"Traveling Light"

Traveling Light, the new film by Gina Telaroli, screened last night as part of the reli­ably invent­ive and excit­ing “Migrating Forms” fest­iv­al at New York’s Anthology Film Archives. This brief feature—it’s a little under an hour, which might also qual­i­fy it as a lengthy short, but to my mind, it has par­tic­u­larly dens­ity that I don’t asso­ci­ate with short films—is one of the most strik­ing and excit­ing films I’ve seen this year. I can­’t wait to see it again. 

I should get the dis­clos­ure out of the way now: I am friendly with Gina Telaroli, we have a bunch of friends in com­mon, I find her an utterly delight­ful and dis­arm­ing and enga­ging per­son, and she was very help­ful to me with advice and mater­i­al assist­ance on a couple of pro­jects, and so on. On the oth­er hand, I did not tag along with her and the group of her pals who where hav­ing din­ner after last night’s screen­ing so maybe that buys back some of my journ­al­ist­ic integrity. 

Traveling Light does not, or at least I don’t think it does, take its name from the punch line of the really good joke about the photon check­ing into a hotel; rather, it describes in large part the con­di­tion of the film, which chronicles/simulates a train jour­ney from New York’s Penn Station to Pittsburgh. The movie emerged from the semi-ruin of a dif­fer­ent pro­ject. Telaroli, whose first, and sim­il­arly excel­lent film, A Little Death, con­veyed a pain­fully par­tic­u­lar nar­rat­ive in a a calm but relent­lessly acute style, wanted to craft anoth­er nar­rat­ive film, this one set on a train. A per­cept­ive crit­ic­al writer as well as a film­maker, Telaroli has an affec­tion for trains and train travel that I think is endem­ic to a cer­tain kind of cinephile/cineaste. Consider the track of great train-featuring or train-themed films from the very begin­ning of cinema. Consider, too, the idea that a train itself is in a sense a rather gar­gan­tu­an dolly track for a cam­era. Telaroli’s scheme to cast friends as minimally-defined char­ac­ters and have them impro­vise around a scen­ario set dur­ing a train jour­ney from New York to Cleveland was scotched when a snowstorm made com­ple­tion of the jour­ney impossible. Telaroli recon­ceived the film as a non-narrative work, some­thing she said she might have sub­con­sciously had in mind in the first place. What she’s come up with is a film that some­times so con­vin­cingly sim­u­lates a train jour­ney that it’s kind of lulling. But this is no aim­less impres­sion­ist­ic assemblage. As langour­ous and nat­ur­al­ist­ic as it can often seem, it’s also quite not­ic­ably mod­u­lar, and actu­ally builds to an acknow­ledge­ment of the fact that you’re watch­ing some­thing that could con­ceiv­ably be inter­preted as a salvaged by-product. 

After some estab­lish­ing shots of the typ­ic­al dim orange fog-breath blur of a Penn Station board­ing plat­form, Traveling Light lives up to both its title and the idea of locomotive-dolly with a dizzy­ing shot in which the com­part­ment from which Telaroli is shoot­ing whizzes by anoth­er train packed with multi-colored con­tain­ers. It’s like a real­ist, geometrically-altered reit­er­a­tion of the psy­che­del­ic light show near the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film settles into a rhythm of shots and sights that are some­how less con­ven­tion­ally mind­blow­ing. Views of sta­tion plat­forms from dirty win­dows; it seemed to me that every one of the sta­tions was in New Jersey, had to be; and of course I very vividly recog­nized the New Brunswick sta­tion, the Trenton sta­tion a little less vividly. Any Amtrak pat­ron is likely to get some­thing in the vicin­ity of a Proustian rush at some point dur­ing the pic­ture. The views of a grimy grey present are altern­ated with shots that look like they could have come out of a silent pic­ture. See, for example, the image at the top of the page. The near sepia-color, the black­ness on either side of the 1.85 frame very much sug­gest­ing an iris-in shot. Extraordinary. This is not just beau­ti­ful in and of itself but an iter­a­tion and acknow­ledge­ment of cine­mat­ic con­scious­ness. And as the film goes on, we have glimpes of “char­ac­ters” leav­ing restrooms, look­ing con­tem­plat­ively, and with act­orly poise, out at the passing land­scape. It almost seems as if the “nar­rat­ive” is about to pick up at cer­tain points, but it nev­er does. And then there’s a beau­ti­ful, impres­sion­ist­ic shot of dozens of frozen rivu­lets on a win­dow, each one mutat­ing the red light from the out­side of the train like its own little lens, and there’s some talk on the soundtrack that’s clearly from the per­son who’s get­ting the shot—yes, indeed, the effect is “awesome”—and so now we are in the realm of the near-documentary, or at least where the mech­an­ics of the film begin reveal­ing them­selves, and a shot of the film­maker her­self a little later com­pletes the effect. The view­er­’s inno­cence is taken away, and yet it’s not; Traveling Light con­tin­ues its par­tic­u­lar spell to the very end. 

I hope you, read­er, get to see this film some­how. It’s really won­der­ful. And while I don’t want to end this review on a polem­ic, I’m afraid I can­’t help myself. This is a motion pic­ture by an incred­ibly tal­en­ted female film­maker in her twen­ties. This is a blog by a white male of fifty-two years of age. I’m just gonna leave it at that, now that I think of it, and instead sug­gest that some forward-thinking pro­gram­mer or five at the Film Society of Lincoln Center have a look at Traveling Light and con­sider it for at least a side­bar this fall.