The New York Film Festival’s Projections series is an often-overlooked selection of the finest in recent experimental and avant-garde film. Spread over 11 programs, this year’s subjects ranged from documentary to magical realism, from fades to found footage. Aggressive editing techniques and sound collage offered some new and provocative investigations, yet it was the modest program of two seasoned filmmakers — Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler — that beamed with the liveliest verve and curiosity. Partners in love and art for over 50 years, they have earned a following of poets, philosophers and artists steeped in as much affection as respect for “Nick and Jerry.” Like their legendary at-home screenings, this was a show-and-tell of gentle, beautiful things.

The program included three short films — Dorsky’s Autumn and The Dreamer, and Hiler’s Bagatelle II (all works 2016) — each imbued with the pair’s characteristically playful and patient observations of natural and interior life. Autumn, however, stood out as Mr. Dorsky’s most transient tapestry to date, and a significant interpretation of haiku — the pure poetic form that first seized him as a youth. Shot in 2015, during the last months in that year, as California’s drought continued, the film is dedicated to all autumns and ruminates on its essence through nature, using short shots of the California countryside. Inconceivably crisp and luminous, the 16 mm film is 26 minutes long and silent, complimented by the tick-tock of the projector. Dorsky’s films do without narrative structure, allowing the images to speak directly. By such standards, Autumn is verbose.

The film opens slowly, burying us eye-deep in foliage before clearing a space for Dorsky’s found treasures: broad-eared rhododendron and butterfly bushes, wayfaring between islands of light, fade in and out of a blackness that comes to linger within an organic, oneiric, day-for-night tone. Everything seems steeped in twilight — the violet hour, the day’s autumn — where partitions blur and something slips. Flora is constant, becoming a verdant ether, occasionally contrasted by the slick hide of a building, but we are always quickly pulled back under the brush. Each image, dyed in oscuro, is kernelled and then connected by a constant flow of gaze. Vegetation, despite its thirst, pulsates and vacillates throughout while, against reason, bushes blush green. Dorsky is reflective, more mirror than director; his subjects, once pinned to celluloid, are egalitarian: the darkening bough, a sun freckled path, light smeared like jelly across a window, an ache for life.

Such is the poetry of Dorsky, and his interest in haiku has long been shared among filmmakers. In the 1929 essay “Beyond the Shot,” Sergei Eisenstein precisely correlated the natures of montage and haiku. In both practices, it is the copulation of forms to create a “representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.” He offers the Japanese lexicon as example: the combination of water and eye mean to weep, knife and heart mean sorrow. Such laconicism describes haiku as much as Dorsky’s art; to see his film is to see master poet Matsuo Bashō’s 17 syllables glowing at the edge of winter:

Autumn moonlight —
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.

A self-proclaimed hunter of the Zen occurrence, of satori (the sudden enlightenment), Dorsky applies a number of poetic rules to the film, allowing his images to move us as consistently as Bashō’s cranes, cuckoos and moons. Vital to haiku are kigo (“season words”) — such as cicada, typhoon or grapes — that connote the time of year. Autumn is pregnant with the kigo-laden images of its namesake: rain slick streets, coy ochre moons, hexagonal light and tawny leaves glide down, across and over the screen. This is not simply a rummaging of diaphanous delicacies, however. Cutting is as essential to haiku as montage, and each cut is precise. Cutting works like a punctuation mark, and for Dorsky like a door. Throwing the juxtaposition into revelatory light, it links us to a new dimension — the moment of satori.

Such delightful turns happen throughout the film; seasoned and cut with care, Dorsky’s images become incarnations of linked verse. In one observation, light-tickled water meets a crush of velvet black reeds; the pair, now joined, transforms into an ominous sea urchin. Midway through Autumn, some late afternoon light falls yellow on the nubby back of an armchair or sofa. It glows, beginning to resemble a wheat field, but a crossfade exposes a dark landscape of whirling gears beneath: upholstery and infrastructure combine to reveal parallel universes of leisure and grind, flesh and mechanism. This all quickly falls away again, yet you can still taste a type of yellow, decidedly post-harvest.

In material as much as purpose, both film and haiku are attempts to bottle the moment of revelation, the fleeting experience. Indeed, the haiku is traditionally printed, like celluloid, as a single vertical line. Their kinship culminates towards the end of Autumn, the frame lingering on a voluptuous bit of vegetation. As Dorsky pushes and pulls us in and out by his signature dark fade, we move through a hypnagogic and hesitant collapse (or arising), towards a new vision: constellations of inestimably starry flora. In its final syllable, the film negotiates heaven and Earth: the Milky Way in milk thistle.

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Smoke and Water: A Living Painting at Southeastern Alliance for Community Change

November 2014 to February 2015
317 Castle Street
Wilmington, North Carolina

On a cold December morning, I met Working Films Initiative co-director Anna Lee to discuss the documentary Coal Ash Stories and to view Greg Lindquist’s installation Smoke and Water: A Living Painting at Southeastern Alliance for Community Change (SEACC) in Wilmington, North Carolina. Smoke and Water is part of a collaborative project that aligns community organizations and residents by using art to highlight and draw on local expertise. A native of Wilmington, Lindquist’s work reflects his connection to the area. The immersive installation spans across three walls of paintings, photographs, and statements, which provide an intimate glimpse into a community struck by one of the largest coal ash spills in the nation’s history: in early February 2014, officials estimate up to 39,000 tons of toxic coal ash spilled into the Dan River in Eden, North Carolina.[1] It lined the banks of the river for 80 miles downstream from the spill site.

Upon entering, I am impressed with the command the installation has over the small community center. Paint pervades the open space normally reserved for community gatherings, yoga, and meditation groups, setting a reflective tone on the way the environment concerned is simultaneously experienced and imagined. Presenting a multilayered narrative of wide-ranging voices and imagery, Lindquist juxtaposes abstracted impressions of an empty and disconnected landscape with interwoven memories and stories presented as text on canvas.

As if looking at multiple screens open on a laptop, Smoke and Water simulates a space of interconnected thoughts, urgency, and action. The painted walls invite and sensitize its inhabitants to the viewing space — a platform for discussion and contemplation. Warm analogous tones envelope the room. On the wall, painted forms play with perceived edges. Swirls of gray and brown — reflections of the coal ash residue unyoked and spreading across the wall — intersect and overlap large paintings that evoke a still winter along the Dan River. The effect is attention to the organic forms and beauty of the paint’s application on the wall and, at the same time, one is charged by its symbolism.

On the floor, taped and gridded texts, drawings, and photographs direct the viewer to navigate the space in a curious and conscious path. I turn to read the texts painted in muted tones on stretched canvases. The narratives speak to the damage inflicted upon the community, and they pose cultural questions on corporate culpability. Local residents’ expressions of how the spill affected their personal health, relationships, and the community spirit, surface as distinct whispers yet layered voices speaking to an urgent and collective cause.

As a native North Carolinian, I’ve always been drawn to the still and powerful character of our state’s rivers and lakes. I feel an immediate connection to the voices of local residents whose nostalgia and experiences have been displaced by the ruin and waste of industrial carelessness. The spill happened over a year ago. Although time has passed, the impact on our sense of place and purpose remain.

As I turn to leave, the late morning light casts a glow on the walls of the art installation, one that suggests the aftermath of a heavy rainstorm or perhaps something ominous. With this illusion, Lindquist subtly advances the cause. These stories travel beyond the walls from a small visual impression to a much larger and more serious discussion involving social engagement around environmental pollution. Lindquist’s work radiates, igniting both tranquil rumination and a charged call to action. He presents the facts while simultaneously distilling sincere experiences and memories. Smoke and Water lingers, encouraging not only reflection, but also reaction… the storm after the calm.

[1] This is the estimate provided by Duke Energy officials.

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I visited “Platform: Maya Lin” at the Parrish Art Museum after spending a couple of days in my hometown of Frenchtown, New Jersey (located on the Delaware River, population roughly 1,200). I was perhaps more receptive to the urgency of Lin’s environmentalist sculptural works than I normally would have been had I arrived by way of New York City. As a kid, one of my favorite places to explore was a rocky peninsula on the Delaware that my father and I dubbed Clam Beach because its shore was littered with sun-scorched freshwater clamshells. One could always count on finding live clams in the small pools that formed along the riverbank. Today, the little peninsula on the river is unrecognizable. Half of it is underwater and the other half is overgrown by a thicket of unruly vegetation and piles of driftwood.

The work presented in “Platform” consisted of three sculptures for which scientific imaging software was used in shaping familiar sculptural materials like marble, steel and silver. The strength of Lin’s approach has always been her ability to reduce seemingly incomprehensible phenomena to a direct, often quiet, physical encounter. A gesture as simple as folding paper is made monumental in her Wavefields (a series begun in 1995, comprised of three undulating mini-mountain ranges in Ann Arbor, Miami and at Storm King Sculpture Park in New York). The wavefields were based on wave patterns that Lin recreated as site-specific earthworks using 3D modeling software. At her best, Lin subverts the frank materiality of Minimalism by tethering her work to science and politics. These recent works allude to geo-spatial boundaries that, since Modernity, have on the one hand been strengthened and fortified through war, politics and Capitalism, and on the other, have deteriorated as a result of excessive consumption and expenditure of natural resources.

Pin River — Sandy, (2013) was the most effective work in Lin’s exhibition. In Pin River, the diffuse boundaries of the floodplain along the coastline of New Jersey, Long Island and New York City are rendered in thousands of steel pins, forming a slightly blurred wall drawing of the section of the Northeast where Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. The regularity of the construction almost absurdly orders and regularizes the chaos of the eponymous “super storm.” With this work, Lin points straight ahead at the map and tells us, “This is where the storm hit, these are the floodplains,” and the echo that follows is, “It will happen again.”

Latitudinal coordinates take the form of marble rings in the tripartite floor sculpture titled Around the World (2013-14), Each nested ring represents the topography of the ocean floor in the three works, titled Arctic Circle (the innermost ring) Latitude New York City (the central ring) and Equator (the outermost ring), The marble structures show the hills and canyons found miles below sea level: they make visible the unpredictable beauty of the Earth’s unexplored topos. But how does the gray-veined Vermont marble used in Around the World relate to the latitudes of New York City, the Arctic Circle or the Equator for that matter?

A similar dissonance between form, concept and material is felt in Lin’s wall-hung renditions of three East End lakelets titled Mecox Bay, Accabonec Harbor and Georgica Pond (all 2014) These small, fragile bodies of water were mapped and their lacy perimeters were used as the outline shape of the sculptures, though I’m not convinced that these works live up to their aspiration as talismans for environmental awareness. Silver is precious, yes. These lakes are precious, of course. But how does this precious metal connect to the ecology or topology of eastern Long Island? The works’ diminutive scale makes them look more like gilt ginger roots than fragile bodies of water. Lin wants poetry, but in this work her slick materials threaten to eclipse the conceptual urgency of her subject. In her monuments and earthworks, Lin acts almost like a choreographer who guides bodies through space. The import of her work is absorbed not simply through the visual but likewise through corporeal engagement and movement. And although one can circumambulate Around the World, Lin’s small sculptural works neglect the elements of encounter and surprise at which she is so adept.

I sat in the atrium with Lin’s work on the last day of Fourth of July weekend and watched a cavalcade of cars inch along Montauk Highway through the museum’s picture window. I would like to think that the three concentric rings that comprise Around the World might act like sonar beams radiating outward from their point of origin (Lin) — out into the world of environmentally-minded art-admirers and weekenders alike. In the waning daylight, the pins in Pin River — Sandy cast a westerly shadow that suggested the wiping away of the coastal regions of the floodplain. With this gesture, Lin subtly advances her environmental warning, one straight pin at a time.

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