Wavelengths 2: Ride the Wave
(Italy, Cambodia, China, Canada, Brazil, United States, Australia, 73 min.)
Dir. Beatrice Gibson, Nick Gordon, Daphne Xu, Leonardo Pirondi, Chris Kennedy, Tiffany Sia
Programme: Wavelengths
An instruction, or a gentle command, “Ride the Wave” urges surrender to being carried by a momentous force. It asks for trust that the successive movements will lead to a meaningful destination, landing in a place where the adventurous traveler might be rewarded. Wave, too, suggests motion, repetition, a method of passage from one threshold to another. This turn of phrase, brief and pithy, evokes imagery of kinesis that unites the films in the Wavelengths 2 program, a gathering of ideas concerning identity, belonging, nation, and geography.
To begin the ride, so to speak, Beatrice Gibson and Nick Gordon’s Someplace in Your Mouth opens a portal to a subculture of rowdy motor enthusiasts in Palermo. A commission for Sicilia Queer Filmfest, the film depicts young men and their prized vehicles on the edge of town, observing neon-drenched surfaces and encounters that recall the sensuality of Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos. Here, though, attention is paid to the communal dynamics, offering a compelling survey of the characters who frequent the scene that at once invites and withholds. There are no conclusions drawn with the filmmakers instead preferring to gesture towards the shape of something ephemeral through fleeting snapshots and poetic narration.
From Italy, we’re transported to the streets of Cambodia, where an unnamed protagonist searches for a friend in Daphne Xu’s Notes of a Crocodile, sharing a title with Qiu Miaojin’s lesbian novel. To the strangers of Phnom Penh, she asks, perhaps as a concealed way of finding romance, “Do you know about the Chinese woman? Do you know about the crocodiles?” Surrounded by builders and edifices under construction, she seems to be held in a state of liminality, stuck in a place of longing despite the constant travel on foot, by rickshaw, in cars. Though not a strict adaptation of Qiu’s writing, Xu brilliantly repurposes the author’s fondness for non-narrative structures and fragmentation for her own moments of queer desire, dislocation, and alienation.
A project that explicitly makes use of source material, Adrift Potentials derives its images from the 16mm footage of a Brazilian artist who was living in exile in California during the military dictatorship in the 1970s. Filmmaker Leonardo Pirondi skillfully assembles the found material, constructing an unsettling vision that evokes a historical past—seemingly untouched, fertile, abundant with natural resources and beauty, ripe for the taking—while reverberating into the present. The use of disembodied sounds, voices, and recordings produces a persistent feeling of anxiety, juxtaposed against natural landscapes that gradually reveal sinister manmade interventions.
In Australia, Canadian filmmaker Chris Kennedy’s Go Between provides welcome playfulness with its buoyant, zippy sequences. Shot from a hotel window, Kennedy observes cars and trucks crossing the William Jolly Bridge as boats pass below on the Brisbane River. With masking and superimpositions structured by vertical curtain blinds, there’s a clarifying arrangement of geometric forms: the curve of a bridge arch, dignified columns supporting infrastructure, horizontal lines demarcating building floors. A black-and-white moving collage of land, water, and sky, the film serves as an exceptional study of movement in a city of millions.
Our journey culminates with The Sojourn by Tiffany Sia, who builds on many of the themes introduced in the preceding works. Comprising nearly half of the program’s runtime, the film considers the landscape over the course of a gentle road trip in the mountains of Taiwan. How are nation and identity constructed in landscapes depicted by cinema, paintings, and photographs? What types of imaginaries are displayed, and what is implied? Sia, our guide who is herself led by actor Shih Chun, visits locations from the films of wuxia legend King Hu in an attempt to respond. From a moving car, we see thick mist, staggering mountains, dense clusters of trees, a stark contrast to the views embraced by Western traditions: if Americans are horizon-gazers, looking toward vastness as potential for innovation and growth, what statement can be made about the East? As we witness more of these scenes, the landscape as a politicized image becomes difficult to ignore, and we are called to confront the narratives that have been carried through time.
Shifting between motion and stasis, registers of fast and slow, the showcase thoughtfully contemplates movement as it relates to boundaries and belonging. To travel is to risk uncertainty, expose yourself to possible failure, but also to find opportunities for thrilling, new openings and formations of the self, the collective.
