Back in the Park (2019), courtesy of Ernie Gehr
Evaluating Mark McElhatten’s recent Carte Blanche screening series at the Museum of Modern Art in terms of pure numbers wouldn’t necessarily be a wrongheaded approach. Eleven feature-length works, 41 shorts, and two excerpts from longer features were programmed in this exceptional series, which certainly lives up to the intensity of McElhatten’s esteemed reputation as a curator—but focusing on such data would be missing the overall point. The breadth of selected titles—which varied between established auteurs and eclectic avant-garde obscurities—feels like an afterthought in terms of the more interpersonal objectives the series sought to accomplish.
When McElhatten introduced any of the works, he forwent any (perceived or not) rigidly academic jargon and never attempted to reiterate history; instead, he characterized these titles in earnest terms, speaking to their base impact outside of any ostensibly needed analytical context. Their inclusions, on top of being comprehensive, also were deeply idiosyncratic, and at times personal; many of the makers represented here were mainstays of McElhatten’s Views from the Avant-Garde series, which he programmed with Gavin Smith for the New York Film Festival from 1997 until 2013. Nathaniel Dorsky, who had six works shown in the Carte Blanche, screened Triste (1996) at the first Views; Ernie Gehr, who showed five, would regularly have new works to exhibit. In this respect, having the opportunity to watch world premieres from two of our greatest living moving image artists should certainly be heralded.
Temple Sleep (2020)
Dorsky’s new cycle of vernal 16mm films—shot before (starting with Canticles in late 2019), during (Temple Sleep), and after COVID lockdowns—kicked off the entire series on an especially chilly autumnal night in New York, where the radiant warmth of his images felt more unmistakable than usual. The films, which were shot and edited in their presented order, follow a loose arc, one that first bears witness to a world rife with human activity (Canticles and Lamentations) before falling into primordial darkness. A shadowy, solomon image of a small child’s clasped hands haunts the ghostly Temple Sleep, which features a seemingly never-ending cascade of rippling casting pools at Golden Gate Park; the following work, Emanations, ends on a shimmering, neon-lit Ferris wheel at night, one which recalls the closing images from In the Stone House (2012) by Dorsky’s partner, Jerome Hiler. The final two pieces shown are predicated on a sense of internal awakening, of the tranquility that comes after the worst is over; the closing image from the last, of a steady stream shot from afar, is one of humble, meditative resolve—a simple shot set-up, but one that only a master like Dorsky could produce.
While each of Dorsky’s new films had its own merits, McElhatten implored audience members to consider what we were viewing as one large work in and of itself. In that sense, watching this collection felt more akin to long-form cinematic poetry, with their gentle editing rhythms unobtrusively moving from image to image, each revealing the transient beauty of the world around us with each polyvalent in-camera edit. In a possible act of divine intervention, the screening was moved to the Celeste Bartos Theater at the last minute due to a technical issue with the film projector at the Roy and Niuta Titus, affording the film a smaller, more intimate space, a choice that, while not intentional, felt entirely appropriate given the occasion.
Mirror of Dreams (2020), courtesy of Ernie Gehr
The return to the Roy and Nuuta Titus a week later, likewise, was equally as fitting; the larger theatre was the ideal site to watch a small selection of new digital work from Ernie Gehr, where any issues of celluloid projection wouldn’t rear their ugly head (though there was one file that glitched out halfway through). These titles—which were selected by Gehr at the behest of McElhatten and sequenced with formal variance in mind—gave only a small sampling of the rich body of digital work he’s made since his transfer to the medium at the start of the 21st century, none of which are in immediate distribution (they’re available only if Gehr has been invited to present them). Yet, it was a grouping that further evinced how his contemporaneous digital images are just as accomplished as his previous filmic ones; the trademark kinesthetic qualities of his cinema—which have regularly reshaped viewers’s perception of motion, time, and space—have only been accentuated with this forward-thinking embrace of current technology.
Opener Mirror of Dreams (2020) fixates on the reflective, flat apparatus of a New York-located Starbucks windowpane with a single static shot; the images progress at a crawling speed, forcing us to confront the optical incongruities which occur around us unnoticed, a sentiment echoed with Floating Particles (2018), a longer instance of the same technique. Equally as impressive was the anchor for the night, Undertow (2019), which plays with spatial and geometric dimensionality as it applies to movement in a visually clever manner, one similar to a great many of Gehr’s works which reveal their true nature at about the halfway point of an attentive viewing. Here, we have another “static” image of sorts: a digital camera has been placed on the back of a vehicle, one which traverses through an undisclosed rural terrain, right through a bustling cityscape, and back across more terrain. It eventually inverts back, but the camera never moves from its starting position; instead, the automobile keeps progressing forward, reversing at the halfway point with an effect that has been applied in post-production. This extended eastbound movement has been flipped on its side, in a literal fashion: one on the left of the screen, one on the right of the screen, and the two identical films symmetrically meet in the middle of the flattened three-dimensional image, creating a free-flowing sensation of disorienting weightlessness in the process.
Undertow (2019), Ernie Gehr
Other highlights included a 4-hour-long, stealth Halloween program with an unsubtitled 35mm print of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), which took place on the 30th of October, a missed opportunity if there ever was one. It was billed as a “moonlight matinee” probably because it was composed of many works with stark black-and-white photography, each stumbling in and out of different states of memory, consciousness, and varied durational length. This led to a selection that was both remarkably well-paced and imbued with a clear logical progression (and an intermission), trailing off into the night with little disruptive fanfare—which unfortunately could not be said of another movie marathon which took place a few days later, one that culminated with Jack Chambers’ already demanding The Hart of London (1970) in a trying program which could charitably be described as uncompromising. Screened alongside it was Nisi Jacobs’s Eternal Beach (2021) and Jodie Mack’s Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons (2021), both of which had passionate introductions by the filmmakers themselves on the night they premiered. The two films are artistic products born during COVID, with each articulating divergent visions concerned with the natural world and its ever-evolving state of being: one digital (Eternal Beach) and one celluloid (Wasteland No. 3), where each respected work emphasized the inherent qualities of their given medium, like the vibrant, granular filmic textures of defrosted garden plants found in Mack's short.
During all of these screenings, the idea of seeing cinematic works as a physically-defined activity became more apparent as the weeks rolled on; not just in terms of the spaces where these works were viewed, but the privilege of going to the MoMA and watching rare 16 and 35mm prints becoming second nature, more so referring the material of the work itself which was screened. The likes of David Gatten and the late Gregory J. Markopoulos—artists both known for having their work seldom screened, usually on celluloid (Gatten has dabbled in digital within the past decade)—were both represented. In these instances, the rarity of ever seeing some of these films was enough to bring a strong turnout, where the two makers’ high prestige helped to boost the visibility of what were in essence niche special events.
This Day’s Madness did prepare Tomorrow’s Silence (2021), courtesy of MoMA
Oddly enough, their screened works centered around the idea of sacred places—the Il Castello Roccasinibalda in Markopoulos’s Gammelion (1968)—and items—letters written between two women in Gatten’s This Day’s Madness did prepare Tomorrow’s Silence (2021)—that obtain their inviolability through the act of becoming everlasting filmic objects. Gatten and co-director Ashley West’s piece—which is the first part of a forthcoming seven-hour film series—re-purposes and re-conceptualizes personal footage from 30 years prior, framing it within a dialectic on the transfer of information as it applies to printed and visual language; in this instance, to watch this on anything other than its intended format would be missing an integral part of the work itself.
That being said, the quality of many prints screened called into question the necessity of their engagement—Max Ophüls’ La signora di tutti (1935) and The Hart of London both heavily damaged; Jacques Rivette’s L'amour fou (1969) was missing its sixth reel—beyond adhering to strict exhibitional purism of the Fred Camper variety, a sentiment which was intensified with the inclusion of an aforementioned unsubtitled print of Vampyr. It was a particularly bewildering choice, one that felt like a bit of a tease after an already long-enough, testing day as was. That disappointment aside (and, to be fair, those were easily the most notable blemishes), one should and could make no mistake about it: this screening series was a major feat, the type of far-reaching programming effort which is nowadays solely feasible with an institution like MoMA’s vast resources. In that regard, it was, at the very least, an inspired assortment that lived up to the Carte Blanche namesake.
And so perhaps it would be best to end on a wholly positive note, and speak to one of the inspired acts of programming I’ve witnessed in my lifetime: the first minute-and-a-half of Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1949)—which when freed from its original material, formally reads as an expressive art-house fever dream of misaligned youth—followed immediately by Sid Davis’ Age 13 (1955), a Nicolas Ray-esque sensationalist “educational film” whose melodramatic qualities (including a stepfather who loves his cat more than his supposed son) were only enhanced when viewed on a DCP that oversaturated most of the colors. The two were connected by an empathetic sense of fear of the moral corruption of America’s youth, one that also suggests the only hope for rehabilitation is through familial compassion. It was nothing less than an unexpected, potent moment of explosive pathos.