The Brooklyn Rail

Where does cinema take place? I don’t mean that as theoretical obtusion or pragmatic demurring—I don’t wish to discuss apparatus theory or name streaming services, at least not right now. What I mean is, when we sit down in a dark room, when the lights simultaneously dim around our bodies and cone into a plane before our eyes, where is the cinema? Can you feel a film in your eyes?

Toronto-based filmmaker Blake Williams’s new work, Laberint Sequences (2023), suggests that, in addition to feeling cinema itself (more on this figuration later), the eye is capable of feeling so much more than we suspect. Like any assortment of human organs—the heart or head, a forearm maybe, the ball of a kneecap—the eye feels. It can become sore or free. An eye can feel warmed up or feel pressed or get impacted or be made more tender. It senses, it has sensation. And so it can feel lost.

Williams’s lab is Barcelona’s Parc del Laberint d’Horta, a space composed of both an eighteenth-century neoclassical garden and a nineteenth-century Romantic garden. As such, time is already out of step. Or rather, already jutting into itself. Laberint Sequences graciously and generously locates and loses the spectator in careful rhythm. The film begins with a set of master shots of the garden: a spit of foliage, a fountain, classicist statuary. The polarized images hum with both the passage of time (a bug’s buzz or a siren’s lights warble the air, children yelp across the screen, leaves wiggle in breeze) and the feeling of the curated depth that stereoscopic 3D creates. Forsaking the movement of zoom or dolly, Williams positions these early shots to communicate the way our eyes can create and then explore motion inside a stationary stereoscopic image; to scrutinize the edges, which seem to be “closer” to us, and then move our eyes over and through the panes, conjuring a sense of mobility freed from the physics of “real” (reel?) life.

And then the sequences begin. In conversation at NYFF61, where Laberint Sequences played alongside Deborah Stratman’s Last Things (2023), Williams discussed recreating the garden’s maze by filming a POV shot from each angle along the way. The result was a set of footage whereby the film can, in the edit, create its own way through the labyrinth, with the still shots becoming trailheads from which our eyes depart into wandering. Here, the stereoscopic image is experimentally tactile: as the camera pans, the dimensions of the maze’s edges woggle. Space gets stretched, just so, and returns. Looking feels different. And if there is a whiff of screensaver to this portion, it’s only to suggest that if we shake our cursor, this footage may fade. What will it reveal?

Too often, we write “the film teaches us how to view it.” It’s a nifty formulation, but like most cute languaging, it forsakes clarity for well-grooved narration. There is surely an element of pedagogy in these establishing shots, as Michael Sicinski points out: “Williams is both offering the viewer the basic lay of the land as well as getting us accustomed to the multi-planar depth of the 3D.” But these images also perform a sense/sensual operation, establishing a rhythm by which the movement through the hedge maze—and the duration of the film—plays out. The duration of the image interacts with the time spent in the maze, the time it takes to leave, respawn, and re-enter it. The still and moving images don’t decode each other—they play us.

As a kind of texturally experimental cinema, Laberint Sequences is interested in the experience of its spectator’s sense of feeling, in co-creating a relationship between the image and eye and the feeling that occurs when these two entities are held together in a cinematic apparatus. It’s less a teachable moment from a knowing entity to a willing subject than it is a co-learning moment. What if films don’t teach us how to watch them, but ask us to write them simultaneously? Beautifully composed, the still shots serve as controls to be distorted and broken by the perspective pan in-labyrinth. We feel this. The images feel beautiful in and on our eyes.

Williams’s cinema is a moving image study in stereoscopic experimentation. What does that mean? These are 3D movies! 3D cinema, among the most speculative and spectacular of approaches to image-making, has been largely abandoned and unexplored by commodity and experimental cinema alike. To be a film-goer of a certain age—to be at the mercy of the megaplex post-Avatar (2009)—is to groan at even just the invocation of the format. After Cameron’s breakthrough, we were subject to a cavalcade of shoddy 3D narrative cinema, addled with juiced-up admission prices, playing under already dimly blinkered projection conditions, and often shot in 2D and converted to 3D in post. The 2010s-ish slew of 3D imagery is a grotesque mirror of the technology’s often faddish application in the early fifties; for every Anselm (2023), a Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), for every Man in the Dark (1953), a Sangaree (1953).

Laberint Sequences, while notionally less traditionally “narrative” than the four films listed above, is no mere rebuttal to the popular reduction-narrative of 3D as an aberrative, boring visual strategy. While obviously motivated to resituate the visual, emotional, and theoretical possibilities the stereoscopic image provides, the film is genuinely speculative: it doesn’t exist in opposition to anything, but as a new version of feeling itself. It feels around for all the ways image-making bends our perception. It bends back. It is a set of speculations on how the eye feels when engaged in perceiving 3D images. In its twenty-one minutes, it interrogates how feeling navigates expression, which is to say, language itself. “There’s a realm of sensations and affective responses that is beyond the hostile pop-out effect that intrudes on your space and makes you feel a brief moment of surprise or wonder or feeling like you can touch or poke what’s coming out at you,” Williams—also a critic, scholar, and teacher—told Phil Coldiron in the Rail in 2018. “And since I think language is always itself hostile toward sensations, you have to be careful with how you develop the vocabulary that is being used for these articulations.”

In its last third, Laberint Sequences forgoes the hostility of old language for careful stepping into undiscovered terrain. Suddenly, black and white footage of an old Hollywood film—The Maze (1953)?—interrupts the maze-panning. We then see actress Deragh Campbell, seated at a table, watching the black and white footage on a laptop screen, dubbing the film’s actors’ dialogue, a sort of nesting doll of artifice. With Campbell’s voice soundtracking the memory of an image, Williams begins to manipulate the panes and planes of vision, achieving a frankly otherworldly sensation as red and blue siren lights—featured in earlier, establishing footage—occupy something like the fore-foreground while manipulated Hollywood plays behind (beyond?) it. Joshua Minsoo Kim said it best: “my eyes have never felt this before.” I wondered if my eyes were supposed to do this, if they could.

What else is experimental cinema if not the return of the moving image to the body? What good is a camera in hand if it doesn’t pierce the pane of existence determined a certain way? “Depth, whether before or behind the screen, is the real dramatic tool in 3D,” observed Milton Gunzburg, the inventor of the Natural Vision Stereoscopic 3D process. “To insist on a screen or window between the action and the audience is to keep pictures artificially behind a flat barrier.”

To think alongside Laberint Sequences is to grapple with the sense reaction an eye undergoes as what happens when what stimulates the eyes becomes the sensational operation we call ‘cinema.’ Williams digests Godard’s insistence—that the eye is always seeing two images—to render the revelation that we are always seeing with two cameras in the same moment, in a different moment. To watch the corporeal (a body, a past, a movie) is to look through the perceptual (light, change, amorph), a cinema that is nominally about being lost and that perhaps colloquially “loses” the spectator only to communicate a deep and profound sense of novel location.