Alex Herboche’s And Their Phantoms is the most inspiring
independent film I have seen all year. Shot on Super 16mm, it dispenses with
formalities such as plot, character, and even dialogue. What’s left is silence
(often the true emptiness of audio drops, like gaps in our consciousness),
landscape, people, and the film (embodied by the ever-present film crew).
The film’s premise is general – three people (we never learn
their relationship to each other) go on a trip together with the ashes of a
loved one. We never see them beginning their journey (because there is no
beginning); we don’t even learn if they eventually get to their destination.
The film, like its elliptical title, doesn’t end or begin so as much as it
abruptly springs to life and runs out of life. It is a film of the Warholian
order – automatic in the sense that it begins with the push of a button, and
ends because the film eventually runs out.
And Their Phantoms is especially exceptional with its use of
space. Throughout, the people are constantly dwarfed by the imposing landscape.
Harsh mountains bear down and gaseous springs bubble up to consume the people
in their wanderings. After all, the only appropriate response to overwhelming
nature is mute, dumb fear. There is an inability for this landscape to even coalesce
into affection (as a character himself wonders in an unfocused, grainy
close-up) – we wonder if it is because we are not perceiving it in the right
way at all.
The enormity of it all – of death and grief – reels the film
into shock. Sound goes absent, the image goes blind (with violent losses of
focus), and sound/image become unhinged. At every cut, the machinery of the
film dies, only to be reborn. Every cut produces its shadow (what could be,
what could have been, what will never be) and the film crew’s presence only
reinforces that. After all, what a film crew chooses to shoot or record is
almost entirely up to the whims of nature – which direction the wind blows that
day, how many crickets are singing at that moment. The record is unreliable –
it could have been so many other things, and yet it is often taken as truth.
Herboche’s rumination on cinema is bracing and utterly innovative.
