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latenightcinephile · 3 months

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Film #912: 'The Horse Thief', dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1986.

The Horse Thief makes for quite an interesting viewing experience these days. It's rare for a film on the list to have left such a small footprint - I could find a handful of in-depth articles, as well as the (almost mandatory) Senses of Cinema review. Besides this, though, there's almost nothing that lays Tian Zhuangzhuang's film out in clear detail. There's hardly even a detailed plot summary which, for a film that tells most of its story through opaque images, puts me in the bizarre position of only being mostly sure I know what happened. So let's try and examine this film's plot, as much as it seems to have one.

Norbu is a horse thief by trade, living in the Tibetan mountains in 1923. When the film starts, he does this reluctantly and only in order to feed his family. Despite the disapproval of his elders (especially his grandmother), he tries to live righteously as much as possible, donating a large portion of his proceeds to the village's Buddhist temple. However, when he pockets a stolen item intended for the temple, the village elders can no longer ignore this behaviour and he, his wife and young son are exiled from the village. His son, who was already ill, dies young and Norbu and his wife are forced to endure the harsh environment alone. All is not well at the village, however, as famine besets even the most noble people. At long last, Norbu and his wife have another child and, desperate to provide for them, Norbu returns to stealing horses. He sends his wife off with some silver and, depending on how you interpret the film's final shots, is either killed or kills himself.

This ambiguity is one of the things I enjoyed most about the film, for several reasons. Overall, the film's central conflict appears to be between survival and living a noble life. Buddhist ideologies saturate The Horse Thief at every level, which removes the film's plot from a simple black-and-white morality. Norbu's grandmother frequently cites 'goodness' as a determiner of someone's worth, and muses that Norbu will never get into heaven, but it seems that this is a shallow estimation of her grandson's life, and that Norbu actually strives hard to live a noble life to the best of his ability. The fundamental question of the conflict is 'Is it better to starve, if the alternative is to commit crimes? Or can someone still be virtuous while committing crimes?' This makes one of the final images of the film, of Norbu's dagger in the snow, surrounded by spilled blood, a test of the audience's interpretation. If he's been killed by someone he's wronged, then karma has finally wrought vengeance on him. If he's killed himself, then he has reached a judgment himself about the film's central conflict.

I find this second option more narratively appealing, but another benefit of the film's ambiguity is that I have no idea whether narrative appeal is meant to be the metric by which I judge the likelihood of an interpretation. Long stretches of the film are given over to meditations on landscapes and events: famine strikes the land, and for four or five minutes we watch villagers dig a grave, or watch Norbu carrying an effigy of death into a river, that the assembled villagers then pelt with stones while Norbu struggles back to shore (he helps himself to several piles of coins while the villagers are distracted, or perhaps this is a legitimate payment). If there were a more direct plotline in this film - something that required more detailed explanation - I would say that the film puts its plot on hold for these sequences, but I actually think the reverse is true: the film pauses its meditations to tell meaningful elements of a simple story.

These visual sequences are stunning, and are the main reason why this film is still worth a watch. As with several of his other films, Tian's camera takes an almost ethnographic documentary approach to its subjects. We see Tibetan sky burials (although the censors apparently made Tian remove explicit images of dead bodies), Buddhist ceremonies, and grieving rituals. Without much dialogue to contextualise these events, they develop a sort of 'flow' entirely fitting for a depiction of a devoutly Buddhist society. John Berra's piece for Senses of Cinema suggests that these sequences initiate the viewer into seeing things from the Tibetan perspective. Writing on the sky burial scenes, he says "What could be interpreted by an outsider as an inhuman way to treat the remains of the recently deceased becomes a transcendent reverie: Tian illustrates how the community regards this ritual as one stage in a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth", adding that the eerie merging of chanting and synthesiser on the soundtrack further enhances this transcendent feeling. Given its unusual style, this film seems like it should be a cinephile's dream, so what happened? Why is it so little-known? Some of the factors around the film's reception are obvious - it was a financial failure on its release, partly due to its subject matter and partly due to its experimental and poetic structure. Berra states that only ten prints of the film were initially made for release. One of the other elements, though, is the political lens through which the film was interpreted. A Chinese director setting a film in Tibet, which the Chinese government had annexed in the early 1950s, meant that the film would naturally be interpreted using this metaphor. Even a traditional, happy narrative film would have been fraught; one that included famine and exile was even more prone to interpretation. The Chinese censors insisted that a title card be included, which set the film's action in 1923. However, this was not enough to overcome the public's apathy, and The Horse Thief remained virtually unknown, even after Martin Scorsese declared it the best film of the decade. Tian continued to skate on thin political ice: his 1993 film The Blue Kite, explicitly critical of Chinese political events, resulted in him getting banned from filmmaking for nearly a decade.

Despite this reception, The Horse Thief remains an interesting and timeless watch. It reminds me in some ways of the essay films made by directors like Chris Marker and Godfrey Reggio at around the same time (Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi was made a few years before The Horse Thief, but shares the same sort of poetic structure). What I find especially appealing about the film, though, is how it marries this structure to the themes of Buddhist thought. The events of the film have a karmic justice to them, while the extended meditative sequences suggest that the events of Norbu's life just happen in sequence, a flow of time that cannot be stopped and can only with great difficulty be adjusted at all. Norbu is who he is, and has the values he has, and everything else follows from there. While this film is certainly an acquired taste, its imagery lingers in the mind. Tian said in an interview that he made the film "for audiences of the next century to watch", and it seems to be as potent now as it was over thirty years ago.

#1001 movies #the horse thief #tian zhuangzhuang

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dustedmagazine · 21 days

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Listed: Verity Den

Verity Den plays a soft-focus, trance-state shoegaze with glimmers of Zelienople, Bark Psychosis and Movietone. The band, out of North Carolina, is comprised of Casey Proctor, Trevor Reece and Mike Wallace, all three of the DIY veterans who formed the band in early 2023. Reviewing their 2024 self-title debut, Jennifer Kelly wrote, “Though their album is enjoyable as rock, it is very clearly not just that; it pools and looms and gently probes improvisatory effected guitar zones that sit pretty far from conventional song structures.”

Casey Proctor “Chant Arabe” (Anonymous) from Suzuki — Piano School: Volume 1

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I started taking Suzuki Method piano lessons when I was five years old, and “Chant Arabe” was one of the pieces in Volume 1. During my first recital, my teacher exclaimed how I connected with that piece more than the others, saying that some people can emote ominous (minor-key) music more effectively. It was an early realization that I might be one of those people, and I still enjoy listening to and writing with those tonalities.

Mahavishnu Orchestra — “Meeting of the Spirits”

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Every Sunday morning for a solid five-year period when I was a kid (like 7-11), my dad would blast “Meeting of the Spirits” while making breakfast. Undoubtedly, I was influenced by all the music he listened to, but that song in particular is probably the reason I went on to listen to other prog bands from the 1970s and later bands like Meshuggah and Animals as Leaders. We weren’t a religious family but during that era we were attendants at the church of prog rock.

Young Marble Giants — Colossal Youth

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The first time I heard a Young Marble Giants song it was Hole covering “Credit in the Straight World.” I didn’t “discover” that it was a YMG song until later and then finally listened to the entirety of Colossal Youth. Front to back it’s a perfect album. It has minimal instrumentation, but it’s completely engaged and never boring. Alison Statton’s lyrics are nuanced and poetic but very punk. I don’t know how to make music that sounds like that, and I haven’t heard anyone else do it.

Mikhail Kalatozov — Letter Never Sent (1959)

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Letter Never Sent is my favorite film. Beyond it being one of the most beautifully shot films I’ve ever seen (Sergey Urusevsky is the cinematographer and it’s in black and white), the subject matter feels like it’s personally tailored to me in a few ways. It’s about a group of government-funded geologists who are sent to Siberia to find diamonds. Their expedition is interrupted by a forest fire that cuts off communication with rescue crews and disorients them into a survival situation. Much less dramatically… I worked for the US Forest Service for 12 years, building and maintaining trails in the front and back country, almost majored in Geology and was a certified wildland firefighter for a few years. Also, honorable mention, from the same director… Salt for Svanetia (1930) is fantastic cinema and one of the earliest ethnographic films ever made.

Trevor Reece Roedelius — Wenn Der Südwind Weht

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Right before the pandemic, I wasn't playing much “rock” guitar or listening to most of my long-time go-to-records. Leaning more towards experimental, drone and synth-based music. A friend put this Roedelius record on my radar around that time and it inspired me to record some questionable but exciting stuff at home. A classic record and always there to help.

Alex Chilton — Like Flies On Sherbert

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Alex Chilton & his weird friends making a mess in the studio.

Bill Daniel — Who Is Bozo Texino? (2005)

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I first saw this film during a screening tour through the south around 2006. I was somewhat new to town, wandering around and only cared about making art. Highlighting old outsiders making their mark and telling stories through a grainy film collage felt new but familiar. The ethos of this film is one that I still relate to today.

Mike Wallace Allen Toussaint — “Southern Nights”

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A totally transporting song, Toussaint showers you in layers of piano and keys, the percussion chirps along like crickets at night and that perfect, unhurried hook. It really captures a certain kind of feeling, that particular humidity, the sun going down over the field. It's strange though because I didn’t hear this song until I was probably 25 or something, so I didn't have a memory of listening to it as a kid or something, but like a lot of songs, it became like a lens to look back on that, maybe memories I wish were there in some way. I guess it taps this strange kind of nostalgia whose origin is hard to locate and also comes with its own load of complications. That’s a part of the Southern experience, too, in a way that's unique to this part of the country. Memory and history are omnipresent, written and rewritten. I don't even hate the Glen Campbell version of this song. That’s its own type of “Southern Night.” Sometimes it's like that. I didn’t always embrace being from the South, but nowadays I’m into it and I know that when I’m living somewhere else someday, I will finally get to have that feeling of honestly missing a place and wishing I was back home for just a night.

Grouper — “Alien Observer”

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This is the first Grouper song I heard and I remember feeling just stunned by it. It has this depth of interiority and a meditative cycle that’s like breathing. I think this song really struck me because I encountered Liz Harris/Grouper at a transitional period. After the end of a long relationship, I was living for a little bit with several people in a house in Greensboro, NC called Hellraiser Haus, named because some scenes from Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth were supposedly filmed at the church across the street. It was a show house and the people I lived with were great, but I was kind of struggling with what was next and who I was in the wake of everything kind of disintegrating. There was something so bleak and comforting in this song, I really did kind of feel like an alien, observing myself, kind of detached. A few years later I saw her play kind of a large theater in Raleigh for this festival Hopscotch, and waking up several minutes after she had finished, kind of disoriented and crunched up in the seat and thinking I just saw one of the best shows of my life.

Wong Kar-wai — In the Mood For Love (2000)

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What more can be said about this movie that hasn't already? Wong Kar-wai is a master, and a really singular stylist. I never tire of watching this one, but I rarely put it on, it's just really worth savoring. It's also one where one’s feelings may change over time in relation to the basic plot points. Maybe you recognize yourself at different points or scenes than you did before, or see a new detail in a gesture or glance, like every moment’s a prism and would mean something different if it was just slightly turned. Being in a state of longing can really feel awful, but there can also be a kind of solace in there. Even once it's over, you can return to it sometimes, to remember. I mean just see it; this isn’t making any sense anymore!

#dusted magazine #listed #verity den #casey proctor #mahavishnu orchestra #young marble giants #mikhail kalatozov #roedelius #alex chilton #bill daniel #allen toussaint #grouper #wong kar wai

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rivertakis · 7 months

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One really specific experience I'm so happy to experience is watching really good dubs of movies. I'm not from an english speaking country, and so the dvds I used to watch as a kid always had dubs. They would sometimes be really bad (like the same guy voice acting every single character with no tonal change), or really, really good.

Some examples that come to mind are Ratatoullie and Garfield 2. The dubs are so good, that the original english version just feels... I wouldn't say bad, but the vocal performance is amazing and gives so much character that isn't the same in the original.

Another dub I fucking love is the new Puss in boots movie. I went to the cinemas for it, and the movie is already phenomenal, but the vocal performance...!!!!

Goldilocks and the three bears have an east London accent in the original english dub (that's what google tells me at least), and to translate that feeling into my culture, they used a Žemaitish accent to carry through the same feeling, regardless of the language barrier! Lithuania is separated into 5 different ethnographic regions that all have a different accent and different stereotypes.

Just a small ramble about something I love love love about dubs

#rambles #puss in boots

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eucanthos · 2 years

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Sky Hopinka (US, 1984)

The language in the calligrams employed in “I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become” (2016), is excerpted from early-twentieth-century ethnographic texts written by anthropologist Paul Radin about the Ho-Chunk Nation.

The films of Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/ Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) aesthetically intervene in photography and cinema’s historical complicities with settler colonialism.

In infrequent scenes of Native groups or gatherings, he works with their images generously and protectively. The camera might linger while pointing down, be kept at a distance, adjust the focus to blur, or intermittently turn away from a dance or ritual. Hopinka uses these simple cinematographic moves as well as mesmerizing, technically complex postproduction effects to safeguard Indigenous peoples’ images even while celebrating their presence.

Desire Lines: Sky Hopinka’s Undisciplining of Vision

https://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article/75/3/12/120198/Desire-LinesSky-Hopinka-s-Undisciplining-of-Vision

https://www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5377?

#Sky Hopinka #filmmaking #cinema #native american #ethnography #concrete poetry #calligrams #language #flying #birds

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adrenalinezetaax · 1 month

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On Imageless Films

What remains of cinema when the visuals are removed?

A few years ago, Anthology Film Archives did a screening series of what it called “imageless films.” The program is spread across a century of cinema, including Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend from the thirties and Derek Jarman’s Blue from the eighties, as well as more recent films. Some of them admittedly aren’t very different from what most people would call “sound art,” but I think there’s an important difference: unlike, say, listening to a fiction podcast, the audience must sit in a dark theater for the entire duration of the work (as one would for a movie). If one wants to get philosophical about it, one could also say that the dark screen is the image of absence—and it’s that distinction that some of these works rely upon to make their point.

Expedition Content is a striking example of this principle. This film was made by Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati at the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, which has produced several acclaimed documentaries. It repurposes audio originally recorded in the sixties during an expedition to West Papua conducted by ethnographers as part of research on the Hubula people. By focusing the audience’s attention on the sonic dimension of their journey, the artists curtail the preconceptions that accompany visual depiction of the film’s subjects, what some scholars might even argue constitute a “colonial gaze.” Sometimes creative choices undermine this objective: A text that prefaces the film revealing that one of the researchers disappeared during the expedition biases our sympathies somewhat, lending it the feel of a highbrow Blair Witch Project sequel. Nevertheless, the overall effect is quite striking. Presenting the material in a cinematic format also resolves the practical matter of captioning dialogue in a foreign language, which constitute a significant portion of the film’s material.

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sakuraiadam1704 · 2 months

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Week 4: Digital Community and Fandom

Sisters Who Make Waves: Decoding the Phenomenon

Few months ago, people in my country – Vietnam, has followed up a very famous show named “Chi Dep Dap Gio Re Song” which was taken from the copyright of another well-known show named “Sisters Who Make Waves” of China. Without any further ado, I would like to introduce to you my post for this week – Sisters Who Make Wave. Below are the 2 MVs for each contest I have been listed out.

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Abstract: Sisters Who Make Waves (SWMW), a Chinese reality music show featuring a few female celebrities over 30 years old competing in a girl group debut, those girls may have different backgrounds such as singers, models, actresses, businesswomen, etc… has become a cultural phenomenon.

SWMW, during their launch in 2020, presents a unique twist on idol competition shows. It challenges ageism in the entertainment industry by empowering "thirty dark horses" to rediscover their potential (Sun, 2020). The show's format, blending competition with sisterhood narratives, resonates with audiences seeking diverse representation and positive ageing portrayals (He, 2022).

Public Sphere: SWMW transcends entertainment through its social commentary. It sparks conversations about gender roles, female empowerment, and defying stereotypes (Wang, 2021). The show's online presence fuels discussions on platforms like Weibo, reflecting its engagement with contemporary social issues (Zhang, 2022).

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Audience: SWMW attracts a diverse audience. Existing fans of the participating celebrities tune in, but the show also cultivates a broader viewership interested in relatable stories and defying societal expectations (Xu, 2021). Younger demographics find inspiration in the contestants' journeys, while older viewers appreciate the celebration of mature femininity (Li, 2022).

Debate: SWMW isn't without controversy. Critics argue that the competition format undermines its empowering message and that the "girl group" concept reinforces unrealistic beauty standards (Chen, 2020). However, these debates highlight the show's ability to provoke discussions and challenge existing norms (Wu, 2021).

Winning Hearts: SWMW's success lies in its ability to connect with audiences emotionally. The contestants' vulnerability, determination, and supportive relationships resonate with viewers seeking authenticity and inspiration (Yang, 2022). The show's message of self-acceptance and defying limitations transcends cultural boundaries, creating a global fanbase (Liu, 2023).

REFERENCES:

Chen, M. (2020). Gender, performance, and reality TV: A critical analysis of Sisters Who Make Waves. Social Sciences in China, 41(4), 123–140.

He, Y. (2022). Ageing gracefully: Sisters Who Make Waves and the representation of mature women in Chinese reality TV. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 16(2), 189–205.

Li, X. (2022). Beyond entertainment: Sisters Who Make Waves and the discourse of female empowerment in China. Intersections: Gender, History, and Culture in Asia, 9(2), 145–162.

Liu, J. (2023). From local to global: The transnational appeal of Sisters Who Make Waves. Journal of Global Media and Culture, 10(1), 34–52.

Sun, Y. (2020). Thirty dark horses, return to youth: An ethnographic study of audience reception of Sisters Who Make Waves. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(8), 942–955.

Wang, Y. (2021). Reality TV and social commentary: Sisters Who Make Waves and the discourse on gender in China. Television & New Media, 22(8), 754–775.

Wu, X. (2021). The debate over authenticity: Sisters Who Make Waves and the construction of reality in Chinese reality TV. Media, Culture & Society, 43(8), 1202–1220.

Xu, J. (2021). Fandom and reality TV: Exploring the audience of Sisters Who Make Waves. Popular Communication, 20(3), 254–270.

Yang, L. (2022). Emotional resonance and audience engagement: The case of Sisters Who Make Waves. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 66(3), 425–446.

Zhang, H. (2022). The power of Weibo: Online discussion and the public reception of Sisters Who Make Waves. Chinese Journal of Communication, 15(2), 193–212.

#mda20009 #SWMW #Youtube

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mariesprincl · 7 months

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FILMS

Čapatý Ján (2013_ IDF Ji.Hlava)

Blue Box (2014_IDF Ji.Hlava)

Morava, krásná zem I (2015_ IDF Ji.Hlava)

Morava, krásná zem II (2016 _Marienbad Film Festival)

Morava, krásná zem III (2019 _BAFICI Buenos Aires)

Moravia, o fair land III

After centuries of oppression, the spirit of Moravian Slovakia (Slovácko) awakens to the rhythm of folk music and speed metal. A folk costumed zombie horror under the supervision of a modern Adam and Eva from a Czech TV quiz show mixes classical tragedy and ethnographic studies, biblical parable and low-brow genres. Petr Šprincl subverts the sacred myths, satirically revealing the dark foundations of social rituals against a background of folklore motifs. After nationalism and fascism, the subjects of the first two parts of this Moravian Epic, the series continues with variations on the Mrštík brothers’ play Maryša, imbued with Satanism.

„The Trilogy Moravia, Beautiful Land starts with belonging to tribe, folk costume and folklore, continues with the birth of the fascist of Slovácko and his defeat of the devil, and pagan inferno breaks out in the final volume.“

-IDFF Ji.Hlava 2019

Čapatý Ján

A documentary miniature illustrating the birth of rural mythology. As they talk about Jan Vizváry, a physically disabled resident of the village of Čáry in western Slovakia, a group of villagers gives rise to stories and tales that they witnessed or merely heard about. The boy with the deformed legs became the subject of observation and local sayings in which memories of World War II become intertwined with everyday as well as extraordinary events.

The village’s residents remember a big storm during which his father was hit by a tree, as well as the film scraps he collected and then screened at the local cinema.

-IDFF Ji.hlava

The impressive and abstract approach was chosen in the next joined episode of Čapatý Ján (2013), where the image of this man appears only for 7 seconds, during which, the audience, engrossed in the whole visuals and atmosphere, doesn’t spot this the first time, but imagines him the whole time. The story is constructed as a collage of black and white picture fragments, which are analogously cut and filled in by post productive extreme sound recordings. This strange roadmovie is in itself basically a double-feature – of Ján Čapatý and present time appearance of the region Čáry.

- Zuzana Janečková, VLNA magazine 55/2013

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notenoughspace · 1 year

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IN MATHIAS POLEDNA’S 16 mm black-and-white film Version, 2004, silence is deafening. The Los Angeles–based, Austrian-born artist’s most recent film features a dark space in which a group of young dancers sway languidly, their movements registering an unhurried and tranquilizing rhythm. The setting is strangely airless, a spatiotemporal vacuum that indicates nothing of its location; the music is audible only to those on screen as they weave about in a kind of trance-induced shuffle, an affectless ten-minute performance that loops repeatedly when projected. Poledna trains his camera on the dancers: We see tightly observed passages of hips, elbows, shoulders, and occasionally a face, only rarely glimpsing a broader view of the event. Without screaming “retro,” the dancers’ style appears of a certain vintage; but it’s hard to put a finger on precisely what that vintage might be. The jut of someone’s hair or the peculiar rise of a sweatshirt or jeans recalls stills from the annals of both modern and popular dance—think Judson Church or Yvonne Rainer, or better yet think American Bandstand—but the abstract quality of the film and its cinematic fragmentation of bodies resist seamless reads.

As in Poledna’s earlier, prefilmic, research-based work produced in Vienna and his more recent films Actualité, 2001, and Western Recording, 2003, Version delves into a virtual archive of what the artist calls “fragments of twentieth-century culture,” using histories of pop movements as an organizing principle. Without recourse to sound or voiceover to advance the scene, the audience is compelled to engage in an imaginative guessing game, scrutinizing not only scant visual details for clues to the work’s larger meaning but reflecting critically on the relationship between sound and vision in the various genres of music and dance cinema. The artist, however, injects a purposeful opacity into his representations. While his decisively grainy footage suggests antique film stock, the work does not so much play to nostalgic sensibilities as it troubles them relative to the range of their historical mediations. In Version, Poledna taps into a reservoir of these arcane associations, as if prompting us to ask, “Didn’t we see this film before?” But there’s something blank and miasmic about these references. They fail to sponsor any singular point of orientation for the viewer, lacking the declarative punch of a full-blown iconography and the stable signifying conventions that come with the territory.

Poledna achieves this effect by insisting on a certain discontinuity between sound and vision. In Version, it’s expressed as the rupture between diegetic sound and nondiegetic sound (Poledna effectively collapses the two) and mise-en-scène. The sound track’s absence suspends immediate access into the work for the viewer, who first attempts to fill in the narrative blanks before realizing the uselessness of the activity. What this suggests about Poledna’s ongoing project has to do with the ways in which different forms of media—in this instance, visual and audio material—coalesce into larger cultural representations; and how these forms supplement one another in the production of recent history. Indeed, prior to his making films (which he has been doing for the past five years), his practice engaged a variety of political and pop-cultural sources, producing a range of work every bit as diverse as the materials he was investigating. In addition to site-specific projects and interventions that gave nods to the first generation of institutional critique, Poledna contributed to the magazines Texte zur Kunst and springerin, writing reviews and features on architecture, design, books, and music. He was also working extensively as a graphic designer and organizing the occasional show. One work in particular foreshadows the quasi-ethnographic impulse distilled in his recent films: The video installation Fondazione was created in 1998 for an exhibition Poledna curated at the Generali Foundation in Vienna entitled “The making of.” The work is partly a documentary of the Fondazione Feltrinelli in Milan, one of the most extensive archives of literature related to labor movements and utopian thinking in Europe.

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Poledna repeatedly draws on such diverse strands of political and pop-cultural materials to investigate the multilayered and polyvalent dimensions of cultural representation, specifically those that assume the status of official history. His last three shorts—Actualité, Western Recording, and Version—reveal an emerging preoccupation with the relation of sound to images. In these films a thematic split occurs between the visual documentation of the staged event and the sound track meant to accompany it, as if one struggled to keep pace with the other and both fell progressively out of sync. Western Recording depicts a singer in a recording studio warbling an obscure Harry Nilsson tune from 1969. He is captured in a series of ever-multiplying perspectives within his tabula rasa setting, but the back-and-forth between close and medium views denies the audience the totality of the performance. Similarly, Poledna’s Actualité—equally inspired by the Lumiére brothers’ film of the same title and Godard’s fractured paean to the Rolling Stones, One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil (1968)—sees a band of young musicians rehearsing on an empty soundstage (they are actually professional actors). Attempting to settle into a groove, they stop and start again and again—but to no avail. Like Version, Actualité is set in a kind of liminal zone; and like the dancers in the later film, the musicians appear to occupy some recent if not wholly nameable past, their wardrobe telegraphing the No Wave aesthetic of the early 1980s in keeping with the angular music they fruitlessly labor to play. This failure even to start a rhythm—to find a beat propulsive enough to motivate the events being projected—is equal but opposite to the soundless repetition of Version. Neither recording of the visual event matches up with its sonic unfolding in time.

Both approaches hint at a tension in our relationship with the sources to which Poledna implicitly alludes and at the ways in which the vagaries of collective myth and memory have come to stand as history itself. Poledna effectively overturns our comfortable habituation as viewers of time-based media. The disconnect between sound and vision in these works underscores a parallel failure on the part of their audiences: our vast capacity to be passively absorbed into the ambient space produced by the conjunction of music and cinema. An admittedly crude experiment helps illustrate the matter. Rent your average Hollywood blockbuster—a Jerry Bruckheimer flick will do just fine—and try to parse what little plot exists from the characteristically bombastic sound track. There’s a reason why Aerosmith tunes blare out at moments of high drama. Hard-rock histrionics play surrogate to the narrative complexity sorely lacking in movies of this genre.

And it’s for equally good reason that writers on Poledna have frequently turned to Theodor Adorno to countermand this musical logic. In one of his many bleak accounts on the role of popular music within the culture industry, the German philosopher lambasted what he called ’30s music’s “fetish character”: the reified nature of its easily assimilated melodies; its propensity to subsume listeners in a wash of aural pabulum; and its facilitation of a new mode of listening, described by Adorno as “regressive.” Poledna’s work corresponds well with this critique. For example, Actualité treats the musical riff as a twinned fetish of sorts, a commodity and object of desire. The riff is pop music’s sonic desideratum, the thing meant to “hook” you; its repetition sells the tune, as if the song had internalized its own advertisement. For Poledna, the musicians’ failure in Actualité to find a hook betrays the impossibility of their achieving either goal, of striking the elusive chord that resonates empathetically, and commercially, with their audience. By staging this musical scenario in an equally unreachable past, the “regressive” then assumes a historical dimension for Poledna as well. We may first be lured by a sense of nostalgia the film appears to invite but soon find that the experience is withheld at the level of narrative, which stumbles and stalls along with the music.

This may seem a less-than-promising diagnosis of the state of music and moving images, but there’s a dialectical component at work in Version that licenses both critique and pleasure. To withdraw the sound track in this film, after all, is to put that music in reserve: to deny its explicitly commercial function when instrumentalized in the service of images. (Witness the fate of countless punk, “indie,” or “alternative” songs in advertisements for SUVs, cruises, and other props of the lifestyle industry.) The communal aspect of Poledna’s soundless dance paradoxically suggests both utopian possibilities and the social mechanisms that stand to repress them. In fact, the inaudible song that sets the dancers into motion was performed by Junior Delahaye, whose politicized reggae and dub innovations of the early ’80s called equally on a world of hard work and the prospects of liberation (Delahaye’s key song here is 1983’s “Working Hard for the Rent Man”). This subtext, once brought to light, recasts our view of the performers, whose movements can read as both labor-intensive (or at least “task-oriented,” in the way defined by the “minimalist” performance of the ’60s whose practitioners are hinted at by Poledna’s choreography) and purposeless—and thus outside the strictures of work. The fractured glimpses of the dancers’ bodies in Version and the near-abstract way the camera tracks movement release the performers from a set narrative or stable personae that might lock them into an overdetermined historical scenario.

Following a practice established with early works like Fondazione, Version is quasi-ethnographic in spirit—though the artist hardly takes the ethnographic at face value. Just as he is interested in our collective imaginary around popular music and its mythos, so too will he investigate the logic of its mediation through ethnographic forms. A clue to precisely which aspect of pop ethnography surfaced when Version was shown at Richard Telles Fine Art in Los Angeles last spring. A program organized by the artist in conjunction with the exhibit was called “Films with Music from China, Haiti, Jamaica, North America.” The screening featured not only a special version of Version (called Sufferers’ Version, 2004, it is the same ten-minute sequence presented with its reggae sound track) but also Maya Deren’s Meditation on Violence (1948). A twelve-minute black- and-white study of martial artist Ch’ao-Li Chi performing Wu-Tang boxing and Shao-Lin movements, Meditation was one of three shorts to which her larger notion of “choreographies for camera” quite literally applied. But her association with anthropologist and choreographer Katherine Dunham—whose engagement with Haitian music sparked Deren’s subsequent interest in Vodoun ritual (culminating in her famous study Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti [1953])—is more telling with regard to Poledna’s interest in her work.

Deren’s art is upheld as paradigmatic of the “trance film,” P. Adams Sitney’s notion of a dreamlike and surrealizing cinema, but its ethnographic and ritualistic aspects play an equal share in her poetics. A canny use of sound highlights the precise means by which she manipulates movement cinematically and rejects the standard linear narratives expected of studio film. You can imagine Poledna drawing something from her example: Deren set Meditation to a sound track alternating between classical Chinese flute, Haitian drum, and extended gaps of silence; and her description of the composition would be as aptly applied to that of Poledna’s Version. “The film begins in the middle of a movement and ends in the middle of a movement, suggesting the infinite extensions of a fugue rather than an enclosed climactic structure,” Deren noted, adding: “The other problem which I began working on in this film is the relating of sound to images brought together from independent sources, rather than that the source of the sound and image be one and the same as in the theatrical tradition, which dominates most film.” Version is in keeping with the challenges Deren poses to film’s theatrical inclinations, though it finds its solution by avoiding sound altogether. And in the spirit of many of Deren’s films, it does so through the mediating role of ethnography.

On the occasion of the very first showing of Version, at Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna, Poledna pursued an ethnographic source of a more explicitly pop-cultural variety. In a gallery adjacent to the room where the film was projected, he displayed an untitled work consisting of a group of album covers, the titles of which represented a veritable library of ethnomusicology. Their display in a glass vitrine evoked museum exhibitions of material culture while harkening back to the methods of research Poledna had early on employed in his practice. Indeed, the albums that make up the work are culled from the catalogue of Folkways Records & Service Co., the New York–based label started in 1948 by Moses Asch and Marian Distler. Releasing more than two thousand records from the time of its founding to Asch’s death in 1986, Folkways’s original mission was curatorial, practicing a kind of “salvage ethnography” by gathering the music of tribal peoples once breezily described as “primitive.” In addition to these holdings, the label was also renowned for its critical role in the American folk-music revival. Artists from its ranks such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger would become formative influences on a younger generation of performers that included Bob Dylan.

Folkways’s linking the genre of “world music” to American source material sheds interesting light on Poledna’s ethnographic forays. Given the kind of titles usually associated with the label, one album displayed inspires a double take: A red-and-black cover with bold white letters announces Bertolt Brecht Before the Committee on Un-American Activities. That a record documenting one of the most ignominious episodes of American history could be classed alongside Laotian and central Indian tribal music suggests a more expansive notion of the ethnographic—not to mention the “primitive”—than what these words are generally taken to mean. By including this record, Poledna recasts our relationship to our own aural histories. The mythomania that spurred the actions of those responsible for the Communist witch hunt are indeed inseparable from the mythos surrounding American culture and the legacies of its recent past.

If you pay a visit to the website for Folkways—whose catalogue is now owned, not incidentally, by the Smithsonian Institution—you might come across a factoid of some relevance for Poledna’s work. The rumor goes that one of the label’s most popular titles from 1950, The Sounds of the Rainforest, a nature recording–cum–found music was actually recorded in a shower in New York City. Music has been regarded, at least since the Enlightenment, as the most transient and thus most aesthetic of the arts and the least subject to vulgarization. A noisy simulacrum of Amazon life would suggest, on the other hand, that modern recording technologies have irrevocably eroded that romantic ideal. Poledna starts from this point but goes much further in his critique. It’s through an apparently jumbled crossing of references—between the past and the present, avant-garde and mass culture, ethnography and myth, communal and private forms of social experience—that the artist betrays an acute instinct for our modern “folkways”: the behaviors we accord to the visual culture of music and the fractured dramas of history we spin from that culture in turn.

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