Fern Silva’s films cannot be described as ethnography, personal/mythopoeic film, or essay filmmaking, although they often partake of all of those modes. Though his films are rooted in particular places and cultural spheres, they assiduously avoid the rhetorical or declarative traps of typical nonfiction filmmaking. Instead, they envelop the viewer in a diffuse but concrete ambiance, conveying the palpability of land and water, the weight of the air surrounding hills and trees. They represent a doubled physicality—the world as unavoidably there, inseparable from the cinematic substrate of 16mm filmmaking itself—and the result is a hybridized form of documentary “fiction,” in the classical Latin sense. Silva’s films are made, formed in the interface between reality and those human and mechanical processes that bring it into being.

By Aliza Ma Pacific Sun (Thomas Demand, USA) 21 Chitrakoot (Shambhavi Kaul, USA/India) Many a Swan (Blake Williams, Canada) Concrete Parlay (Fern Silva, USA) Departure (Ernie Gehr, USA) Auto-Collider XV (Ernie Gehr, USA) Filing into the familiar (and familial) cinema space of Jackman Hall for the inaugural installment of Wavelengths 2012, devout patrons of the…