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Inner Visions

Vermont-based avant-garde filmmaker Ted Lyman will present five of his short films at Hallwalls on Thursday, November 1, at 8pm.

One of the many stereotypes about avant-garde cinema is that it is inaccessible and difficult, that it makes viewers work hard for their pleasures. The films of Ted Lyman provide a perfect foil to this stereotype. Without sacrificing any of their serious experimental and non-narrative spirit, his films are sensuous, riveting and, best of all, immediately pleasurable.

What makes these films instantly engaging even though they are light-years away from conventional storytelling? One key reason is Lyman’s assured, heterogeneous style. Even within the same film, he will often use an array of striking stylistic effects. Testament of the Rabbit (1989) employs animation, live action, subtitles and manipulated imagery, all in the course of a half-hour.

The film is set on a train speeding through the picturesque Scottish Highlands. Cradled by nature, the protagonist-filmmaker falls into a trance. He reminisces about his children. But as he sinks deeper into sleep, the imagery turns abstract. Trees and leaves transform into elemental shapes, darting about like splashes of quicksilver. This dance of abstract images is scored to the hypnotic clack-clack of the train in motion. Finally, an animated passage breaks the spell and brings both protagonist and audience from abstraction back to reality. We come to realize that the goal of the film has been less to relate a story than to communicate an inner landscape of perception, sensation, and experience.

Lyman’s images draw their power partly from his deep affinity for nature. Fla.Me (1982) contrasts bodies of water in two separate locales, Brooksville, Florida, and Sutton Island, Maine. (Lyman’s big, roaring motif in his films is water.) Nature isn’t rendered here with the picture-postcard prettiness of a National Geographic special. Instead, it looks familiar yet strange, beautiful yet unrecognizably private. It’s nature seen not in a documentary fashion but in a visionary one.

Scotland With No Clothes (1977) is a 10-minute film that is playfully reminiscent of Michael Snow. As the camera zooms slowly into a waterfall, the mesmerizing soundtrack of gushing water rises steadily and builds to a grand crescendo. Tension and release, dramatic arc, climax—all achieved without a single human character.

The ambitious First Surface (1996) is about a boy for whom present and past are indistinguishable. He finds himself shuttling back and forth between memory and reality. Two photographs—one of his family and the other of a waterfall—take hold of his mind. Once again using a rich mix of techniques (like reverse animation and subtitles), the film aims to represent the processes of memory and cognition using cinematic means.

This is a small point, but I found it moving: Lyman and his children, at different ages, appear in several of the films. Thus, these works also play a double role as a family album; they preserve the traces and imprints of real lives. In doing so, they remind us of a great virtue of experimental cinema: that it is, above all, an art that is personal.