Kevin Obsatz has a Bolex 16mm camera. It records 24 still
pictures every second (or more or less, depending on where you set the frame
rate), but it records no sound. The camera creates its own soundtrack, a
steadily rotating clicking sound that means that it is exposing frames to
light, and Kevin explains that in this age of silent cell phone cameras, the soundtrack
that his camera produces sparks conversations about the nature of the device.
Kevin has recorded these conversations with that device, but we see these talks
in image only, images of hands moving, or mouths ending a sentence and smiling.
Instead of the words of conversation we have films of the nonverbal parts of
talking, the parts that we are told carry the majority of the information in a
conversation. As we watch his images of the hands and bodies of people talking,
we have no idea of the topics of these conversations, but we know the passions
of these people, their sense of humor, their warmth toward each other, their
reservations.
In late December, Obsatz screened four of his 16mm films as
part of the Northern Exposure film series at the Trylon Microcinema. Northern
Exposure is a local filmmakers showcase curated by Adam Loomis and Kate Rogers.
The world outside the Trylon was turning white even after sunset as Minneapolis
had its first big snowfall of the season, and inside the theater, Obsatz's
images privileged the brighter end of the black and white spectrum by reaching
to the sun and to the fingers and blowing hair of the people he films.
Obsatz hand processes 16mm, transferring the strands of film
from bucket to bucket with his own hands and fingers to process, wash and fix
it. The act of processing his films this way fills his movie skies with strange
dancing lines that distract and bind you to the image, and specks of dust far
too large to ignore, a constant snowfall even on the sunniest of black and
white days.
His films are journeys through time and space. Three of the
films took us on very specific journeys from one place to another and then back
again. The earliest film, "Empire Builder," recorded only a few
minutes but almost everything of the short train journey a friend of his took
to Milwaukee to visit his dying father. The film that we saw at the Trylon was
every frame that Obsatz filmed on the trip, some short bursts of the train ride
but mostly the weave of superhighways that choke downtown Milwaukee. Those
weaving elevated freeways were reflected in the weave of tubes in the hospital
room that led from one medical device or another to the sheets of the bed where
his friend's immobile father was dying.
The film that opened the screening was a journey through time,
a Bolex diary of the year 2012 as seen by Obsatz, from the snows to summer and
back again, with conversations and dinners and a trip to the everglades and a
friend's wedding and those hands and smiles and mostly the babies and young
children of his south Minneapolis community. Obsatz explained after the
screening that many times he set the camera on a table during a conversation so
that he could record film without blocking his face with the camera, so that he
could stay engaged with the moment and still film it, and this low table angle
makes many of his shots seem to come from the viewpoint of a newborn, a low angle
that fixes our attention on movement, as if we were looking up from our spot in
the crib, as if we were learning how to use our eyes.
His film is about seeing things in your home as if you were
on vacation, seeing everything for the first time, the reflections of trees in
the puddles of the street, the pattern of clothespins holding up nothing but
themselves on a short clothesline that connects one yard with another, cabbages
that open their leaves to us only to show the shadows at their core. This film
journey of the year 2012 ends with the image of a baby crawling toward the
camera and to us as the end of the film strip, exposed to light, pulses with white,
beating and expanding into pure sun.
In the third film of the evening, "Aberdeen,"
Obsatz took himself and his camera along with the band The Brass Messengers, to
Aberdeen, South Dakota. The performance the band played there occupies a shot
or two of the film, Aberdeen couples dancing to rhythms that couldn't possibly
come from a brass band - this is not the usual band on the road documentary.
Most of the film is about the faces of the band members. One sequence of the
film might have been a full 100 foot spool of 16mm film, with the roll divided
evenly into one long held shot of the face of each member. The sequence begins
with the unfogging of the film from white and ends with it pulsing back into
white fog. It is three minutes of faces, of faces with interesting hair and
wrinkles and expressions that challenge and come to a sense of peace with the
fierceness of that three-eyed camera and its clicking, faces that act and try
not to act. The film ends with the band standing in a cramped space beneath a
sidewalk with a strange skylight showing the shadows of people walking by
above. The light from the glass bricks of the sidewalk is so clear and old, and
the faces of the band members are both puzzled and amazed.
The second film of the evening, "Crazy Horse," is
a work of fiction that is also a home movie, a story of a trip of a man and his teen
daughter to the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is a small story but also as
big as tensions that bend and break the continent, the network of bombs buried
in the ground and in our relationships to each other, how we learn nothing about
ourselves through the landscapes that we colonize with tourism and travel brochure
explanation, a dance to try to make sense of gigantic faces.
"Empire Builder" is also about these things. In Milwaukee,
Obsatz, his camera, and the son of the dying man visit a natural history museum
of dioramas purporting to show this continent before the domination of Europeans,
the magical movie world of wild shirtless native people, spears always at the
ready. These dioramas, decades old, are just as motionless as the dying man,
but they are full of pat explanations while the dying man is full of the
mystery of any living thing, the shadows between the cabbage leaves. The
diorama figures will always be so well explained that they will lead us nowhere
while the dying man takes us to the light, the light of the fogging film that
returns us to the snow-filled night, to our lives as fogged and nicked and
dusty as hand-processed 16mm film.
