Despite the appearance, some films are not made out of images but of patterns, in which the  image is just a second-degree component, inferior to the pattern at hand, becoming nothing more than a simple representation. These kinds of films are, most of the time, somewhat abstract, not in the way that they render abstract things visible, but rather make visible the abstract ground on which what is shown in the film emerges. If these films are primarily experimental in kind, this is because this kind of process of imaging, of rendering of visibility, demands a relatively experimental way of operating with the film. Without the film, along with its image, getting abstractified, in motion as well as in editing, there is no such film at all. To create a pattern and turn one sensible, one must look things up close and knead the film form in accordance with this look. The film as pattern recognition is only possible with this dual operationality, in which a series of patterns get to crystallize.

 

The history of experimental film is loaded with many such cases, none of which are similar in modus operandi. Takashi Ito’s Spacy (1981), for instance, is built upon the idea that a photograph is a pattern, an ouroboros of sorts, an imprint of infinity, of teleportation, due to its innate quality of being the lowest element of the film, which allows the film to structure its form like a multidimensional portal, through which a series of photographs are the channels that open to different bits of the film space. Another example, of course, would be Michael Snow’s Back and Forth (1969), a film that only functions with one sort of camera movement, that is, a pan, which is pressed into service because of its resemblance to the space in which the filmmaker found himself, which is a space, a sort of bunker, that horizontal in form, and which could only be mimicked in abstract terms if it is seen like it is scanned. Last but not least, Paul Clipson’s Made of Air (2014) finds a pattern not in space but in a broader circuit, in an atmosphere, in nature, which does not exist in linear temporality but in a circular one, a time that anything and. everything synchronically comes and goes, and which can only be patterned with superimpositions, a technic or a method that reforms the duration as the sum of overlapping timezones that are born out of each other. In all these examples, a pattern, whether material, spatial, or ephemeral, is the basis of the film form.

 

A pinnacle in this regard, in this context where a pattern and the form of the film are identical, where the film form is remodeled, in macro and micro scales, under a pattern, is, presumably, Rose Lowder’s Turbulence (2015). What happens in this film is relatively simple: a waterfall is waving. Nothing else. Yet it endlessly does that by being in a state of constant flux, ad infinitum, and by being in that state, it also conjures up the visible and invisible forces on the screen. So, in one way, it perfectly represents the matter it showcases by keynoting the general characteristic of the matter: liquidity. Still, in another way, it creates a sense of infinity, of endlessness, of eternity, via which the water is just a means, an instrument of expression, of manifestation of an invisible process, a process in which infinitude gains ground. In this second aspect, one understands that water is just the visible counterpart of an invisible force, a force that has no end and, logically enough, no beginning. This also resonates with the film’s content, i.e., the wave. If this film is about waves more than the water, it is because the wave is constantly in motion, not in a state of stasis like the surface of the water. However, it also has no beginning or end; it is just a block of movement through which liquid matter flows recklessly. So, in a way, the film’s depth and surface tension match: one finds in the waving an infinity and in infinity a constant waving—the infinite as constancy.

 

Of course, all this is only possible through forming the film’s structure in such a way that it emphasizes the underlying process of the ever-continuing movement of the wave. If this film is shot in close-ups, the why is simple: shooting things up-close makes them the whole, the whole of which they are everything. By isolating the thing shot from the world, one starts a process in which that thing becomes the world in itself. In this case, the thing shot is not just a wave or a turbulent part of the water but an infinite progression, amplified in force through the micro framing of waving, rendering visible the invisible in the water: endless motion. If the cuts are not even sensible in this film, it is for the same reason: if the thing seen is the same throughout and is in a state of hypervelocity, the whole of the film, like the part of it, is made out of the same image, in this case, the image of infinity, of endless circularity, which finds its correlative, its proper pattern, in the waving of the water. Thus, the film not only makes the wave seen but also structures and forms it and is hereby received as if it is a wave of sorts, a gigantic one. By recreating the film, on the scale of both shot and montage, in the image of waving, and raising it to the level of permanency, with its images covered with the halo of limitless capacity to move, Turbulence becomes an infinity, liquid in form, vast in scope, and circular in motion. In this sense, it is not even a film. It is, instead, an oceanic perpetuum mobile.