The experimental documentaries by Jacquelyn Mills and Alison O’Daniel make their local premieres at the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 14, 15, and 16.
In the history of experimental film, many innovations can feel like extensions of pure theory, actions the filmmaker took just because they could. But form can and should follow function, and it’s always a vital political project to document what hasn’t been documented and to feel what hasn’t been felt.
Two new experimental features at the 2023 Wisconsin Film Festival—Geographies Of Solitude (2022), screening Friday, April 14, at 1:15 p.m. at the Chazen Museum Of Art and Sunday, April 16, at 11:30 a.m. at Hilldale, as well as The Tuba Thieves (2023), screening on Friday, April 14, at 3:45 p.m. and Saturday, April 15, at 4:15 p.m. at Hilldale—have this in mind as they stretch their aesthetics to help us see in new ways.
Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies Of Solitude is a film about an ecosystem and the woman who bears witness to it. Off the coast of Nova Scotia, naturalist Zoe Lucas has lived on the remote Sable Island for 40 years, documenting its wildlife. Horses and seals mainly occupy the land, but Lucas has kept detailed notes on everything on the island, from its flora to the garbage that’s washed up on the island’s shore. Lucas has become her own sort of attraction, with Jacques Cousteau similarly visiting the island in the 1980s to document her work.
Like Cousteau, Mills’ camera again observes the observer, now several decades into her practice where each day of growth and each piece of new trash on the island makes its way into a massive excel spreadsheet. In her film, Mills herself also attempts to document the island, only by way of more challenging structural conceits. Her work has Brakhage-like stretches of film emulsion that’s been copied and processed in horse manure, lilacs, and sand from the island. It’s a novel approach to archival work, catching not just images but physical embodiments of the landscape. She even goes as far as recording the sounds of the island’s bugs, amplifying the near-inaudible sounds of snails and beetles in a manner similar to the “lowercase” music of Steve Roden. It’s a bold strategy of nonfiction filmmaking that gets to the core of the subject, knowing truth cannot be understood by our existing means of perception. The truth usually lies in the contours, in the things that get papered over when we have to make the truth of experience palatable.
Alison O’Daniel knows this well as a d/Deaf filmmaker, and her new film The Tuba Thieves is an even more embellished work. The film is a “nonfiction” one, but one that achieves that through extensive recreation and vignettes that turn it into a sort of essayistic fiction. O’Daniels’ film uses the real-life story of a rash of tuba robberies at California high schools between 2011 and 2013 as a catalyst to craft several vignettes that focus largely on d/Deaf people and artists in the area. O’Daniel similarly uses her subject as a jumping-off point for crucial formal interventions, employing open captions as their own dimension of meaning. They offer the standard clarifications for dialogue and sound, but they’re clearly their own site of artistic experience here.
A performance of John Cage’s 4’33” begins and ends roughly an hour apart in the film’s runtime, seeming to guide the audience in and out of a deeper awareness while inviting them to focus on the incidentals and intentions beyond what we’re looking for. O’Daniel consistently plays with diegetic sound as well. An early shot in the film cuts between studio musicians and producers, who are separated by soundproof glass, while instruments are only audible on separate tracks, one at a time.
Elsewhere in the film, sound is inscrutable but always intentional, with O’Daniel’s three-credited sound artists (including, by coincidence, the previously-mentioned Steve Roden), who split duties to create its sonic world. Even O’Daniel’s dialogue scenes draw the ear in unexpected directions, with the near-silent plosives and brushing sounds of ASL speakers playing like radically paired-down ASMR. The prosody and resonance of language is felt by characters and read by us. This reliance on text prescribes some subjective reactions, like when a saxophone melody is labeled as “vulnerable,” or when decibel levels are outlined to establish the disruptive qualities of a jet engine flying overhead. But it’s a reminder that all sensation is individual, and the symbol of a sensation is the sensation itself.
Where Tuba Thieves applies these concerns to sound and image more broadly, Geographies similarly tries to bridge these chasms of experience for a single place. Mills brings the tactile qualities of nature to the screen itself, substituting intensive seeing and listening for feeling. It’s nothing compared to what Zoe Lucas has invested in this place, but Mills seems to ask viewers to see the island through her eyes, and make a film that’s not just about the land, but of it. It doesn’t matter that the animals of the island don’t seem to care about the presence of Lucas; it’s a thankless job, but a necessary one for the island’s study and preservation nonetheless.
In our film-viewing, it’s important to make this kind of relationship with art. It’s not there to be anything it’s not; a film will not reach back to embrace you. But that doesn’t make films or their subjects any less worthwhile, and it’s an act of deep humanity to change the way we see in service of what demands to be seen. If Roger Ebert was correct in his characterization of films as “empathy-generating machines,” it’s films like Geographies Of Solitude and The Tuba Thieves, which reshape our paths towards empathy, that are most crucial.
