LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER & HE WALKED AWAY (Jennifer Reeves, USA, 2007)

Tucked into a small Chinatown gallery on Orchard Street this past weekend, Jennifer Reeves showed a short program of two experimental, multi-channel 16mm films. After so much time steeped in artist-made film in Milwaukee, it was refreshing to attend a good, old fashioned film screening—one complete with makeshift seating, a hanging sheet for a screen, and the filmmaker projecting her own work in the back of the room. Extra points for a (slight) mechanical malfunction, and an uncomfortably delayed start-time.

Both films were two-channel, and performance-based works that had been performed before under slightly different circumstances. They were both colorful, abstract, and highly textural films, with filmic effects and editing by hand. Reeves spoke about how it was good to work directly with film to create the images, after digital video has more or less taken over for artist-based film work.

Certainly the screening exemplified the tactile quality of 16mm film, and what is lost as filmmakers continue to rely more and more on digital effects. The treated effects on the film, mostly coming from paint, created beautifully crisp imagery and a handmade intimacy that was extended into the projection process, in which Reeves adjusted images and filtered the thrown light, especially during “He Walked Away,” in which the screens were overlain on top of one another. It was a big reminder of the fragile, forgotten materiality of film for a new generation of artists.

Composed mostly of manipulated footage, some shot by the filmmaker, some found, both works were highly referential and personal for Reeves, while playing mostly to the poetics and rhythm of light and cracked images. By integrating the projection into the performance of each film, Reeves also gave the films a living presence and improvisational energy, which humanized and endeared the dual-projection, which can sometimes prove flattening and bloodless.

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