Mack at Work in the studio, photographing frame by frame.

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Physical film print of Posthaste Perennial Pattern

Saturday night at Hollywood’s Egyptian theatre, a mid-sized screening room was fully packed to see a series of several films by the experimental filmmaker Jodie Mack, presented by the Los Angeles Film Forum. 

Founded in 1975, Los Angeles Film Forum iscurrently the longest-running venue in Southern California dedicated exclusively to the ongoing, non-commercial exhibition of independent, non-narrative and avant-garde cinema. Mack is one of the bigger names currently working in experimental film, and her work has been featured in exhibited in prestigious festivals including the New York Film Festival, TIFF and the Venice Biennale. She has also been featured in publications such as Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times. 
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Mack refers to herself as an “experimental animator” who uses found physical materials and objects to create stop-motion collages. These images, when played at a standard framerate, evoke a sense of movement, but as Mack herself pointed out, the images don’t sequence perfectly. Mack refers to this as “continuous discontinuity”, speaking on how the way our brain works to fill in the gaps between the images as they are presented rapidly. The three films were all presented and created on celluloid. Like many in the experimental film world, Mack considers celluloid an essential part of her work, describing the texture of the organic film elements as something that adds to the films. 

The first film, Posthaste Perennial Pattern, set the tempo for the night to come. A series of floral patterns played at rapid speed to audible remixes of nature sounds on the soundtrack. Much of Mack’s work is a visual-audial synthesis, with Mack herself creating the musical scores. 

 The second, and most didactic work, was “Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant” a silent montage contrasting images of computer motherboards and flowers. 
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The third film, a 4-minute, silent work “Hoarders Without Borders”, which Mack describes as a “commentary on the process of archival procedure”. The camera focuses on a single pedestal as a hand places a series of rocks of differing sizes on the pedestal. All these rocks came from the personal mineral collection of a single collector.

Mack refers to herself as an “experimental animator” who uses found physical materials and objects to create stop-motion collages.

The final film, and main attraction, was “the Grand Bizarre”, Mack’s 61-minute debut feature which screened in 2018 at the New York Film Festival and AFI. Shot in 15 countries over a period of 5 years, “The Grand Bizarre” is a complete audial-visual experience and a large step up in ambition from the earlier, short-form work. The film continues Mack’s ongoing interest textiles and turns it into a feature length odyssey and meditation on the current state of textile production. The film began as a sort of travelogue, with Mack indexing her travels to various countries and photographing sporadically whenever financing was provided from various grants.

​The film turns into a kind of meditation on globalization, using textiles as vessel. We see textiles as they are animated to travel on various forms of transportation such as, boats, trains and airports. Though it may be a stretch to say The Grand Bizarre has a narrative, it has an evident structure. According to Mack, the film is roughly structured like a textile; it begins and ends with fringes, and the middle functions as a series of rows, with each row introducing a new motif. The musical component of the film is one of its most impressive elements; Mack describes the lo-fi mash of sampling and found sounds, which moves from hip-hop, house and R&B as her commentary on “modern pop music”. As the film begins, outside sounds are mixed and twisted while interior sounds remain static as the film progresses this process reverses itself. As Mack explained, the film functions as a kind of feature-length music video where Mack’s collaging of pop music samples is just as important as the images.

These images, when played at a standard framerate, evoke a sense of movement, but as Mack herself pointed out, the images don’t sequence perfectly. Mack refers to this as “continuous discontinuity”

Hoarders Without Borders 
(2018, 5m45s, 16mm, color, silent)

Wasteland No. 1, Ardent, Verdant
 (16mm, Silent, 13 min)

Posthaste Perennial Pattern
(2010, 3m30s, 16mm, color, sound)

images from The Grand Bizarre (2018, 61m, 16/35mm, color, sound)

​The threads of a body of work are maintained across the several films and one got the sense of an artist growing in ambition and experience. Much of Mack’s work seems to have an inherent pop sensibility, so it will be interesting to see where Mack’s work continues, and whether it will become more commercial or remain firmly within the space of experimental film. 

The first three films are available to view at Mack's Vimeo page, here.

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