2016 Directed by Sky Hopinka
Texts and performances by the late Indigenous poet Diane Burns bind Sky Hopinka’s dazzling and mysterious blend of original and found sources, which continues the filmmaker’s exploration of language, storytelling, and transcendent ways of seeing.
Touching tribute to Diane Burns. I've had the fortune of reading her since high school. Hopinka plays with some arresting effects, not altogether flush in execution, perhaps as intended, but the passion's felt all the way.
Layers of abstraction resulting in a message that is felt more than understood. Or I’m missing something. Probably.
were all just lights passing in front of the lens
beautiful somewhat disjointed song but i have a soft spot for poetic cinema odes
[5]
My capsule review from my TIFF Wavelengths coverage for MUBI:
Hopinka’s follow-up to his highly acclaimed film Jáaji Approx. is a tad more difficult to hold onto, although that by no means makes it any less lovely to behold. Beginning with footage of First People dancing in formation, Hopinka manipulates the images—video processing is the likely mode here, although at times the work resembles hand tinting. The dancers are abstracted into shafts of brightly colored light. This scene, as well as the ending during which the figures have been even more effaced, vaguely recall the video installations of the late Jeremy Blake.
In between, Hopinka incorporates the poetry of Diane Burns, sometimes as documentation of a reading, but more…
One of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. It weighs being above all else, singing, "I feel therefore I am." Feeling anything is enough, you exist. As much as this can be written off as an aesthetic exercise, it isn't--the being shown through those lights we see life and community and dancing, feeling exercised. I've struggled a lot lately with seeing terrible futures all around us and the purpose film has in relation to it. The idea of invoking feeling above all else feels in a way resistant to the popular trends, where stale and derivative techniques popularized by corporate ad companies in the mainstream and Quentin Tarantino's postmodernist approach in the indie world. Repackaging the past has given the appearance of formalism/auteurship when it is nihilism viewed with an ironic distance. Something like this lives in opposition to that--it depicts life, projected and reflected. Just the now of its time. Its title says that itself.
"When you reach the work in the galleries, one of Hopinka’s silkscreened calligrams greets you on the wall. The work reformats a poem into the figuration of a bird, breaking words into limbs of letters. Burns spoke in interviews about looking up to see eagles drawn in by the music of powwows, circling high above because somewhere in their bones they could remember these songs that had echoed in the skies from gatherings of generations past. Hopinka’s work uses cinema to explore how time embeds in sound and images, how sound embeds in landscapes, and how landscape can embed in sound."
Max Levin for Screen Slate. Features from 1/18/23 through 1/31/23 at the Museum of Modern Art.
Holy ghosts dancing in triumphant color beckon more lonesome modernity, coalescing in a cycle of patterns and poetry containing both.
