Prismatic Ground Year Five

Tadhg O’Sullivan, To the Moon, 2020, 80 min. Produced by Inland Films/La Lucarne.

“Maybe these are just not poetic times,” declared bright amber subtitles in one of the short films screened on the packed opening night of Prismatic Ground in New York—the experimental cinema festival now in its fifth year. The phrase, with its echo of Brecht’s “In the dark times / Will there still be singing? / There will be singing / Of the dark times,” kept returning to me throughout the jamboree’s four days of experimental shorts, documentaries, and features. It also recurred when, on my return flight to Europe, I read festival organizer Inney Prakash’s article in Screen Slate: “Pouring so much energy into a film festival at a time of massively gross social dysfunction feels a tad disheartening; but … it remains incumbent upon cultural workers to sustain venues for those expressions.”1

How can one continue making films differently in 2025’s unpoetic times? Films that surprise us? That surprise even their filmmakers? That expand the formal repertoire of the medium, stick in the craw of commercial and political “common sense,” and break with the technical slickness that predominates the prestige art-house sector as much as it does the Marvel Cinematic Universe? One established route through this thicket of questions has been to make “imperfect” films—a little rough around their edges—which proudly betray their own material substrate, as suggested by the ongoing fondness for the fuzzy warmth of Super 8 or 16 mm in the moving-image community. Another has been the surrender of auteurial megalomania afforded by the use of appropriated and found footage. Both of these noncommercial tendencies were well represented at this year’s Prismatic Ground. The festival also attested to the need for a newly militant political aesthetic, most evident in the selections shown from Some Strings, “an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures that is rooted in Palestine”; the project’s aesthetic befitted the increasing authoritarianism of the now-global “great moving right show.”2 Here the festival seemed to burrow a path back into Fernando Birri’s manifesto on “Cinema and Underdevelopment” (1962), where his opening salvo announced that the peoples of Latin America needed:

A cinema which brings them consciousness, which awakens consciousness; which clarifies matters; which strengthens the revolutionary consciousness of those among them who already possess this; which fires them; which disturbs, worries, shocks and weakens those who have a ‘bad conscience,’ a reactionary consciousness; … which is authentic; which is anti-oligarchic and anti-bourgeois at the national level, and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist at the international level; which is pro-people, and anti-anti-people; which helps the passage from underdevelopment to development, from sub-stomach to stomach, from sub-culture to culture, from sub-happiness to happiness, from sub-life to life.3

Alexis McCrimmon, Remote Views, 2025, 15 min. Courtesy of the artist.

The opening program functioned as a declaration of intent, bringing into conversation films which were in their own ways “pro-people and anti-anti-people.” The most strident of these was a recently unearthed cine-tract that opened the festival: Palestine Will Win by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (1969), found and digitally preserved by the Third World Newsreel. Constructed in the form of an agit-prop letter addressed to a young guerrilla following the Six Day War, watching this in 2025 poignantly affirmed Edward Said’s lesson on the importance for Palestinians of narrating their history, or else risk having this history misnarrated back to them.4

This need to marshal “counter-memory” against official erasure was also evident in two other films from the opening night. Your Touch Makes Others Invisible (2025), the debut feature by Rajee Samarasinghe, was a hybrid of documentary and magical realism (an amalgamized form that was quite common elsewhere in the festival as well) that followed the bereaved Tamil mothers of young men forcibly disappeared by the Sri Lankan regime during the country’s twenty-six-year civil war. Though it shared certain similarities with Patrico Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010)—which also dealt with the legacy of forced disappearances, but under the Pinochet dictatorship—one devastating difference in Samarsinghe’s film was the conviction of these mothers that their sons were still alive and that international bodies would eventually come to their aid. The film’s often elliptical (and at times rather oblique) visual grammar and pacing was a consequence, the director confirmed during the Q&A, of his choosing to shoot on location and thereby having to work around the strictures of Sri Lankan censorship. Elsewhere, the not-so-hidden hand of the censor was more successfully negotiated in the sculpting of the delirious “core-core” montage film How He Died Is Not Controversial (2024) by Gao Lingao. In this exemplary short (which the subtitles at the end declared the filmmaker had been “forced to delete” following the 2022 Philippine elections), Lingao blends iPhone footage of aquariums, Manila street scenes, and military checkpoints into a rich informational impasto that captures the anxious sensations of furtive, forbidden glimpses—playing cat and mouse with the authorities.

Other revelations came through a presentation of bold and energetic 16 mm Bolex films by the Indian parallel cinema filmmaker and cultural anthropologist Ashish Avikunthak, something of an heir to trailblazing Indian avant-gardists such as Mani Kaul. In Avikunthak’s Dancing Othello (2002), highly adorned street theater artist Peter Pillai (played by Arjun Raina) fuses the classical dance form of Kathakali with Shakespeare, resulting in an iconoclastic affront to both. Breaking the fourth wall, Pillai/Raina ventriloquizes the intolerance of India’s official film culture—hilariously interrogating Avikunthak’s nonnarrative methods of filmmaking by asking: “What is this film? Where is the social message?” The other Avikunthak films shown here, particularly Vakratunda Swaha (2010) and Kalighat Fetish (1999), seemed to sit within the lineage of what P. Adams Sitney termed the “trance film”—the oneiric journeys of Maya Deren, Curtis Harrington, or Kenneth Anger.5 Yet despite such similarities, Avikunthak insisted during a discussion following the screening that his films emerge from a different philosophical undercurrent than the Deren-Anger line. Through his syncretic combination of solarized dissolves and fast-motion footage with a soundtrack of Vedic chants and mystic documentary footage of Hindu religiosity, the filmmaker clarified his inquiry as concerning “how it is possible to be modern in the twenty-first century, by thinking through a premodern philosophical tradition.”

Somewhat inevitably given the sheer density of the program, not everything was so persuasive. An overused device, foregrounded in at least three films, was the epistolary exchange or diary entry as a narrative voice-over pitched at a distance from the on-screen images (thank you very much, Chris Marker). This increasingly rang as insincere. The reliance on diary or epistolary exchanges in these films seemed intended to fabricate an unalienated and closed-off social world, one protected from the corrosion of instant messaging and instant posting. Elsewhere, the frequent overreliance on unvoiced subtitles for narrative heavy lifting also intimated something of a general lack of confidence in the capacity of images to effectively tell stories by themselves, presenting a crutch which several of the films would have been better off without.

Two found-footage video essays in the program sought out lyrical ways to thread archival imagery through the present. Tadhg O’Sullivan’s To the Moon (2020)—a title purloined from the Percy Shelley poem in which the bard broodily compares old Luna to a “dying lady” in a “gauzy veil”—combined original and found footage from world cinema into a charming supercut of lovestruck moongazers, lunar melancholics, lunatic séances, and moonlit shores. Meanwhile, Alexis McCrimmon’s distorted video essay Remote Views (2024) pursued a far more interventionist approach to its found material. McCrimmon remixes public access television imagery of Black entertainers with commercial footage and home videos of the period when Black popular culture wholly entered the mainstream of American life in the 1980s. The tremulous bands of VHS video fog that the director welds through analogue distortion of her footage defamiliarize the image in a way that moves beyond the “video feel” FX filter popularized by retromaniac shows such as Stranger Things. Rather, here we are presented the 1980s—that most commercially repackaged and thus weirdly overfamiliar of decades—through a newly psychedelic optic. McCrimmon’s lysergic images acquire metallic highlights and reliefs that conjure up the work of German artist Matthias Groebel’s Machine Paintings. They render video into a vessel that leaves us remotely viewing a more optimistic era while still “stranded / on this day-glo mesa, with its epicene cartoon.”6

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, 1944.

The most mesmeric viewing experience at Prismatic Ground wasn’t strictly speaking a film at all. Invited to cocurate a presentation of poets working between poetry and cinema, Shiv Kotecha took advantage of the occasion to present a live reading from his book-length poem Extrigue (2014). He read this poem, which “renders the mise-en-scène of Billy Wilder’s 1944 noir Double Indemnity into an inventory of objects and actions … composed of 419 numbered sections, each of which refer to the sequence of shots of Wilder’s film,” alongside an ultra-slow-motion screening of the relevant sections.7 The transfixing aspect of Kotecha’s experiment in ultra-thick description, as it passed in and out of sync with Wilder’s images, was how acutely it brought home both the surplus (the sheer too-muchness) of language and its deficiencies. Somehow the image always wriggled free of its descriptions. Somewhere between a directors’ commentary, a lecture performance, and one of those ultra-detailed rental property inventories that a hyper-fastidious landlord will commission before new tenants move in, Extrigue moves according to an actuarial logic that is both native and alien to cinema. To produce the work, Kotecha counted everything in each frame and stitched these objects into all-caps, unpunctuated, numbered stanzas (e.g., “145. 9 RECTANGLES 2 CIRCLES 7 PEOPLE AND A MOVING VEHICLE.”) After ten minutes or so of hearing these increasingly thick descriptions, the anxious poignancy of Kotecha’s project became clear. His measured scouring of the chiaroscuro frames in Double Indemnity for tiny morsels of information, teasing out all the possible clues they might contain, felt like it was a poetic project engineered to stop Wilder’s film from ever ending, to stop the murderer from ever being found—to fulfill that desire for the credits to never roll.