NYFF 2023 Dispatch One: Allensworth, Kevin Jerome Everson x2 And Last Things

It’s that time of year again.

With the fall film season now in full swing, the season’s most anticipated festival has returned, as the 61st annual New York Film Festival has gotten underway. With a myriad of the latest and greatest in modern cinema from around the world, paired opposite global classics who have had new life given to them thanks to gorgeous new restorations making their debut here, the 2023 edition of NYFF has the makings of yet another collection of must-see pictures. However, where does one begin with such a diverse collection of features, shorts and classics at their disposal?

That’s where we come in. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting a few of the films that we’ve seen from this year’s lineup, starting this very weekend with our first dive into the Currents selection.

Starting off this preview is actually going to be the primary focus of this piece, which is arguably the highlight of this year’s Currents slate. Debuting on Sunday, October 8 (with a second screening the following afternoon), James Benning returns to the festival with his latest film, Allensworth. Maybe the master of structuralist landscape cinema, Benning points his camera this time at the town of Allensworth, California, and its rarely-discussed history. Founded in 1908 by African Americans, Allensworth would burst into a thriving community around the turn of the century, even becoming the state’s first Black school district.

As with many towns of its vintage, however, time wouldn’t be too kind, ultimately finding the town to be relatively abandoned due to a mix of environmental and economic factors. This is where Benning picks up. Over the span of his 12, roughly five minute long vignettes, Benning tells the story of year in the life of this former boom town, as it tries to restore itself to its former glory. His camera, as static as ever, gives viewers the chance to both get lost in his wonderful use of sound and the rural setting in equal measure, with the setting proving to be more than viable as a source of intrigue for this type of picture. Architecture sings here, with Benning’s painterly, still life compositions glancing more towards a museum-style viewing experience than something purely cinematic. That said, when he does break from this, as with the use of songs like Nina Simone’s Blackbird or the recounting of poetry penned by Lucille Clifton, the juxtaposition turns Allensworth into something almost defiantly cinematic. Truly one of the year’s most engrossing pictures.

I say that this film will be the main focus here, because preceding this feature are two of the highlights from the Currents shorts lineup. Premiering before Allensworth are two new shorts from beloved documentarian Kevin Jerome Everson. First is Air Force Two, a mix of Hollywood bombastic and political protest as only he could craft. Pairing handheld footage shot in the Ohio State Reformatory and a voice over ripped from the script for Air Force One, Everson crafts a film that feels startlingly satirical. The handheld footage is raw and captivating, and pairing it opposite something as absurd as Andrew Marlowe’s Air Force One script makes for a thrilling and one of a kind five minute short. Finally Everson bows Boyd v. Denton, a three minute short that draws its name from a US Federal Court decision that closed the same Ohio State Reformatory that the first short takes place in. Feeling very much like a sort of modernist ghost story, Everson’s direction here is surprisingly angular and abstract, pairing perfectly opposite the more absurdist Air Force Two. Taking all three pictures into account, few viewing experiences come more highly recommended.

Rounding out this preview is a film we loved all the way back at Sundance, and the latest from one of modern art cinema’s great filmmakers. From legendary avant-garde filmmaker Deborah Stratman comes Last Things, a 50-minute dive into the history of, well, more or less everything, as told through rocks. Sort of. Last Things uses everything from literature (opening with a reading of the introduction from Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star) to vintage science models to create a meditation on time and space through the lens of rocks.

Sounding dryer than actually licking one of those very rocks, the film in actuality is a gorgeous, almost dystopian exploration of history as a geological survey. Stratman’s direction is almost cosmic, turning every nook and cranny of a rock into a new cave to explore and be placed in awe of through the use of microscopic photography. Pairing this opposite sci-fi texts and scientific discourse, Stratman’s film becomes something brazenly cinematic. In just 50 minutes, the film turns into something near poetic, a document seemingly lost in time and space.