TIFF 2011: Wavelengths 5: The Return/Aberration of Light

Closing out Wavelengths 2011 was an inspired, if imbalanced, double bill that matched The Return (see pic above) – the newest work from Nathaniel Dorsky (who is some kind of avant-garde guru) – with a live cinema performance by Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder, and Olivia Block called Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure. While the pairing loosely made sense on a strictly experiential level, there was some significant asymmetric weight distribution in this program, temporally and qualitatively speaking. Programmer Andréa Picard intimated an awareness of this, conceivably delineating them by designating separate – and separating – Q&As after each one. Here, there will only be paragraph breaks to suggest that one should resist the urge to compare these two artworks despite their juxtaposition in this programme.

For Dorsky’s film, there is so much to say, and yet so little that needs to be said. Working in the same mode as he has been for nearly two decades now, his reel long, silent films resist cognition; furthermore, they depend on this resistance. They function in the mode of devotional cinema, which is symbolic, transformative, and transcendent all at once. The Return was shot last Spring, and represents the ‘return’ of many things: life from the dormancy of Winter (present in the numerous images of leaves and flowers in emergence), Dorsky to the festival circuit (he was at TIFF last year with three films, so it was by no means an extended absence), and, carrying the most significance, light from darkness. Heck, there’s even a pretty substantial religious connotation, evoking post-crucifixion divinity.

There is always a deep feeling of transformation in Dorsky’s films, from an awareness of celluloid’s alchemical reaction to photons, to the intuitive feeling of replacement that experience in the twenty minutes. We were here, the film began, it ended, and we’re something else. No, the film itself hasn’t affected us so that we’ve ourselves transformed; rather, we’re always changing – whether anatomically, psychologically, or whatever – and his films indirectly make us aware of this. It isn’t a journey of the sort where movement is implied or shown, for there is just as much stasis as anything else in Dorsky’s images; it is found in the depths of the psyche. If this is all a bit vague, it’s because, as Dorsky himself preaches year after year in the post-film discussions, this film cannot be viewed in the way that 99.9% of all films are meant to be. It is to be felt, as images, and must not be transferred into any other language – especially text.

With Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure (see pic above), Gibson, Recoder, and Block aimed to take us on another sort of journey – this one just as ‘subconscious’ and abstract as Dorsky’s. In a live performance that was said to have benn entirely produced in-house, Gibson and Recoder manage a crescendo of light that was produced by manipulating found 35mm film prints in a reconfigured cinema projector. Block, meanwhile, controlled the accompanying shoegazer score. The undulating colors, which filled the entire front of the cinema (it was only barely contained by the screen, and judiciously lands on audience members’ heads and the ceiling throughout the performance), combine with the score to create an often seductive display of ‘expanded cinema,’ projecting shaped light that had the uncanny look of a digital image at an immeasurable resolution. A strobe kicks in at about the halfway mark in case we weren’t already aware that we were supposed to be trippin’ beyond that Infinite, and is underlined by a mutation in Block’s score that must have been sampling the climatic score in Kubrick’s 2001. At 50 minutes, Aberration well overstays its welcome, and starts to become way too post-rock and screensavery for its own good.