Reel Hub Review: Robert Fenz and Leo Smith at HFA

Nothing helps avant garde art go down like a good gimmick, and filmmaker Robert Fenz had a great one. Fenz screened two films Monday at the Harvard Film Archive, each accompanied by live improvisation from the renowned jazz trumpeter Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith.

Fenz is a young filmmaker who shoots in black and white 16mm. His work consists largely of urban landscapes rendered in richly composed shots. Unlike structuralist filmmakers, however, Fenz's films also have a documentary component.

Smith has worked with Fenz before. The trumpeter provided the soundtrack for Vertical Air (2000), Fenz's best-known film. The two met when Smith, who helms the CalArts program in African American Improvisational Music, taught the filmmaker, and Smith's music -- which comes from the same 60s free jazz incubator that produced Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp -- informs Fenz's work.

Their aim Monday night was to create a seamless artwork, "with neither sound nor image subjugated." It's a difficult task, considering that Fenz made his films years before and Smith was composing his work on the spot. But, by a certain measure, the performance was a success.

Fenz's exceptionally violent film Crossings (2006) began the evening. The film cuts quickly between shots of different highway intersections, establishing a constant pulse of light, devoid of context. (The screening notes explain that the film depicts the US-Mexico border.) Ghostly children, cats, and bottles haunt the landscape. The result is nearly immediate sensory overload, in which images duel with their inversions to form an epileptic forcefield around the screen.

Crossings screened once unaccompanied and a second time with Smith playing trumpet. Primed by the first screening, the audience knew what to expect from the film, and Smith's trumpet provided a befuddling comfort. His improvisation was at first tentative but eventually coalesced in a muted drone that broke into a coherent and recognizable melodic passage just as the film itself became most legible, during a segment where two walls with different numbers alternate with one another.

For all his skill at depicting landscapes and the surfaces of cities, Fenz's camera often risks transforming people into props or window dressing. His films work best when they demonstrate a human connection, when his subjects are doing more than mugging for -- or strenuously ignoring -- Fenz's camera.

Meditations on Revolution, Part IV: Greenville, MS (2001) is a case in point. Confined to the space of a boxing gym, the film possesses a clarity of focus that the others in the series do not. The audience sees the boxer's routine: jumping rope, punching the speed and body bags, riding the stationary bike. Fenz cuts long shots with close-ups, and the grainy stock of his reversal film evokes the grueling experience of martial repetition. The film left Bostonist with a workout fatigue even though we hadn't lifted a finger all day.

The collaboration with Smith worked best during this segment. As the boxer went through his routine with a speed that recalled something mechanical, Smith used long melodic phrases, pauses, and stabs of sound to stretch time, establishing an almost contrary rhythm that remained nonetheless illusory. The two artists were presenting what amounted to contradictory temporal experiences, yet they established a consonance that was ineffable and undeniable. You could expect less from experimental art.

Still from Meditations on Revolution, Part IV: Greenville, MS from HFA.