This essay was originally published in Cinema Scope.
In Jessica Sarah Rinland’s 2016 short film, The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior), a shy, studious eight-year-old becomes transfixed by a nature documentary while her more rambunctious classmates whisper and pass notes around her. “The ostrich is incapable of doing the one thing birds are famous for: they cannot fly,” the documentary’s narrator intones with BBC-inflected authority. Rinland registers the young girl’s enthusiasm in extreme close-ups, first focusing on her eyes and then the corner of her mouth, suggesting a secret smile. The other kids are all framed in wider shots, bored and antsy like the schoolboys in Le quatre cents coups (1959). When discussion turns to the ostrich’s defence mechanisms—its uncommon speed, strength, stride, and agility—Rinland cuts to a close-up of the girl’s ear, underlining the message of the film: “If you’re a bird that can’t fly, you have to find other ways of surviving.” The girl picks up a note from the floor, folds it into an airplane, stands, and tosses it towards a window while everyone around her looks on in silence. It’s a small but significant moment of self-actualization.
In most respects The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior) is an outlier among the 20 films Rinland has made since 2008. Commissioned by Random Acts on Channel 4, it’s a crowd-pleasing, inspirational, on-the-nose story told effectively and efficiently in just under four minutes. Still, Ostrich is a useful point of entry into Rinland’s practice because it expresses so matter-of-factly many of her preoccupations and stylistic habits: playfully poking at traditional documentary tropes; mixing classical narrative montage and scripted performances with more experimental strategies; collecting visual material with the curiosity of an archivist (the ostrich footage, which Rinland shot herself in Esteros del Iberá in Argentina, is used in a previous film as well); and precisely modulating the affective experience of viewers, primarily through her dedication to 16mm film and her reliance on formal techniques that verge on ASMR. More simply, the young girl in Ostrich is a convenient personification of the authorial voice that guides much of Rinland’s work, which is full of wonder and open to epiphany.
Raised in the UK by Argentinian parents, Rinland had her own epiphanic encounter with a film while studying painting and photography at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. As part of a class assignment, she wandered into a screening of Jonas Mekas’ Walden (1968) at the Tate and was struck by how it evoked the same sensations she had experienced as a child when she would compulsively rewatch her family’s home videos. In particular, she was mesmerized by Mekas’ narrated commentary and by her discovery of the meaning-making tension that can exist between layers of image and sound. “There’s something very interesting about the authority of that voice ‘above’ the image,” Rinland told José Sarmiento Hinojosa in a 2018 interview for desistfilm. “For me it’s more interesting when the image and voice are separate and perhaps sometimes they coincide. The separation allows viewers to escape into their own imagination.”
The influence of Walden is easy enough to spot in Rinland’s earliest 16mm exercises—literally so in Bosque (2008) and To Rock and to Cease (2008), which were both shot at Black Pond, south of London. The Laughing Man (2008) is a silent portrait; Fog (2008) is an experiment with in-camera effects, including double exposures. In Darse Cuenta (2008), Rinland recites Jorge Bucay’s poem of the same name over obscure images that have been processed into low-contrast, periwinkle abstraction. The poem, which Rinland delivers in an intimate whisper, tells the story of a person who, after falling into the same hole nine days in a row, realizes on the tenth “that it is more comfortable walking on the other side of the road.” As the narrator comes to this new consciousness, Rinland cuts to a wider perspective and the image snaps into focus, revealing a sun-soaked window frame.
At the risk of over-simplification, Rinland’s mature films have tended to fall into one of three general modes. Darse Cuenta and Ostrich belong in the first, which might be classified as fairy tales of a sort. In Nulepsy (2010), an elderly man recounts how his life has been affected by a rare pathological condition that compels him to stand motionless and nude. (In flashback scenes, he’s portrayed by a curly-haired actor whose resemblance to Michelangelo’s David is surely no coincidence). In Not as Old as the Trees (2014), another aged narrator describes the joy of watching the world go by from the vantage of treetops. Both films have some of the superficial markings of televised re-enactments, as if we are watching one of those “strange but true” cable series, but Rinland’s image-making—particularly her blocking of people in the middle of the frame for static portraits—combined with the child-like sensibility of her scripted voiceovers lend the films an abiding sense of awe and attunes viewers to presence. A sequence of portraits at the end of Not as Old as the Trees is like a lesson in mindfulness, guiding viewers to experience life as the old man does, with curiosity and compassion.
Rinland’s “sensibility,” her “authorial voice”—these are ham-fisted attempts to describe what might more plainly be called her “taste,” that fickle quality in every talented artist that resists simple classification. In the best of the fairy-tale films, Adeline for Leaves (2014), a botanist who is nearing the end of his life awakens with a vision of a blue flower, signifying, as he says in voiceover, “a metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable.” The task of cultivating the flower is bequeathed to Adeline, a young prodigy who toils away silently in her garden. Rinland opens the film with a lovely montage of banana plants and palm fronds before introducing Adeline, posed among the flora in a still, planimetric composition as rich with detail as anything in a Wes Anderson movie. Rinland achieves a kind of twilight rapture in the rhythm of her cutting, occasionally pausing on an especially beautiful image for the sheer pleasure of it—I’m thinking of a 20-second shot of Adeline looking out of a car window, the natural light shifting in shadows on her face, her hair blowing in the breeze.
In 2011, Rinland happened upon the site of a stranded sperm whale and struck up a conversation with the veterinarian who was performing a necropsy. That chance encounter set her off into the second major phase of her career, a series of films, installations, performances, and a book, completed over five years, that investigate the social and economic histories of whaling. The project also fed her interest in institutions such as museums, laboratories, and historical societies that have grown up around the study and preservation of animals and artifacts. A Boiled Skeleton (2015) documents the basement facility at University College London’s Grant Museum, where the 160-year-old remains of a bottlenose whale are stored away in boxes and bubble wrap. Necropsy of a Harbour Porpoise (Seeing From our Eyes into Theirs) (2015) appropriates Stan Brakhage’s objective perspective on the physical remains of a life by filming an everyday dissection. We Account the Whale Immortal (2016), a collaboration with Philip Hoare and Edward Sugden, is a multi-screen installation that revisits the stories of three whales that found their way into the Thames.
The first of the whale films, Electric Oil (2012), is a transition piece, with another young heroine at its centre—six-year-old Laura Jernegan, who in 1868 set off with her family on a three-year whaling expedition and documented their adventure in a journal that now resides in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. In large block lettering, she sketched daily accounts of the grisly “cutting in” processes that took place up on deck—”they smell dredfully [sic]…the whale’s head made twenty barrels of oil”—which Rinland then spins into a fiction: Jernegan, now an adult, has become plagued by a mysterious allergy (a variant of “nulepsy”) as a manifestation of her repressed trauma. The final minute of Electric Oil cuts rapidly between close-ups of Jernegan tugging at her sweater and found footage of whales racing alongside a hunting boat. As Jernegan strips off her shirt, a harpoon finds its target and a dying whale tips forward, its tail bobbing lifelessly on the surface.
The found material in Electric Oil also appears in the short sketch, Description of a Struggle (2013), and again in The Blind Labourer (2016), an ambitious essay film that draws parallels between the industrial practices of whaling and logging. When we first see the whalers in Electric Oil, the mid-century footage is intercut with a clinical note written by Jernegan’s fictional physiologist: “Laura’s first memory of this sensation was at sea. She vividly recalled two men, up to their knees in the blubber of a humpback whale, squeezing out the oil.” In that context, the images are charged with a certain eroticism, as they are filtered through the competing subjectivities of both a young girl living in a world of men and the anxious woman she will become. In The Blind Labourer, the exact same footage is rendered inert. The whalers, like the loggers, are little more than cogs in a gruesome machine.
Rinland is rare among contemporary moving-image artists in that she is more naturally a scenarist and writer than a conceptualist. Her frequent use of voiceover narration generates the polyphony she admired in Walden, but it’s also a literary device that gives her license to craft characters and story arcs, and to play with language itself. (James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a peer in this respect.) It wouldn’t be quite accurate to suggest Rinland is leaving behind those tendencies—the absurd and genuinely funny voiceover in Ý Berá – Aguas de Luz (2016) describes fish that swim backwards to keep water out of their eyes and a one-winged bird that can fly in only one direction—but the most recent phase of her work does represent a significant shift in style. Most striking is a new penchant for disembodying her human subjects by shooting their behaviour almost exclusively in close-ups. This strategy is the foundation of Expression of the Sightless (2016), in which a blind man runs his hands over John Gibson’s statue, “Hylas Surprised by the Naiade,” and describes what he “sees.” Likewise, in Black Pond (2018), Rinland seldom pulls back to a wide shot of her collaborators from a Natural History Society in the south of England. Instead, she focuses on the practiced work of their hands, as they tend to bats and measure trees.
A key to Rinland’s newest film, Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, can be found in the closing credits. Along with cinematography, editing, and foley, Rinland is credited as “Voice” and “Pink-Nailed Ceramicist.” (The nail designer is also credited.) When we first see her hands they’re covered in cracked, gray ceramic slip, like gloves. Rinland then cuts to still photos of an elephant’s cracked, gray face, followed by a high-angle shot of Rinland’s clean hands as she vacuums dust from a 3D printer, gradually revealing one section of what will, over the course of the film, become a museum-quality replica of a century-old tusk. I say “century-old” because as Rinland vacuums, she explains that the original was donated to the museum in 1900 and came from an elephant that was poached in Malawi. Because she is not identified onscreen as the speaker, and because the form of the film constantly calls attention to the process of its own making—for example, Rinland claps for sound before the vacuum shot and bridges scenes that take place in interior locations with processed sounds of insects and fauna—we must take on faith the validity of every claim. Rinland, the screenwriter, remains in control.
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another ends with one more replica for us to consider: a 3D rendered animation of the tusk. How does it compare to the original? To the ceramic piece? How should we judge the value of each? Rinland is begging the classic ontological questions of art, but that line of interpretation is something of a red herring. Rather, the film seems designed to ensnare viewers in the unspoken fetishistic pleasures of collecting, archiving, and displaying—the same pleasures that drive the economies of poaching and museum-building. Beginning with the whispered poetry recitation in Darse Cuenta, Rinland has consistently used a number of formal techniques that have, in recent years, become associated with ASMR. Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another is a comprehensive catalogue of triggers: hands turning pages of a book, the sounds of dripping water and spray bottles, soft brushes wiping surfaces clean, unboxing, cutting with scissors, crinkly plastic wrap, drawing and tracing, demonstrative hand gestures, latex gloves, rubbing with sponges, and fingers pulling lint from a vacuum bag.
Nearly an hour into the 67-minute film, Rinland inserts a rare wide shot of a man clumsily stacking tusks and ivory carvings on the bottom shelf of a storage closet, and the noisy banality of his work breaks the long-sustained, hypnotic reverie. He’s not alone. Other workers make small talk, scrub plastic bins, and sweep floors in sterile back rooms. Rinland then catalogs, via red-on-black text, the names of the people with whom she collaborated at a dozen museums. Only in the penultimate shot, when the workers wander outside to enjoy a snack of watermelon, do they appear to truly experience the wonders of the natural world.