Color Field Film: Post-Painterly Landscapes in Experimental Cinema

This essay examines the influence of mid-century abstraction on the landscape films of two contemporary moving image artists: Chilean-Canadian filmmaker Malena Szlam, and Japanese-Canadian filmmaker Daïchi Saïto. Although their approaches are distinct in significant ways, my essay will bring them into conversation with each other. It also situates their work in relation to a larger trend of contemporary experimental cinema which appropriates the techniques of painterly abstraction as a way of mining the still-visionary potential of experimental cinema to allow us to perceive the world anew. Drawing upon my knowledge of the histories of experimental cinema and Western painting, “Color Field Film” demonstrates how these contemporary moving image artists re-activate a certain tradition of painterly abstraction that embraces both flux and unpredictability as enhanced modes of aesthetic attunement to the natural environment. Although my essay briefly situates these moving image artists in a longer tradition of avant-garde cinema, it focuses more broadly on how the legacy of mid-century and postwar painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, and Ronnie Landfield, illuminate the recurring motif of subjectivized landscapes in contemporary experimental film.