Last night, Vidiots at Eagle Rock saw the start of the only weekend of the year where being an indie filmmaker in LA feels like it truly matters as much as it should. As the second edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies kicked off, current microbudget stalwart actor Colin Burgess remarked it “probably has one of the best festival names out there right now, because most festivals are doing ‘film festival’ with the abbreviated FF and not FM, of movies.” Of course, he loves the FM and how it reminds him of that other festival about books. Opening the festival was Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm, an incredibly of-the-moment satire about a group of clueless Vice-style American journalists led by Chloe Sevigny, who mistakenly enter an Argentinian town in the hopes of finding a local musician, only to stumble through increasingly absurd scenarios of fabricated cultural phenomenon and a brewing health crisis they remain ignorant of, all done using a mixed media visual style that can sometimes be described as “Instagram Reels Realism.” After the screening, I bumped into Jake Thiessen, who produces social media video content for a shoe company and for whom the film’s depiction of the exploitation of the attention economy resonated deeply. Regarding the editing of said shoe commercials, “You gotta get their attention for 2 to 3 seconds and build sentences together to get to the point of what people are saying,” says Thiessen, which wasn’t far off from what happened in the film.
Luckily, I got Amalia Ulman’s attention for more than 2 to 3 seconds and briefly chatted about the formal quirks of her filmmaking practice. Coming from a fine arts background, Ulman spoke about how she approaches cinema with a higher degree of freedom regarding working without certain expectations of decorum. Her film deploys a whole host of 360 cameras and GoPros, weaving in digital textures that we typically associate with online content. Ulman’s approach to shooting was so unorthodox that she specifically hired someone to strap cameras onto dogs; footage she remarks she “had to shoot during lunch time, moments that were not officially part of the schedule, even though, in my mind, it was a very important part of the film.” To Ulman, these different cameras are not quite deployed to impede on what we typically consider cinematic but open up a whole host of visual possibilities that emerge when using them as part of your palette. As she remarked, “There are so many wonderful things that you see online, so dynamic. And then you go watch most indie films at Sundance, and they’re all, like, boring.” In Ulman’s embrace of new technology, which captures images without the sheen of perfection, I was reminded of the rough expressionism of post-millennium Japanese cinema, of films like Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop (1998) and Katsuhito Ishii’s The Taste of Tea (2004) both of which were shot on early DV. It was the mention of Ishii’s film—which, because of its offbeat rhythm and similar weaving of a large ensemble, I stated was the only other film that reminded me of Magic Farm—that made Ulman light up. As someone who grew up at the turn of the millennium, Ulman reflected on the formal experimentation latent to the films she viewed in her youth: Heisei-era Japanese films and Dogme 95—periods of unrestricted discovery and expression that we now take for granted in an indie landscape consumed by a desire for polish, production value, and respectability.
When posed with the question of whether the effort to make a film feel modern by borrowing from the aesthetics of the internet would always make cinema feel second fiddle to content experienced online, Ulman traced her influences further back to the dawn of cinema. “I think that is not just about the quality of the image. But trying to make something beautiful out of it instead of just trying to be trendy,” Ulman said. “Instead of being hyper-modern, I also pay a lot of attention to really, really, really old films. Like for El Planeta, a lot of the weird close-ups and all that stuff. That’s taken from Silent films, right? But because it’s taken out of context, it feels like something new. And I love doing things like that.”
It appeared that pockets of cinematic innovation, whether in the 20s or the early 2000s, swirl around Ulman’s mind and in Magic Farm. In the movie, there’s a wonderful moment where you see each actor’s head superimposed over a field, captured in an iris with soft edges. I thought of all the young Asian women with permed hair and winning smiles adrift within Korean karaoke videos, but Ulman’s inspiration, Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), was far more profound. It was a formal choice that speaks to how refreshing it is to view a contemporary film whose visual textures confoundingly alternate between highbrow signifiers and purportedly lowbrow digital “brain rot.” Though perhaps it was Ulman’s unique relationship with her edgy Gen X parents, a generation the film playfully skewers through Sevigny and Simon Rex’s characters, that accounts for her outré modern yet playfully anachronistic sensibility. “I rebelled against skaters,” she said in closing.
