Wrote about this and another 3D Jacobs feature for Not Reconciled.

I understand the temptation to dismiss this as a glorified music visualizer, especially since the blurb basically encourages that reading, but I think that’s wrong.

In the first place, the structuring foundation is an hour long field recording, which is interesting in and of itself. Through sound we get a wideranging snapshot of human activity, from technologies of transportation to music to conversation. All of this is a lot…

I wrote about this film and others by Ouayda for Ultra Dogme. You can watch this one now through 2/21 if you subscribe.

Here’s an excerpt:

The fictional strategy is fully embraced in The Secret Garden (2023), Ouayda’s latest work and her first shot on 16mm. As with her first film, it had its origin in a compulsion to film an aspect of the urban environment, in this case plants, that the artist had begun to obsessively notice, which she…

Ironically, the worst thing about this film—which celebrates how music symbolically transcends the violent racial and economic contradictions which society and history have never solved—is its music design. (Individual performers innocent, Ludwig Göransson not.) 

The best thing is how the inconsistencies of its narrative and myth and metaphor are employed to say multiple correct and virtuous things about culture and colonialism and the impossibility of Black/small business capitalism, and not to save America from its own critique. Sex and music…