I’ve not been very active. That’s because I’ve begun reviewing for In Review Online, with my first piece on Tina Satter’s Reality (2023) — something we all rated at Berlinale. But I’m not planning to halt awful screen. Rather, I’ll be writing a bit more loosely and thematically about films and forms and themes. Like this Nu piece, below. Thanks, as ever, for sticking around.
— For some great and unspecified reason, clouds — billowing vapour; white floating ether — have featured more than prominently in the visual history of the post-war avant-garde. This realization didn’t necessarily come — for me — with James Benning’s Ten Skies (2004) (the obvious choice?), but with a film of flowers (scroll down). If the earliest ‘avant garde’ was techno-logical (May Ray, Leger, Etc), then the post-war impulse was — seemingly — more attuned to the possibilities of the pastoral — or its fragility, and the spectre of its loss. Can we even say that clouds participate in the pastoral — floating so far above?
— Anticipatory things. The flowers of Marie Menken’s Glimpse of the Garden (1957). We need to look up; tilt your head. The clouds announce themselves. Here was nature – the untamed wilderness — brought beneath the gaze of the lens. Menken would anticipate any number of pastoral landscape films shot in the decades that followed — between Robert Huot’s Snow (1971) to Ken Kobland’s Landscape and Desire (1981), where — in the figurations of a non-narrative cinema — the landscape could provide not merely a backdrop so much as a texture for distortion and visual experimentation. Yet, here, the clouds make only the slightest of appearances. Again, tilt your head.
— Later, Dorsky would attend — green-fingered — to a garden; properly, an arboretum. Not quite the arena of clouds; though still subject to them. I’m thinking, here, principally, of his Arboretum Cycle — a sequence of seven films shot during 2017 at the Strybing Arboretum, setting out to “make a film [about] the way plants [there] manifest in light or vice versa”. The clouds might find themselves reflected in a pool of water, or glimpsed through the naked branches of a wintry tree.
— But it is not new, or necessarily new. Early as 1929, Joris Ivens — and I thank Ralph Pritchard for clueing me on to this — shot Rain; a ‘poetic documentary’ whose strategies of editing utilised compositional parallels and a structuring of “raindrops in the canals as a refrain intercut with images of sky, crowds and gutters”. Already, there is an intimation of the lyrical, structural qualities of the clouds — how Ivens uses them to signal a changing of the weather and a transition in the film from rain to sunlight — melancholia to brightness.
— Recently, I found myself taking the bus to Finsbury Park. The upper deck was an oven, concentrating the bright heat of the sun. Reading Devotion, by Patti Smith — a loan from K — felt quietly blissful, and I glanced up at a sky plastered with layers of brilliant cloud; attempting to shrug away the insistence of a hangover that pressed on my skull. Later, the cloud would darken — a kind of dishwater greige — which, eventually, nudged M and I from a bank of grass. He suggested we walk along a forested track, and the clouds slunk away. Light returned, returns, is returning. It is the cloud against its backdrop of blue that draws the eye. Undiluted sublimity.
— Formless form. I’m thinking of Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt — with their Angel (1957). Here, clouds — at first – are a progenitory promise of the heavenly; the place to which the angel statue — the ‘protagonist’ of the film — gazes, while variously drinking in, staring, at the flowers of the earth at ‘its’ feet. Later, toward the film’s seemingly abrupt three minutes, the statue will ‘look’ upon clouds that drift in two countervailing directions. An impossible act of nature — presumably authored by the overlaying of two reels of film shot from the same position. But perhaps not. We’re very far from Ruskin’s doleful invocation — in 1884, from the lectern of the London Institution — of a ‘storm-plague’ of clouds that were then billowing, darkly, above the skies of old Europe. Rather than pointing toward a corrugation of collective or industrial excess, these clouds seem to drift toward the existential — en route to the sublime. Writing years ago, Jonas Mekas was effusive on the “subtle inner movement”, the “vision, or dream” of Cornell’s cinema — a thing that functioned by taking “bits of ‘actual’ reality” and transforming them, “bit by bit”, into “new unities, new things” — the “invisible cathedrals of our age”.
— Years later, in 1969, Peter Gidal made Clouds. At first he describes this work flowingly: “frantic frame edge defining nothingness”. Further along, Gidal was more precise: “there is virtually nothing ON screen, in the sense of IN screen. Obsessive repetition as materialist practice not psychoanalytical indulgence”. Here, the cloud — how it flattens, disorients — becomes a structural means to leverage the material and textural possibilities of film as film. Interpretive blankness. Each still frame is a grey-washed interregnum of sense-making; the baleen-silhouette of a plane fizzing in the lower edge, a bar of diagonal darker grey slicing across the frame (the function of negative superimpositions — cloud piled upon cloud). In this, it is like Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line (1970) — where the ‘cloud’ descends to the skin of the earth, and disturbs all sense of depth and perception; though he did this without superimposition. Two wolves. Cloud — or its terrestrial siblings, fog and mist — become gauzes and veils that can disturb and interrupt our ‘seeing’. In this, they’d function as friendly tools for an avant-garde who precisely wanted to do away with linearity, predictability, clarity.
— Little earlier. Ferdinand Khittl’s Die Parallelstrasse (1962), which delights in the reflective abstractions of clouds reflected in the silvered wings of aircraft — in its opening movements — as if the planes themselves are sinking into the sky; as if it were an ocean. “Thanks to Swiss Air and their crew on all the routes [...] sometime and somewhere”. There is something very confidence-maxing, very boundless and energetic, about these clouds; a glimmer of futurity. We wonder whether it is the cloud or the plane that’s really in charge.
— Does Thom Andersen’s Melting (1965) figure into this in any way? The cream cloud of a sundae decaying into liquidity; puddling from joyous, bulbous softness into ominous goo. Here is your cloud (temporary, fragile form) becoming formless — returning to a strange state that could again become cloud (or not — depending on how much you’d need to whisk). Cherry floats on the dish, having fallen from the liquefying mound. Something biblical about all this.
— Clouds might also be necessarily incidental — everything and nothing all at once. Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale (1971) comes to mind, with its robotic camera-arm pirouetting and lunging to take in soil, strewn rock, scree, and sky. Naturally, clouds create their own kind of terrain, and the camera — when it inverts, flips upside down — suggests what it might be like to walk on the sky with all the world looming above us. Cloud orients us (there is the sky, above) and they can disorient us (where is the sky, where am I standing).
— I can’t highlight a specific moment, but the cloud feels present — it must — in so much of Jonas Mekas; all those flickering Bolex picnics in parks — aimless strolls announced by aphoristic intertitles (“Autumn came, with wind & gold”). Walden (1968) — which, really, properly, reimagines New York as a kind of pastoral. “In my New York there is a lot of nature. Walden is made up of bits of memories of what I wanted to see. I eliminated what I didn’t want to see” (Mekas). Necessarily, slithers and slips of clouds — those which he “wanted to see” — would make the cut. I could count them. I won’t.
— Back to Benning. His cloud has been a protagonist — most literally in Ten Skies (2004). It has also been implied. In Twenty Cigarettes (2011), the bloom of tobacco smoke becomes a kind of ironic facsimile of his earlier film: two cigarettes and their puffing, standing in for one voluminous sky. But then again, the sky makes its appearance here too — a kind of collapsed superimposition already existing within the lens and the image it captures. Smoke piled on smoke.
— It has also, always, provided a painterly backdrop — with Landscape Suicide (1986), The United States of America (1975 and 2022), Thirteen Lakes (2004), others. Within a cinema of structural landscape precision, the cloud is the least controllable element — that which is most subject to its own rhythms and manoeuvres, all while having the dissonant monolithism of an entirely temporary architecture. I think of John Constable’s Cloud Study (1822), in which swipes and blobs coexist on eachother’s plane — the cloud being both sturdy and insubstantial. Wordsworth understood the potential slippage between cloud and poetic subject (him; us). The cloud, a thing that is water-but-not-water, reflects us in the only way it finds possible: obliquely.
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