The Brooklyn Rail

Hands touch the carved stone feet of saints in the Vatican, feet stamp upon the footprint of the devil in Munich. These monoliths become a historical witness to people’s desires, hopes, fanaticism, fears, and superstitions, accumulating stratas of their touch. In Harun Farocki’s 2007 film Transmission, he weaves together a close-up montage of different people touching walls, statues, and rock faces in, for the most part, memorial and religious sites. Documenting this ritualised hand movement, Farocki juxtaposes the temporal distance between an evanescent gesture and the enduring immortality of the chiselled objects. The first recorded “image” made by prehistoric man was his handprint, dusted in ochre, imprinted on a rock wall as a “negative” handprint. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Painting in the Grotto” (1994), he interrogates how this imprint is predicated on a paradox: only by “letting go” do we see its print. The traced outline becomes a remnant of an ephemeral history. He writes, “From the painter to the wall, the hand opens a distance that suspends the continuity and the cohesion of the universe, in order to open up a world,” where the rock acts as this enabler of “suspension.”

This gesture—as a political and aesthetic refrain—emerges again in Japanese experimental filmmaker Kaori Oda’s most recent feature Underground (2024), the concluding work in her “cave” trilogy, which includes Aragane (2015) and Cenote (2019). In Underground, Oda approaches historical memory through a speculative, sensorial lens, structuring the film around two characters. Mitsuo Matsunaga, an Okinawan cave guide, delivers a precise, almost incantatory monologue recounting the stories of survivors who hid in gamas (caves) during the Battle of Okinawa following the arrival of American forces in 1945. Nao Yoshigai, a young female dancer, acts as Matsunaga’s silent shadowy counterpart, guiding the viewers through Okinawa’s forests, beaches, and the expanses of caves with her bodily movements. While Matsunaga presents a memorised, official history, Yoshigai engages with the aethers of what cannot be articulated. In a repeated refrain, Oda films the shadow of Yoshigai’s outstretched hand, which reaches across the knobbles and crags of these subterranean surfaces until she finally lays her palms flat against the rock’s surface.

By reaching out, Yoshigai seeks contact with the past—both the non-human shaped over millions of years by geological processes and the irreconcilable ghosts of human barbarism. Oda’s tactile cinema adds permanence to Yoshigai’s gesture by capturing it on 16 mm, much like that first handprint preserved in stone. Celluloid itself is, of course, a geological medium—its interaction with light and developer creating a crystalline residue that preserves the image of the past. In various sequences of Underground, film footage is then projected onto cave walls in a reversal that accentuates this very material process. There is something almost anti-archeological about Oda’s approach. Rather than digging into the terra incognita of political history to uncover its secrets, she instead accentuates the potentials of tracing the surface—the cave wall becomes a site of speculation, a plane that gestures to a past which cannot be fully uncovered or articulated. Even during Matsunaga’s testimony, he intermittently extinguishes his torch—the cave’s sole light source—plunging us into darkness and leaving only the afterimage imprinted on the empty screen, a gesture that unsettles the very idea that visibility equals understanding.

Oda juxtaposes subterranean and surface worlds in order to challenge the vertical visual regime of surveillance which looks at landscape as a legible site of control, often through aerial drones or satellite imagery, technology that has become ubiquitous in every arena of urban life. The underground then functions as a limit to such infrastructure. Oda’s subterranean orientation not only films a space that traditionally resists capture but also abandons the detective-like propulsion for clarity expected in the documentary form.

Underground, Yoshigai sifts through sand to discover the remnants of human bones; above ground, at the beach, she toys with coral fossils which uncannily resemble those very remains. Then, the deafening roar of an airplane invades her sonic field—a reminder of the ongoing neocolonial presence of US military forces on the island. Consistently throughout Underground, the limits of the image are immediately apparent and troubled at the level of the sound. In the gamas, various sonic layers coalesce in a mode that is often at odds with the film’s images: a woman’s song, the sound of a passing train, cracking twigs, a rumble. These sounds evade a clear source, refuting the idea of a singular traceable origin. Instead, the layers of sound gesture toward the underground as a space composed of various palimpsestic temporalities.

As we’ve become more attuned to surveillance and other coercive tools of visibility, experimental filmmakers, like Oda, attempt to speculate and explore the potential of a haptic, shadowy cinema as an alternative to forms of topographical, militarised control. Rejecting an anthropocentric point of view, experimental cinema has responded by moving beyond light and visuality as the privileged form of representation. By doing so, these filmmakers question the Cartesian logic in which sight is cast as the most rational sensorial regime.

In And still, it remains (2023), London-based director duo Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah probe the question of what can be seen in the aftermaths of colonial violence. The film’s opening presents wide, stationary landscape shots of the Hoggar Mountains in Algeria—a terrain seemingly denuded of life. But, as the camera tilts and shifts, the desert is reframed through close-ups of prehistoric rock art, clotheslines, and vegetation—visual traces of both ancient and contemporary life. Where the desert is often constructed as a site of non-life or posthuman abjection in contemporary popular cinema like Dune or Mad Max, Aburawa and Shah resist these colonial, extractive optics by gesturing toward the desert as a site of cultural and historical sedimentation, marked by the persistence of Berber communities and the interwoven legacies of pre-Islamic and Islamic traditions.

The image is disrupted by voiceover testimonies from local residents who recount their memories of French nuclear detonations in the Sahara during the 1960s. These events exposed nearby communities to radiation that has affected generations of inhabitants. In 2021, scientists confirmed that radioactive particles from these tests were detected in modern-day French snow, carried over by Saharan winds—a haunting meteorological return of colonial history.

How can we photograph radiation? Structuralist filmmakers, like Ernie Gehr and Stan Brakhage, have long examined the material composition of analog film and its potential for producing images through its own geological processes. To make sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014), Japanese-American filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa buried a hundred-foot-long 35 mm negative under the soil and fallen leaves near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power station, from sunset to sunrise. The result was a two-minute long film composed of a deep blue image, flickering with specks of bright lines and staccato scratches. Radiation and time coalesce within the frame to sculpt the photosensitive emulsion, exposing the vestige of toxicity, in which landscape has inscribed itself onto celluloid through a moment of direct contact.

Victor Kossakovsky’s Architecton (2024) is less successful in imagining a cosmos ungoverned by concepts of linear human “progress.” Kossakovsky frequently employs an ascending drone shot to pan across mountains, ruins of ancient Greece, and the bombed-out residential blocks in Ukraine. His technique leads to a fetishistic sense of catastrophe. Kossakovsky’s editing logic is suspect in itself, juxtaposing the rubble of wartorn Ukraine and Turkey’s housing projects flattened by earthquakes to the stone pillars in ancient Greece. This approach creates a flattened binary division between the ancient—which ranges puzzlingly from natural bouldered terrains to early modern civilization in ancient Greece—and the modern, embodied by the concrete inventions of twenty-first-century engineering, which he suggests are more fallible, without gesturing sensitively to the often unnatural ways in which they collapsed. The grandiose, itinerant wide shots often replicate the logic of military surveillance imagery. These shots portray the landscapes as vertical zones, but they miss the opportunity to probe the tension embedded within such modes of visibility.

Exploring a geological perspective beyond a humanist conception of the universe through the limited duration of cinema is a challenging exercise of the imagination. Antithetical to the idea of the indexical image, geological cinema is composed of the unseeable, the unhearable, pushing our sensorial organs to imagine timelines and scales that span the microscopic to the astronomical. Recent films centering a non-humanist worldview do not attempt to create simple modes of cinematic identification—after all, how does one identify with a rock and the incomprehensible scale of deep time?

Chilean filmmaker Malena Szlam’s Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya (2024) is shaped by a geological logic rather than a topographical one. Szlam uses Earth’s tectonic plates as a map to choreograph a journey across Australia’s Gondwana Rainforest, the continent’s central eastern mountain ranges, and the afterglow of the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption in the South Pacific. The structuralist work is kinetically edited in-camera with superimpositions in which volcanoes often appear like projection screens for more landscape imagery.

Szlam’s accretion of various visual layers lead to a multivalent temporality without attempting to present an indexical reality of time. Oftentimes, the close-up of the glistening minerals in rock surfaces collide with a wide landscape-shot. These juxtapositions evoke a contingent deep time that is at once static and sudden, such as the creeping motions of continental drift to the brilliant instance of a volcanic eruption.

Szlam’s film is a work in approximation, acknowledging the limited potentials of human perception, especially in a cinematic register. For the sound in Archipelago, Lawrence English used recordings often outside our hearing range, including the sounds of bats and insects, the ionosphere, and geophonic recordings. These aural captures are then translated into an audible sound frequency, which often build into a roar and a rumble.

In an interview with filmmaker Deborah Stratman, she says, “For a while I was thinking about stones as verbs that are disguised as nouns. They are inherently a kind of writing.” Rocks are doing things in her feature Last Things (2023), which takes on the perspective of its lithic protagonists that hold the mysteries of the planet’s memory as literal sediments in their very composition.

Formally, the film is built like a stalagmite—composed of enmeshed rock interstices, jagged, and glittering as Stratman moves from sci-fi literature to scientific research, from the interscalar to the microscopic, all within a single turn of a sentence. Stratman includes multiple sources like Clarice Lispector’s novel The Hour of the Star (1977), J.-H. Rosny aîné books, and geoscientist Marcia Bjornerud’s work. She places these references at odds with images produced by various technologies from microscopes, anaglyphs, NASA probes, painting, and celluloid. By doing so, she examines all the manmade tools that can facilitate cosmic, animistic, and scientific worldviews. When humans emerge, they appear almost alien-like, particularly in Stratman’s ritualistic staging of various performers who hold on to mirrored tetrahedrons that reflect the sun like an embodied star.

In the epilogue, human hands again touch the earth in the epilogue: break-dancers in Brazil do handstands and jumps, their hands feeling the hum of the earth and all its flattened layers. Stratman ends uncannily with an image similar to Farocki’s—one that gestures not toward permanence but, rather, toward the fragile transmission between man and stone. While we are bound to die out, they are destined to evolve in astonishing ways, and maybe we will exist as the ghost strata of their universe.