultimate Trip.” That and rudimentary education are completely at odds with each other. Everything must be digestible and because of that, superficial. Structurally, by going through each force one by one without diving into how they interact with one another, this becomes nothing more than a Youtube playlist meant to be viewed in 10 minute chunks whenever the science class lessons run short.
Chronovisor
Imagine Olivier Assayas and Michael Snow directed a procedural together. A French academic investigating a potential revolutionary technology through analog means sets the narrative groundwork for a film that is intensely interested in the formal structures that divide cinema and literature and thereafter breaking down those divides. Beatrice Courte (Anne Laure Sellier) holds the frame with her intense curiosity about the titular Chronovisor device. Courte’s research comes primarily through real texts that directors, Jack Auen and Kevin Walker, spent almost a year researching. Chronovisor gets what is so fascinating about research: stumbling toward a new source, connecting an unnamed individual back to an identified person, scouring journals only to find branching pathways with diverging points of view. Assayas feels particularly apt because the desire to put one’s working life on screen comes to the forefront. This is by no means as meta as something like Suspended Time or Something in the Air where Assayas is committed to true autofiction, but even hinting at autofiction within the context of academic inquiries is absolutely delicious.
Beatrice, being a multi-lingual character, dives into text of many languages headfirst, which is portrayed on gorgeous 16mm that brings the yellowed pages of a book to life. In its opening credits, Chronovisor has a title card for its translators, something I had frankly never seen before as an opening credit title. The work of Nicholas Byrne & Cyril Beghin, Maya Jasmin & Dorothea von Muecke, and Enea Zucchetti & Clara Ferri does not go unnoticed as their English translations overlap and shine above the exact words being translated. Large swaths of the detective work come through reading their translations, and the film allows that to be cinematic. Their labor is fruitful, and that process is largely what the film is about. Academic research can be fulfilling, and the libraries with which said research takes place have a liminal but comforting quality to them. Once again, that lush and richly textured photography brings these spaces to life. There is a three dimensional quality to the film, not in the sense of the stereoscopic technology, but in the sense of place. The film feels lived in. Time passes not with a sense of urgency, but with painstaking attention to detail. Texts must be explored to the fullest extent. Places of study must exist before Beatrice steps foot in them and will continue to exist long past the end of the chronovisor project. There are no intense flashbacks to the time of the monks, just whatever exists within these texts. Beatrice sources a lot of her information through white lies that make her desire to get to the bottom of the mystery all the more fascinating. Every time she brings up how she needs to get a posthumous award to a monk’s family, it is a moment worth leaning into the screen. That feeling encompasses the entire film. Everything from its lush textures to its hall of mirrors dead ends and bureaucratic nonsense aligns the audience with Beatrice’s desire to know. That knowledge comes into direct contact with the cinematic storytelling being conducted by Auen & Walker. Inconsistencies, white lies, and alterations to the historical canon can affect everything downstream. Storytelling is creating and replacing a memory with a new perception of that memory. By taking on the chronovisor sincerely, the filmmakers engage with those original memories and how that can be distilled and altered by engagement. Craving knowledge is a core human tenant, and to know the ending of Chronovisor is to experience all of humanity, the past and the present at once through that knowledge and historical memory.
Sukundimi Walks Before Me
As PanAust, a mineral procurement company, sets their sights on the copper and gold deposits along the Sepik River, Manu Peni, the coordinator of Project Sepik and a human rights advocate, organizes the tribes of the Sepik River against the Chinese mining subsidiary. Sukindimi Walks Before Me is most potent when it blends together the present day and prior conflicts of the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea through unexplained archival footage depicting the use of exploited labor to build mines, a wounded soldier in the Bougainville Civil War, and the construction of housing for colonialist settlers that is significantly more sound than the structures that make of the indigenous villages. Contrasting the small but mighty laborious efforts of Project Sepik with the political violence over the 20th century portrays a potential step toward actual economic and ecological freedom. By flattening time, the film identifies the key strategies used to take advantage of indigenous people over and over again. The film smartly considers how different forms of western development are or are not exploitation.
There is a trend amongst modern documentaries of breaking the fourth wall that deflate to any sense of immersion. In service of being authentic, films like No Other Land, Grand Theft Hamlet, Cover-Up, and Sukundimi Walks Before Me bring attention to the camera and force the audience to consider the perspective of the filmmakers. Matasila Freshwater and Lachlan McLeod do not go as far as putting themselves in front of the camera, but by clearly sitting their subjects down for talking head segments in educational environments, it becomes apparent quickly that the audience for the lecture is not the tribesmen in the room, but for the western audience watching the film. The film is not necessarily an observational one, as there is a clear goal from the outset, but Freshwater and McLeod’s perspective is so sound that whatever formal shortfalls they face are easily overcome by their willingness to quite bluntly engage with the history and current exploitation of Pacific communities. They engage with the culture of the Sepik River tribes without speaking down on them. The gifting of betel nuts, a stimulant that functions similar to nicotine or caffeine, goes by without a pause. The film accepts their culture and their reality as truth despite the already prickly history of colonization. The tribes have already been through this cycle time and time again, and that resilience is spectacular.
Tycoon
Charlotte Zhang’s feature debut is a goofy mumblecore shit-post that explores a fictionalized dystopian world where all meat has gone bad and cockroaches are now the leading source of protein. Oh, also there’s the 2028 Olympics happening in Los Angeles. None of that is particularly important in the film, but it’s worth stating the basic construction because the film is a freeform amalgamation of images that have little if anything to do with the one preceding it, narratively, emotionally, or thematically. Even the fascinating shots of cars doing donuts in intersections while police look on lack power. Rather than approaching its silly political ideas with a sense of sarcasm or intensity, Zhang imbues it with an earnestness that reads as corny because there is nothing substantial to hold onto. The antithesis of this approach is the current iteration of Harmony Korine with all his (possibly ethically sourced?) generative AI and intentional veneer of artifice. His films possess a lowbrow view of capitalism and internet culture, speaking to the name of his production company, EDGLRD. Tycoon has a lot of ornamental qualities of Korine’s work but has no clue how to tonally handle the imagery. There is an attempt to splatter anarchic images against the canvas, but it comes across as uncertain and frankly timid.
Tycoon could be generously called a mood piece if its immiscible stylizations felt of the same universe. The dry performances could be described as Brechtian, but that would require a cinematic portrayal to match that energy. The editing feels haphazard, like a fly stuck between three light sources that it so desperately wants to latch onto. There is not a single area of exploration that feels fleshed out. There is no sense of place despite this hypothetical 2028 Los Angeles being a hotbed for political strife. Filmmakers like Jia Zhangke, Clint Eastwood, and Guan Hu have explored the impact of the Olympic Games on the city and people that the games take over to great effect. The massive infrastructure and bureaucratic spend that leads to little if any economic growth and waves of state sanctioned violence and othering. Zhang resorts to conspiracy theories about the cockroaches as meat supplies dwindle in the face of the impending Olympics. Through low framerate stills and some other experimentation, she takes bold steps toward portraying athletes and heroes through a lens that requires the audience to engage with the fact that they are watching a film. There is no attempt to forefront realism, visually or politically. And that is ultimately a fault of the film. By refusing to engage with any political truths, the experimentation falls flat on its face. Tycoon portrays a dystopian city with no legitimate differences from the Los Angeles we see today. At its most coherent, Tycoon can be read as a hate letter to the slacker youth of today and tomorrow, but that would prescribe an actual perspective onto a film that lacks one at all.
