by Jonathan Ali
From the corporeal to the cosmic, the material to the spiritual, the seven films in shorts programme I Am One, And Two explore mechanisms of endurance.
The body is a machine capable of upgrade in the frenetic explant / implant, in which Josh Weissbach engages in an extreme act of 16mm self-documentation: surgery to have a pacemaker replaced. Rapid editing and time-lapse photography suggest the hurried beating of a human heart, and an ironic sense of the routine in this vital procedure.
In contrast, Marthe Peters’s Henry Is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep reflects upon a slower experience of time due to illness and non-human relationships. A childhood infirmity has given the filmmaker the need for a ‘horizontal life’, much of which she spends resting with her cat, Henry. Composed as an ode to Peters’s purring friend, the film is a tender collage of care, bedsheets, vulnerability and a snail’s-paced world to live and love in.
An experience of time as non-linear is presented in Hannan Jones’s Cosmotechnic Templum, which contemplates the star-flecked cosmic realms above as unfolding in cyclical, fluid-like ways. What alternative ways of knowing and being might be revealed if we embrace energies celestial?
In A Telephone for God, Nicky Tavares proceeds from the late Marcel Vogel, spiritual scientist and quartz cutter, to his student Drew Tousley, who fashions crystals for use in psychic healing. Interweaving archival and original footage, as well as a playfully creative sequence featuring a performance by ‘Vogel’s assistant’, Tavares assembles an affectionate tribute to a practice tuned into cosmic frequencies and celestial energies.
Structured around an invasive and impersonal medical procedure, Gabi Rudin’s All of This Must Be Paid For is a tactile investigation into human health and wellbeing. Commingling archival and original images and audio, and drawing from an array of texts on alternative healing therapies, the film searches for possibilities of care for the body, mind and soul beyond a system of commodification.
The body as a wellspring of latent savagery is centred in autojektor’s studies in machine generated violence. VHS-era home-movie footage is seamlessly manipulated with AI in an unsettling interrogation of the vintage horror genre and modern technology.
Finally, in Objectionable Fruit, Hogan Seidel and Gabby Follett find in the natural world a rich metaphor to reflect on the complexities and fluidities of gender identity. Taking the form of a botanical and historical study of the Ginkgo biloba tree, a living fossil with the capacity to change sexes, the film is a lovingly handcrafted polylingual rumination on resistance, resilience and the ability to thrive in defiance of imposed binaries.
