By Michael Sicinski

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”—Yogi Berra

In an ordinary year, the Crossroads Festival, presented by the San Francisco Cinematheque, provides a kind of alternative to other showcases of experimental film and video that, for various historical or institutional reasons, can be less catholic and more risk-averse. But—need it be said yet again?—2020 is no ordinary year, and many of those competing festivals did not or will not occur. With the spotlight just a little brighter on Crossroads in this, its eleventh year of existence, we are given the opportunity to look critically at a number of deserving, significant artists who have been worthy of our attention for quite some time. Artistic director Steve Polta’s diverse, even idiosyncratic programming provides a new urgency, since we find ourselves not just as a “crossroads,” but a clearing, a temporary break in the noise.

I was mentioning to some colleagues recently that Polta may be the programmer right now who is closest to carrying on the spirit of longtime New York Film Festival avant-guru Mark McElhatten. A true curator-as-artist in the Langlois tradition, McElhatten was meticulous about tone and rhythm, how one film played against another in a program. But more significantly, he was dedicated to nurturing artists, identifying roiling, inchoate ideas and encouraging potential. Mark would sometimes screen films that many of us thought weren’t all that good, but they made sense to him in terms of an artist’s overall trajectory or process. He appreciated interesting failures and promising mistakes.

Polta seems to share this attitude: he understands the value in imperfection, as well as the need to exhibit a wide swath of avant-garde productivity. For example, another festival might not find a place for a film of such great sensitivity and scope as To Forget (2019) by Austria’s Lydia Nsiah, a 17-minute work that incorporates cityscapes, ocean imagery, skies, and hillsides with materialist abstraction. In a way, Nsiah seems to be offering a veritable encyclopedia of ways that a camera can engage with the outside world. It’s not entirely successful, in part because its procedures imply an epic approach that its running time cannot fully contain; in other words, Nsiah needed to make a longer film. Still, To Forget announces the arrival of a significant new filmmaker.

One could make similar observations about British filmmaker Kamila Kuc’s noonwraith blues. A film that could maybe be considered experimental horror (it would play beautifully in front of Midsommar [2019]), noonwraith combines cut-up animations from Albrecht Dürer and a series of live-action performance passages involving a young woman on a farm, either experiencing isolation and madness or feeling the pull of vengeful witchcraft welling up inside her. Kuc’s interplay of the banal and the uncanny is highly suggestive, although, again, the film might have generated more power at a longer running time. Nevertheless, this is the sort of imperfect but evocative film one sees only at Crossroads.

Polta’s programming also exposes us to new artists who have not gained widespread exposure, and by showing multiple works by these lesser-known individuals we’re able to play catch-up with folks we probably should have been paying attention to all along. For instance, this year Crossroads showed two films by Finnish filmmaker Eeva Siivonen, who uses a combination of poetic nature study and wry essay form to interrogate the gender politics of experimental film and the world in general; her Demoiselle (2017) is a particularly clever consideration of women’s position relative to the Western canon, as a group of men demand that a camerawoman provide her credentials. The line-up this year also featured multiple films by Britain’s Onyeka Igwe, whose No Archive Can Restore You is a standout of lyrical documentary, a film that boldly argues for letting colonial history rot in the can. And after seeing three films by Canada’s Charlotte Clermont, I can attest that she has a highly unique style and is certainly an artist to watch: her films’ overworked black-and-white surfaces imply excavation from another time, like an irony-free Guy Maddin telling her own story in the past tense. But some of the work can lapse into preciousness, particularly in her would-be elliptical use of language. Her latest film, dream less, is by far her strongest.

A number of this year’s most compelling works happened to engage with landscape, which naturally strikes the viewer in a different way in 2020, as we watch the films at home. But this can be a reductive response to a wide array of artworks with varying aesthetic agendas. Most of the work included in this year’s festival dates from between 2017 and 2020 (not counting repertory series such as the Bruce Baillie and Luther Price programs), which means that some works were made before COVID-19, some after (and directly in response to), and that it’s possible to read all of them in relation to the outbreak. This strikes me as its own deal with the devil, and not a particularly profitable one. I mean, the peerless films of Baillie, renowned for their poetic delicacy and specific California light, are indeed piercingly beautiful to see now, when simply being outdoors is a rare privilege. Works inevitably change with time, but this is hardly determinative. Still, being under quarantine necessarily alters one’s perception of the outdoors, perhaps redoubling the diminution that already exists by looking through a camera in the first place.

A film about the hypothetical freedom promised by landscape (and Western landscape painting and photography) that is inevitably denied, Olivia Ciummo’s We Carry With Us Our Mother begins with a slow zoom into a red image of trees; eventually, Ciummo reframes and crops various landscape images at angles to the frame, turning potentially expansive views into “pictures” that are geometrically interrupted. In a similar vein is the new film by Jeremy Moss, Camera Sick (2019). Moss is an interesting filmmaker worthy of more attention, and this may be his best film yet: a kind of meta-study of landscape transcription, split between grainy 16mm and slick digital video. He whirls the camera, Snow-style, with the first, and then documents himself producing camera set-ups in the landscape with the second. The editing toggles between these motifs, rendering “experimental film” as a set of gestures that can be performed or approximated, with the desert itself a kind of secondary tool in the process.

This leads to another difficult issue that should be addressed—one that was prevalent at Crossroads, but is an even more widespread problem. Certainly some films are made to be silent, but many more are comprised of a technical juncture of image and sound. 1929 was a long time ago, and even back then, Vertov and Eisenstein (and later Peter Kubelka) suggested that sound should be contrapuntal rather than merely synchronous. But a disappointing preponderance of films today evince no serious thought about the use of sound. The most popular “solution” to this issue is a low-grade EDM drone, something meant to occupy the ear but not challenge it. At worst, this kind of aural homogeny can actually serve to ground the images, falsely unifying a film that, on its own compositional merits, would fall apart. Why is this happening? What are people learning in film schools? Every moment of sound and image is a decision point.