And I’m not just refering to that most famous of art-house conventions, the “open ending” (which, puzzlingly, is still a point of frustration for movie-goers). No, this type of film that I’m talking about could be said to have an open everything. They have endings, for sure. Just not the kind that achieves simple closure, but the kind of ending that requires some work and patience from the viewer.

A good recent example of this type of film is Kelly Reichardt’s OLD JOY, which follows two old friends reunited for a road trip to visit some hot springs. The film is marked by a lot of quiet passages, a lot of unfocused conversation, but most of all by its lack of a clear moment of epiphany that one might expect form this type of film. Rather, the slow reveal of thoughts and images between the two characters collect into a poetic experience: less logical, more meditative. What may at first seem to be a series of unrelated events and scenes, can usually, hopefully, by the final shot, with some viewer synthesis, allow the full sweep of the work to be realized.

More purely a poetic film is Tsai Ming-Liang’s I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE. The film is built on the oddly desperate actions of disaffected characters, who don’t say much to each other, but do a lot to each other. The film takes up the concern of raw human connection across borders and genders—but for an American audience, the cultural critiques at play here are difficult to parse. Like most Tsai films, though, the head-on, personally direct gestures of the characters, coupled with stark, contemplative pacing create a universally understandable film.

Moving through gorgeously photographed urban settings, the film is ultimately about the struggle to relate to each other in an increasingly isolating world, and finding the connection through questionable, often hamfisted, means. Whether emotional union is achieved by the characters in the film is unclear, but it certainly leaves the viewer with striking, indelible images. As the central figure of the film—tellingly, often unconscious—floats downstream flanked by his two self-appointed watchers (lovers? opportunists? needy loners?), the overall effect is one of connection by way of proximity, which isn’t always undesirable, and usually necessary in life.

A note about repeat viewings: Most of my favorite films ever, I have watched twice, usually in close succession. Not because I missed something, or didn’t “get it.” But because a good film usually holds a lot of mystery, can pass by the perceptive gaze without enough cognizance, and is usually just the beginning of getting into the work. I think all short-form “experimental” films should be screened at least twice in a row. This is the way we did it in film school during class workshops and critiques. “Project it again!” I recall a professor shouting, before even beginning to discuss the film critically. The method allows one pass for perception, a gleaning of aesthetic and mood, a swallowing whole. The second pass for closer reading and consideration—a chance to expound theories and crack codes.

That said, after my second run of INLAND EMPIRE, I was convinced, although not right away, at the power and completion of this movie. Firstly, I’m confounded by the claims that this film is essentially randomly constructed, with a disjointed series of dreamlike scenes. Certainly the film is non-linear, and an amalgam of styles, ideas, and set-peices—but the film actually uses a different logic of connectiveness than one might be used to. Rather than using plot or characterization as development, even abandoned the notion of cause-and-effect, INLAND EMPIRE instead plays out as an emotional progression, using instead referential linkages (mystery objects, like a silk with a hole burned though, a screwdriver, and that damned monkey) to tie the movie together. More subconscious than conscious, the logic extends across settings and tonal planes, and is a mostly exhilarating ride, if the viewer is up to it. And by the time that final act arrives, with the big, emotional song accompanied by a montage of moments from the film-world, it’s hard not feel some kind of denoument has taken place.

Also noteworthy—in this film more than Lynch’s recent work (most likely a product of self-funding)—is the interest in experimental imagery and abstraction. Lynch has spoken widely about his love of the imperfect nature of video, it’s ease of use, but also with the mystery that it instills within the image. By not allowing the viewer to know exactly what is happening, one of Lynch’s most important techniques gets direct, imagery-influenced currency. Utilizing darkness, blurred contrasts, relentless hand-held vision, untrained focus, and a careful, purposely use of video effects, reveals an interest in mostly ungraceful media forms for largely grace-infused (a hardknock grace, sometimes) content: this is Lynch’s great tension, whereby he juggles high art, and pop (including Hollywood chic), by way of risky melodrama and avant garde cinema.

Take for evidence, despite all the chair-squirming scenes and nap-inducing meandering, the true filmic transcendence he can achieve. Recall that most affecting of scenes in the movie (you know the one: Laura Dern dying, homeless Hollywood, one-legged prostitutes, “No more blue tomorrows.”) When the scene concludes, and we have the big pull-back, revealing the set and camera, the actors leaving, we must not feel cheated (as in the classic groaner, “It was all a dream”), because the motive is not to sweep the rug out from under movie magic, but rather it is revelation. It reminds us that magic moments like this happen all the time, whether “real” or scripted doesn’t matter, because even in the movies, it’s really happening. Anyone who has worked on a film set is familiar with this feeling: watching a drama unfold in pure, silent, isolation only to get shuttered back to reality with the call of “cut.” Even dream logic is human logic, something we all relate to. To diminish it for a lack of real world applicability is to not understand the real world, or human emotion and motives.

For all its linkages, the movie actually appears as an improvisation—which it largely is. Anyone who has read about the film knows that it began with Laura Dern’s improvisational interview monologue. Watching closely, you can even see Dern’s eyes searching for her next subject. This speech quite literally lays the groundwork for the emotional thrust of the film, and most of its narrative points, too. Working without a script (Lynch wrote dialogue for scenes the day of), or improvising scenes is nothing new to cinema. Lynch just uses those as his principal modes of expression here, and rather than using improvisation to fill in or aid his work, he let it guide the film wherever it would go. It’s a truly brave technique, and for someone like Lynch with so much creative energy and spirit, it is essential for an unmediated expressive cinema. This is pure Lynch.

Like much of Gehr’s work, the film is a carefully constructed, determinedly minimalist example of the kind of work that helped define the Structural Film style. The thing that I find uncommonly memorable in Gehr’s films from this movement, however, is the inescapable human element he imbued in them—by way of a seeking, often hand-held camera; simple, almost rote, editing; and his intuitive, environmentally-informed, shooting strategy. To hear Gehr speak about his work, he almost uses his amateurism as a technique, a way to avoid the common traps of movie-making, and to create a unique cinematic experience. And when his technique is at full blossom, which I believe it is in this film, he creates a distinctly human-formed space that’s easy to get lost in.

The film is near an hour of footage shot from inside a glass elevator, and the resulting view is one of a cityscape in constant flux—with perspective, scale, and direction being shifted, reversed, slanted. It’s an exhilarating and disorienting study in slow-motion weightlessness, as the elevator travels up and down, and the camera holds on certain angles, or follows buildings, or engages in subtle shifts. It all combines to make a gravity-defying space impossible to ground oneself in.

Although the film looks very structured, Gehr stressed his open-ended work methods. Driven by necessity, he described smuggling his camera aboard the elevator, and working from makeshift notes jotted down on previous rides. “If you try to control everything in the frame,” he said during the Q & A session, “you create a dead work to start with.” He went on to encourage one to let a film “breathe,” and to remain open to accidents. It is this mindset, I believe, which make Gehr’s contribution to Structual Film, and American filmmaking at large, so devastatingly affecting.

After working in the Hollywood model for years, it’s refreshing to hear a filmmaker talk about being so open to new ideas, to work via new methods, and to be so carefree in his filmmaking. Which isn’t to say the results are sloppy or malformed—rather they are joyously free. When we watch Van Sant’s now trademark wandering camera drift in and out of focus, even up and down f-stops, it’s hard not to give in to the moments of pure lightness of being.

Certainly besides being told with faces, this is a film told with air. The way a girl’s hair flows across the frame in a (potentially disastrous, but eventually transcendant) sex scene, the way the long grasses are parted before the camera in a character’s walk into seclusion, and of course the lyrical skateborading footage. Here, the filmstock changes from 35mm to Super 8, as Van Sant used footage shot by the teenagers themselves on skateboards, rendered in mobile, grainy interludes.

Working from a novel—in fact, the film is framed by a narrated journal passage—the film is able to stick to story conventions, while also molded to fit the true life aesthetic. Van Sant confessed to not shooting his film in the traditional method, that is to shoot scenes all the way through from a variety of angles and to put the film together in the editing room. Instead, he often took only one shot of a scene, choosing to follow his on-set instincts, and to create the film on location. In this way, the film is truly alive, and that energy is present, mostly in the poetic, usually hand-held, cinematography.

Taking a video game world to its pure and inexpressible end is a technique that has been achieved by hacking (Cory Archangel’s SUPER MARIO CLOUDS comes to mind), but with the more immersive worlds provided by newer games, sometimes no hacking is needed.

Such is the case with the recent work of Phil Solomon shown at this year’s Views of the Avant Garde, part of the New York Film Festival. UNTITLED (FOR DAVID GATTEN) is the first of three haunting new movies which are taken directly from Grand Theft Auto gameplay. Simply put, the works take banal game world excursions to a heightened emotional sense of landscape, and our (or the avatar’s) presence.

In UNTITLED, we watch from behind a first person avatar as he stands before what could be an apacolyptic storm in a barren landscape. Randomly (realistically?) coded movements and breathing register in the figure, but mostly he remains still as the landscape churns around him. The effect is one of unexpected empathy—Solomon has charged the scenes with more humanity than a lot of mainstream films do with actual humans.

The scenes captured were found at the frontiers of the video game landscape, (where the filmmaker’s avatar wandered “without mission, without murder” according to Solomon’s own program notes), re-purposing the game, and reaching an illogical conclusion: The heart still beats at the edge of town.

One of the most surprising film-going experiences I had this year, OUR DAILY BREAD is a heart-stopping, painful yet gorgeous film. Documenting the European industrial food production world in all of its ritualistic, absurd, and devastatingly real glory, the film keeps its camera and perspective strictly centered. In purely cinematic language, the film unfolds in a series of carefully framed and filmed tableaus in long, often motionless takes.

Structurally captivating, the film moves from factory farms to slaughterhouses, finding poetic and compositionally attuned environments in the most grotesque and mundane projects within the food industry of today. Highly ordered, and mostly mechanized, the film frames and ritualizes scenes of trauma, violence, and haunting imagery, and traces the path of the homogenization of our food products.

As important as filmic concerns, discussing this film from a political standpoint is, I think, vital. Understandly, it can be hard to understand the value of a film that makes something so grotesque and harmful so beautiful. On the contrary, I feel that although the film is stripped of commentary of any kind, its offers an unblinking gaze onto the sometimes surreal, swept-under-the-rug food world, rendered with the banality and duration of daily life, highlights the detachment that consumers, esprecially Americans, have with food origins. And by including scenes of the food workers having meals, by this juxtaposition we understand implicitly that this is a connection that works best when not spoken about. That it is best considered privately, individually, in order to arouse appropriately. In this way, OUR DAILY BREAD is, for me, one of the most successful films of recent memory.

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.

Her latest work comes from a series of large-scale drawings, which she filmed, and edited together in a two-channel, side-by-side presentation. The resulting work is a loose narrative composed entirely of still images, with motion and progression executed through pans, editing, and the play between each projected screen.

Partially an ode to Benning’s own impulses following September 11th, the piece displaces her motives and actions onto anonymous hand-drawn city-dwellers across a downtown landscape, characters she describes as, “in search of everyday play and pleasure.”

The two-way editing is exciting, but I found the prosaic approach to lack empathy. Flat can be beautiful, as Benning has made known in other recent filmwork, and the expert composition and Benning’s own soundtrack sustains the piece well. But no amount of compositional dressing (including color filter shifts) can overcome the supressed heartbeat of the stock characters. The two-channel approach, with two screens synched via computer code, is also disappointingly limiting for future screening options for such a topical work.

Two years ago, The Books began touring as a live act. Possibly to offset the fact that much of the arrangements wouldn’t be performed live (two string instruments played over pre-recordings of the found sounds and samples), the band presented video pieces for nearly all the works. I have seen rock bands play with video accompaniment before, and it usually comes off as secondary, lazy, and quickly produced—useless padding, and not integrated into the show.

The Books have never been a traditional rock band, though, and their video projections were expertly produced, and clearly a major aspect of their live show and performance. Clearly not wanting to be in the spotlight, The Books’ Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto sat in darkness below the projection screen, letting the video be the main attraction. Despite being in a rock club setting, I consider seeing The Books live one of my best art film screenings of 2006.

One of the most memorable pieces of the night was “Take Time,” an upbeat piece off of their 2004 album “The Lemon of Pink,” and which is included on the new DVD release “Playall.” While their music is best described as experimental, what you will notice first in this piece is how charming and playful the music is. Audio samples of laughter are common in a Books song, and spoken clips are a cut up and mined for jokes and wordplay. This is folk music at it’s best, building a universal soundworld and bridging cultures across everyday experience.

Certainly The Books are obsessive collectors, and much of the audio samples come from video clip libraries. What’s amazing, to previous listeners or not, is watching the audio samples sourced back to their original video source. At this point, the video collage becomes intimately part of the song.

Found footage can easily be mined for comedy, for campy moments to thrill you and your teenage friends, but The Books mine the footage for something else. Sometimes funny, usually meaningful, all distinctly human. These are universal moments, highs and lows, scenes of rapture and communion. The Books are careful editors, and their attention to detail lifts these audio/visual pieces from simple collage into uniquely moving song-poems.

Available to View on YouTube.

So much light in such darkness, it’s a little like lifting a rock and revealing the bugs beneath: Used to the privacy and secrecy of the shade, what is seen can be a little jarring. Watching these kids in what the director calls a “collective freak-out,” I’m reminded of an experience I had when I was able to view an adoring rock audience from behind the stage. It’s thrilling peering into world not meant for you, and also reflexively scary, thinking of how each of us must look in such disarming moments.

But this is noise rock, and the mood is purely drugged-out and trance-inducing. It’s hard not to be hypnotized watching this performance, and the filmmaker’s notes about achieving a ritual of “the highest spirtiual order” can not be denied. This is religious stuff, and Russell’s in-your-face film style gets right into it.

This film, inexplicably, is available in the iTunes Store, as part of the Sundance Short Films package, so cough up $1.99 for filmic transcendence.