In a performance from 1968, Hollis Frampton projected a stark rectangle of white light onto a wall. The “film” in question was the Fluxus artist Takehisa Kosugi’s work Film/Film#4 (1965). Through a tape recorder, Michael Snow narrated Frampton’s impressions of Kosugi’s seemingly radical act of reduction:
It is only a rectangle of white light. But it is all films.
We can never see more within our rectangle, only less …
But aside from that, we must agree that this [film] is, from an aesthetic point of view, incomparably superior to a large proportion of films that have ever been made.
But we have decided that we want to see less than this.
Very well.1
A pure white light contains within it the entire visible spectrum of color. Yet Frampton’s point was not simply tautological. I thought of this episode as I sat near the summit of Cardada-Cimetta, 1400 feet above the Lago Maggiore, surrounded by pinky-indigo Alpine peaks, to stare like millions of others in Europe at the eclipse. The crowd of locals gathering in the Piazza Grande far below, the hobnobbing in the Campari bars, the agitated post-screening discussions of films most of us would likely forget as soon as the festival subsided, seemed now all very far away. Through the twin rectangles of my eclipse glasses, the spectrum of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared rays was radically diminished until all that remained in my field of vision was the molten globule of the sun getting gradually gnawed away by the moon. I watched it transfigure from an open-mouthed Pacman to a clementine slice, to a perfect croissant, until all that was left was a crisp orange cuticle hung in the middle distance. Soon a cloud drifted across, I took off my specs, and the world returned.
Perhaps it’s a touch unfair to set the “incomparably superior” aesthetic experience of the Alpine solar eclipse, an event that last happened in Switzerland twenty-six years ago, against the films presented at the 79th Locarno International Film Festival—which annually brings cinephiles to the slightly hyperreal splendor of this lakeside resort town. That the eclipse did prove the most visionary and enduring thing I beheld during my time in Ticino was just inauspicious timing, I suppose. “We have decided that we want to see less than this. Very well.”
A major debutantes’ ball on the circuit for independent and art house films, Locarno historically treads a path between the demands of the tourism industries, which in part financially sustain it, and “pure” cinephilia. The nightly screenings in the vast Piazza Grande (where this year one could watch Nicolas Cage high-kicking his way through Wild at Heart and Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor) cater to the former camp, while the retrospectives and shorts programming service the latter. Recent years have also seen notable overtures from the festival towards experimental artist filmmakers. In 2023 the art collector and LUMA Foundation president Maja Hoffman was appointed president. The festival’s director Giona A. Nazzaro also recently scrapped the “Moving Ahead” sidebar program dedicated to experimental film, with the rationale of allowing more avant-garde, nonnarrative work to commingle into a richer, more pluralistic program.
Halfway through my stay in Locarno, I found myself at a panel titled “A World Without Film Critics,” prompted no doubt by the juvenile dream of attending your own funeral. The room was jam-packed (with film critics, naturally). The discussion went beyond mere professional status anxiety: Was the crisis of criticism parasitic upon the crisis of cinema itself? Were we also facing the gradual extinction of the nonprofessional cineaste? Why is it that only multimillion-dollar blockbusters like the Odyssey—rather than the art house productions on show at festivals like Locarno—seem able to seriously kick the hornet’s nest of critical discourse in 2026? And how can film writers effectively torque their language to outmaneuver AI and better capture what Raymond Bellour called that “fundamentally elusive object” of film? Do we just, as Diego Cepeda (editor of Outskirts magazine) suggested, all need to return to reading Joyce?
The Golden Leopard (Locarno’s top prize) this year went to Romanian New Wave director Florin Șerban’s You Don’t Belong Here, a well-scripted moral fable about anti-Roma racism regrettably shot and color-graded with the hyperbolic sobriety of a 2000s-era anti-drugs infomercial. A more deserving recipient would have been Denis Côté’s Nobody’s Violence. A goth-punk reckoning with the febrile discussion in Canada around MAID (medical assistance in dying), Côté’s film follows a terse and spectral black-market euthanist called Mira (a superb turn from Larissa Corriveau) working the beat of a small town in Quebec. Mira says little, lives in her van with her Jack Russell, and seems at first temperamentally well equipped for her grim occupation. Though the film initially appears as a homage to Claude Chabrol’s Story of Women (1988), Côté soon warps and wends his narrative in unexpected directions that force Mira to interrogate her own attachments to the world.
Made, as ever for Côté, on a shoestring budget, and lensed in a bristly mix of vintage and expired 16 mm stock, the director wrote the script while himself suffering from a kidney disease that left him unsure if he would live or die, pending a donor. These heightened existential stakes are apparent as the film spurs itself into almost convulsive outbursts of spirit and liveliness, particularly during two brilliant extended sequences. First there is Mira’s meet-cute with a faintly deranged party-boy called Flanagan, and next a raucous dinner party at the house of her lecherous handler Ludo, both of which explode the grimness of her routines. There is an antic, restless inventiveness to Côté’s whip-cuts and compositions, which renders his choice to film in a wraithlike 16 mm totally apposite, imbuing his images with gothic dread.
This medium-sensitivity was not so evident in several of the other 16 mm films I saw at the festival (a rough tally put my count at fifteen, though surely there were more), which more often than not seemed to have alighted on the decision to shoot on an “artisanal” stock through nothing more impassioned than professional osmosis. When artist filmmakers first began returning to “obsolescent” formats en masse around the turn of the millennium, light-leaky images bearing the traces of their own materiality were consciously favored over the more current options of digital or video. Often these media were conceived as a means for meditating on the “nostalgia for the ruined dreams of twentieth-century modernity,” as Erika Balsom once wrote of Tacita Dean’s work. Yet the once programmatic engagement with analogue and expired film formats appears to have ossified in the moving image community into something largely irreflective or automatic, to the point where at festivals like Locarno such images increasingly feel like a ready-to-hand imprimatur of suitability for the festival circuit: a warm, one-size-fits-all visual strategy for immediately siloing films off to the “survival compound” of the white cube.
One of this year’s more anticipated titles was the second feature from Ann Oren, Objet A (the Lacan nod is intentional). The film follows Ingeborg and Adam, an haute-bourgeois couple working as hand surgeons who live in an upscale Berlin apartment. In her press conference Oren spoke of her desire in Objet A to explore haptics, tactility, and the larger erotics of touch we have lost through continuously swiping, pinching, and pawing at our LCD screens. She sets the stage for this early on in the film with rhythmic cuts that delight in the thwack of Adam’s newspaper at the breakfast table, the swish of satin sheets in their bedroom, the whirr of a polaroid camera, the slice of vintage fan blades, the ignition of their vintage Saab. They don’t have phones. There is a particularly telling scene in which Ingeborg scowls disapprovingly at people watching Instagram reels around her on the U-Bahn (might we catch the director scowling along with her?).
After Ingeborg fractures her leg, a former patient of the couple’s, Gaia, is drawn into their life as their assistant. To borrow from the argot of polyamory, Gaia rapidly becomes their “unicorn,” a source of anguish and erotic fascination. Gaia—who wears an organic hessian dress and speaks in riddles—embodies a closeness to and kinship with the natural world that is absent from Adam and Ingeborg’s monomaniac lives. Her deepening involvement with the pair soon prompts spores of fungi to sprout in their minimalist home, a forest to encircle it, and a genuinely lysergic closing sequence in which the trio together approach a prelapsarian bliss in the forest.
In its modish and unconvincing effort at presenting adjustments to one’s lifestyle as a form of eco-critique, Objet A felt symptomatic of the limited horizons of romantic anti-capitalism. This compost heap of art house cliches made me wistful for an era when art house filmmakers dared confront the psychic and comic affordances of the transfiguring socio-technical apparatus, rather than simply expressing a sophisticate’s horror at their vulgarity. By the time the credits rolled, Oren’s retromania had begun to remind me of the once-common sight in Stoke Newington of a barista riding a penny farthing with a handlebar moustache.
Locarno’s program this year was also replete with disembodied and disjointed voices, murmuring in and out of sync with the images on screen, or wandering off on parallel narrative circuits altogether. These distant narrators can be understood as what sound and film theorist Michel Chion has termed acousmêtre—the voices we hear but never see, like a call center phone operator, or the voice of our mother while we’re still inside the womb. For Chion, the acousmêtre is a source of “disequilibrium and tension,” something partially outside of the film but nevertheless guiding it from within, which possesses dark powers of ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence.2
In Forgotten Spaceman, Elham Ehsas’s fascinating video-essay on Abdul Ahad Momand, the first (and only) Afghan sent into orbit, the filmmaker’s disembodied voice-over is enunciative—as he wistfully strikes up a one-way correspondence with the forgotten spaceman, accompanied by his own father’s highly saturated archival footage of the space mission (which the director found in the digitized archive of Afghan Films rescued by the CAMP collective). “From space we don’t see the borders we die for.” Much like Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s The Lebanese Rocket Society, Ehsas’s film is an exercise in counter-memory, which reactivates a moment of cosmic optimism to illuminate, in his words, “how nations forget and how their exiled children remember.” The pathos of combining this enunciative mode of address with archival footage was also pursued, albeit less successfully, in Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die, a film which again strikes up an intimate correspondence between the filmmaker and his subject: the Lebanese documentarian Jocelyne Saab. While Yaqubi’s work in restoring Saab’s exhilarating documentaries on various militant, anti-imperialist struggles across the Arab world from 1973–83 has been of immeasurable benefit, his obtrusive commentary over her footage in Revolutionaries Never Die (“Jocelyn, the closer I grow to your process the more I regret not replying to your email sooner”) ultimately left one wishing that the festival had chosen to program a retrospective of Saab’s newly restored films instead.
One of the more peculiar films playing in the competition, Nicolaas Schmidt’s wordless September Afternoon, also used its audio track to notable effect. While his images tell a modest story of a young couple taking their child on a trip to a windy beach along the Nordsee, and dwell in a somewhat familiar slow-cinema mode on the depiction of them methodically packing up and erecting the tent, Schmidt chooses to accompany these long shots with a hypnotic loop of the bridge to Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face,” mixed alongside diegetic audio of the beach’s roaring wind and tide. When it works, as during a ten-minute sequence of the silent protagonist walking along the shoreline, this looping sonic mélange of eighties pop and ocean gale was oddly captivating—capturing the faint dread of an earworm that entangles itself into your thoughts against your will.
Meanwhile in Ana Vaz’s second feature, Hanabi, the Brazilian video artist also works along the seam between sound and image. Vaz freely adapts the Japanese writer Yoko Hayasuke’s Journal of a Radioactive Brain—a diaristic essay he wrote in the wake of the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster that followed the Tohoku earthquake—into a script to accompany her sumptuous Bolex footage of the post-disaster everyday (following evacuees, nuclear scientists turned beekeepers, and business as usual). By mixing her own deadpan voice-over, Hayasuke’s mordant reflections, and the steady tick of Geiger counters on the soundtrack, Vaz invests footage of seemingly placid urban tableaux with the ambient threat of a radioactive brain: When everything could be radioactive, how do we know this isn’t? As in Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, the fear of contagion restructures the experience of the quotidian in Hanabi, despite how oddly calm everything looks and seems.
There are few certainties in 2026. This summer will probably have been the hottest on record, the next election results will be disappointing for the left, and Hong Sang Soo will release on average two films a year until either you or he dies. His latest, Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, was an affecting, if oddly withholding, tale of two siblings on a trip to Jeju Island to visit their estranged mother, which carried many of what have become the hallmarks of his style. These include soft, Morandi-ish compositions (which since In Water [2023] have been ever so slightly out-of-focus), long, uninterrupted takes of naturalistic conversations in which a crash zoom suddenly occurs, lo-fi music, and an aversion to close-ups and montage. Yet the style of Hong’s approach to filmmaking lies increasingly in how this set of hallmark visual and narratological strategies have been intercombined, adapted, and accumulated over the years, so that, like Tancredi declares in Leopardi’s The Leopard, in a Hong Sang-Soo film, “for things to stay the same, everything has to change.” He never uses the same device in the same way twice.
This latest film is no exception. What especially jumped out to me here was his reprisal of the voice-over, which he hasn’t used since Grass (2018). As in that film, the voice in question is Kim Min-Hee’s. Her occasional voice-over track becomes a means for Min-hee’s character Sanghee, herself an experimental filmmaker, to express her inner lyricism, and the discomfiture she feels during an agonized, stilted weekend spent with a mother who seems like a stranger to her. So far, so straightforward; the voice-over as backdoor into subjectivity. Yet the torque Hong applies is to mix the diegetic noise of the scene and that of Min-hee’s voice at exactly the same level, rather than for the latter to submerge the former.
It’s a deceptively simple trick whose effect is arresting—one of those softly Brechtian maneuvers that proves what Dennis Lim calls the “countervailing tendencies” throughout Hong’s work, that “even as his films traffic in a realism of the quotidian, they flaunt the visibility of artifice.”3 It can be a convenient shorthand to refer to Hong as a “minimalist,” given his micro-budgets, tiny crews, and limited camera movement. Yet as with Frampton’s thoughts on a rectangle of pure white light (or Robert Ryman’s white-on-white canvases), his reductions have a plenitude within them which focuses our attention on the specificities of each gesture, on what goes unsaid in each seemingly innocuous remark, on the timing of every zoom. He too has decided to show us less.
Hollis Frampton, “A Lecture” (1968), in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (MIT Press, 2015).
Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (Columbia University Press, 1983).
Dennis Lim, Tale of Cinema (Fireflies Press, 2022).
