The Brooklyn Rail

Throughout the fourth Prismatic Ground festival, founder Inney Prakash repeatedly uttered that it was “not exciting” yet “soul-feeding” to have his festival during the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Wishing to oppose the Israeli government invading Rafah leading up to Nakba Day (May 15) as well as university administrators and police officers suppressing the student and faculty call for Palestinian liberation in NYC (Prakash was personally motivated by protests at The New School, where he is part-time faculty), Prakash previously said in an interview with Conor Williams that uniting people together will “strengthen solidarity and engender conversations about the kinds of art and institutions we need to be creating outside of the structures that have failed us.” Initially an online endeavor due to COVID-19 in 2021 to rectify film festival toxicities (e.g. by paying filmmakers or by relying on an open submission call), the avant-garde/experimental documentary festival eventually found in-person hosts in addition to maintaining robust virtual programming through DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, the Museum of the Moving Image, Light Industry, and Anthology Film Archives. Contrary to many fests, Prismatic engages in sufficient dialogue between the old and the new as programs intertwine established artists with emerging voices, and older films aren’t in “Classic/Revival” sections.

Michel Khleifi’s restored Fertile Memory (1981), the first feature shot in the West Bank, opened Prismatic this year. The documentary features two separate portraits, one of factory-working widow Farah (the director’s aunt) and the other of a Birzeit University professor named Sahar. Khleifi shies away from bellicose revolutionary films made in Palestine in favor of examining domestic life. Despite the characters’ different upbringings, they both have a devotion to refusal. Farah reviles her son for giving up their home in a land-exchange proposal, and Sahar rejects the label “militant” when Khleifi asks her off-screen. She doesn’t attend demonstrations and wishes for “normal” life. However, politics exist in her search for identity in a patriarchal world. Silence pops up frequently as the protagonists are grieving their traumas. That silence also symbolizes the time it takes Palestinians to move (getting a permit, traveling, etc.). It’s an intergenerational, feminist discourse on how the political subtly seeps into both pre-colonial and modern ways of living.

Several films made in Palestine or by Palestinian artists maintained the discussion of the siege in Gaza at the fest. They included older movies such as Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman’s critique of Western-produced depictions of Palestinians in the thrilling collage Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990) and San Francisco Newsreel’s coverage of the Palestinian Liberation Movement’s rising in Revolution Until Victory/We Are the Palestinian People (1968). The region’s contemporary entries include Razan AlSalah’s stunning memory preservation of the 1936 Arab Revolt in Palestine through Google Earth–like screenshots and her interview with elder Amine in A Stone’s Throw (2024) and Kamal AlJafari’s UNDR (2024). The latter offers a cathartic, aerial look into the surveillance of kids and farmers in Palestine. However, Prakash notes that presenting Palestinian films “is the bare minimum for a festival at this moment. There has to be structural, material sacrifice and change” to ensure social impact. Prismatic is one of the few arts organizations/projects committed to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and had all proceeds from the vibrant Opening Night Party at the Ridgewood club H0L0 go to Gaza family funds and Palestine Legal. These economic moves burgeon Prismatic’s political goals to be an active force for freedom.

Resistance as a motif echoes in interdisciplinary movies at Prismatic Ground (aptly named after a Marguerite Young poetry volume), which celebrates poetry, music, literature, and still and moving photography. In her stunning mid-length Both, Instrument & Sound (2024), Sharlene Bamboat coils liberation movements narratives with the story of her friendship with a queer activist. Alexis Kyle Mitchell braids her familial history with the conceptions of toxic patterns in her luminescent feature debut, The Treasury of Human Inheritance (2024). Both and The Treasury focus on the personal. Meanwhile, Emilia Beatriz’s barrunto (2024) travels to space in their interconnected tale of nuclear contamination and occupations from Scotland to Puerto Rico. The cosmic title comes from Puerto Rican culture and refers to bodily unrest, omens, or forecasts. Beatriz uses scholar Ángela Ginorio’s readings, as well as protest footage, 16mm cinematography, and animations of Uranus to commune with people of the diaspora. Beatriz and their disability justice group, Collective Text, interchange the film’s Spanish audio and texts with English (and periodically include bilingual captions), conserving culture and heritage while not addressing the demands of the large, non-Spanish world. With references to June Jordan’s and Margaret Tait’s poems, barrunto holds faith for the future in this macrocosm of social enfranchisement.

Prismatic Ground also honored contemporary and historically overlooked avant-garde innovators who observed their social consciousness and expanded conceptions of cinema. Greek filmmaker Antoinetta Angelidi was named the Ground Glass recipient, the festival’s sole award dedicated to an experimental filmmaker who has not received significant recognition. Many of Angelidi’s films, like Idees Fixes / Dies Irae (1977) and The Hours—A Square Film (1995), made their long overdue North American premiere. A student activist turned political refugee following her organizing in the Athens Polytechnic Uprising, Angelidi made experimental works that interrogate female subjectivity. Her psychogeographical journeys, like the life cycle Topos (1985), oscillate between physicality and intangibility in an effort to capture feminine expansiveness.

Late Italian American intermedia pioneer Aldo Tambellini and projection artist arc had their own overview programs at Prismatic, too. Tambellini’s past mentee, multidisciplinary artist M. Woods, spoke of how the Buffalo soldiers (Black GIs) liberated Tambellini and others in “Mussolini’s Italy” and how “the gross injustices in America” planted a seed of political responsiveness to Tambellini. Tambellini considers Blackness as the centrality of human existence. In his 1967 manifesto “Black is the Awareness of a New Reality,” he writes, “There is ‘Black’ inside the womb before the child is born. ‘Black’ is not the opposite of white; it is a state of being.” Some of his most-known works were “Black” videos, a series of cameraless shorts in which Tambelini paints celluloid frames black and burns or pierces spirals onto them. The sweeping presence of black symbolizes Black power, not only in terms of empowerment for Black people but anarchical power, too, through abstraction. Woods later performed Tambellini’s Black Video 3 (which recently made its world premiere at the 2024 Ann Arbor Film Festival) live with a synthesizer machine that is reminiscent of the metal clanging Tambellini did in his original live performance in 1981. Artistic heritage lives on through interaction, remembrances, and uncompromising objectives.

The artist arc took “expanded cinema” literally as they bookended their block with two projector performances. In the opener, conical signal (2016), a beige circle materializes onto the frame for seven minutes. arc, who also goes by tooth, explains how they maneuver society “through a series of veils,” which reflects their intersecting political and artistic identities and “fucking with projection normativity.” In their final short, infinite column (2023), two 16mm projectors are laid horizontally, and arc places a prism and a glass at a 45-degree angle in front of them. In its twenty minutes, rainbows illuminate not only the screen but also the ceiling, floor, and even spectators’ heads. Cinema is everywhere in this parapsychological repository if you keep looking for it.