March 6, 2025

Here’s the weekly news from down here at the From Below. The crocuses began blooming last week on NE 15th Ave. Charlie is going to be away at an artist residency for a couple weeks, which means it’ll just be me, Stefan, running the show. I’ve chosen two films to pair together in his absence, both about being alone. Each investigates vexed relationships to place and hinge on one solitary character. One film, quiet, colorful, and grassy; the other, a handheld noisy psychogeographer’s stroll through language and the city.

On Thursday, March 6 at 7pm we are showing Mark Jenkin’s brilliant Enys Men (2022), a “horror” film (more on this later) shot on 16mm following the daily routines of a botanist studying a rare wildflower on an otherwise uninhabited Cornish island. The week after that will be Bennett Miller’s The Cruise (1998), a stripped-down low-budget effort of documentary portraiture that drifts around the forest floor of New York City through the ramblings of tour bus guide Timothy Speed Levitch.

Here is the link to RSVP for Enys Men. Doors will open at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!

Horror films generally derive the force of their terror from the occurrence of the exceptional and rare. Routine and everyday life is shattered by the arrival of the strongest, evilest, baddest Thing beyond imagination. You watch characters expire on the worst, last day of their lives by escalating, grisly methods. Horror elements are superlatives, excessive, and we love them for it.

Enys Men, Cornish for “Stone Island,” sources itself, on the other hand, from the unexceptional, common, irreducible parts of the human condition: the passage of time, grief, boredom, repetition, cyclical dread, worry, and isolation. Jenkin’s film captures in this simple story of the study of a flower an inescapable presence, looming, in the wings already here or never quite gone. It is an eerie film* par excellence* in Mark Fisher’s sense: “eeriness” can be either an encounter with something where there should be nothing, or a finding of nothing where there ought to be something.

This film is an exceptional sensory delight; boring and entrancing as a dying note from a chime, with its beautiful and unsettling photography. Its drifting, droning score is suggestive of both the expansive solitude of wind-whipped cliff sides and a monotony similar to studying the sonar frequency alone in a submarine. Linear narrative slips away and Jenkins’ zoomed in 16mm work gives us eighty gorgeous, long minutes of disquieting experience with what may be the true protagonists of the film: color, light, and time.

Impressively, the directing, writing, editing, cinematography, and score are all done personally by Mark Jenkin himself, an officially anointed Cornish Bard since 2020. A final aside and something to tide you over while you wait for Thursday to come, this film always makes me think of the album cover and feeling of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

Happy crocus gazing,

Stefan, Charlie, and Stark