First Look is the Museum of the Shifting Picture’s annual celebration of experimental cinema. This 12 months’s version options an intriguing assortment of movies that remix archival supplies, mix nonfiction and fiction, or do each. Elene Asatiani and Soso Dumbadze’s Limitation (2023) reconstructs the timeline of the 1991 coup in Georgia fully by discovered footage. Equally, in Behind Closed Doors (2023), João Pedro Bim layers long-buried audio of a secret Sixties assembly of Brazil’s Nationwide Safety Council over authorities propaganda from all through the years of the nation’s dictatorship. Sara Summa, her brother, and her son all play variations of themselves in her movie Arthur & Diana (2023). And Robert Kolodny takes an uncommon tack to the biopic by developing a faux interval documentary following real-life boxer Willie Pep trying to make a comeback within the Sixties in The Featherweight (2023).
One movie in this system makes notably summary use of remix. The Polish essay piece Solaris Mon Amour (2023) is a heady mash-up of Alain Resnais’s romantic drama movie Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Stanisław Lem’s landmark sci-fi novel Solaris (1961). Director Kuba Mikurda was impressed by the truth that Lem started writing the e book in 1959, the identical 12 months Resnais’s movie was launched. Solaris has been tailored a number of instances in lots of kinds, and is probably going acquainted to most by way of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 movie, an icon of existentialism and Soviet cinema. However Mikurda invokes audio from totally different radio play variations produced by the Teatre of Polskie Radio, mixing it with footage from over 70 instructional works made by Lodz’s Instructional Movie Studio.
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The juxtaposition of coldly scientific pictures with Lem’s craving, wounded narration creates an impact much like Resnais’s movie, an enigmatic, montage-heavy rumination on postwar trauma centered on the romance between a French lady and a Japanese man who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Solaris Mon Amour as an alternative suggests the sensation of being emotionally unmoored in Japanese Europe throughout the tumultuous twentieth century, of shedding one’s sense of rootedness amid an age of dizzying scientific discovery following among the worst carnage humankind had ever skilled.
Gasoline Rainbow (2023) has extra of a story arc holding it collectively, although it too emphasizes vibes over plot — albeit very otherwise, and customarily rather more pleasantly. That is the newest work from director brothers Bill and Turner Ross, who focus on organising intricate situations that their characters navigate as they observe them. On this movie, they give attention to a bunch of teenagers who embark on an ill-planned street journey throughout Oregon to the coast. Latest highschool grads, these youngsters naturally have loads on their minds concerning the form their lives will take. The delineation between what’s constructed and what’s real feels loads clearer right here than in a lot of the brothers’ earlier works. (When the group hops a practice, as an illustration, a viewer is unlikely to assume that is an sudden improvisation.) However the youngsters’ totally mundane, typically deeply relatable conversations and confessions makes them really feel all of the extra trustworthy and uncooked. That form of creative journey completely crystallizes the ethos of First Look.
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First Look 2024 continues on the Museum of the Shifting Picture (36-01 thirty fifth Avenue, Astoria, Queens) by March 17.