By Max Goldberg One of several triptychs showing in this year’s Wavelengths program, Peter Hutton’s Three Landscapes zeroes in on the industrial terrain ringing Detroit (where he grew up), the bucolic pastures of the Hudson River Valley (where he now lives), and Ethiopian salt flats (where he travelled under Robert Gardner’s sponsorship). The most obvious link between…

By Max Goldberg Much like the bastions of freedom and vernacular art he so lovingly recorded, Les Blank’s films seem a kind of arcadia on the horizon of documentary film. Blank died earlier this month at the age of 77, leaving behind a singularly festive body of work. Especially in the many small masterpieces shot…

By Max Goldberg In founding the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 1955, Frances Flaherty paid tribute to her husband’s memory with an informal colloquium that would extend their guiding principles of immersion and “non-preconception” to the viewing of films. The week-long seminar has long since outgrown the Flaherty farm (the last several have taken place…

By Max Goldberg Ben Russell’s field studies of transfiguration invoke the magic of cinema with fearsome lucidity. Hollis Frampton might well have been describing Russell’s work when he defined invention as “the vivid primary instantiation of a compositional strategy deriving from a direct insight into the creative process itself.” Structuralist in their conceptual clarity and…

By Max Goldberg Azazel Jacobs’s fourth and most polished feature to date grants its eponymous hero (Jacob Wysocki) a surprising foundation of confidence—surprising because he’s a husky adolescent boy who wears pajamas to school. His equanimity is clear from the moment we see him cutting through a dry creek bed with the stride of a…