On the Figure of Lights: on the works of Omnes Films

On the Figure of Lights: on the works of Omnes Films

It was 2009 when the story of Omnes Films began in the dormitories and classrooms at Emerson College as classmates Tyler Taormina, Carson Lund, and Jonathan Davies, joined by other friends, had a shared vision of creating a new kind of independent American film of particular sensitivities. Without generalizing the unique interests that fall with each filmmaker in the group, be it music, sports, film criticism or other worlds, let us begin by saying that each of their films starts with a certain kind of light, which is to say their films deal with time.

When it comes to the weather of Los Angeles, the city Omnes members base in, David Lynch, in his famous online weather reports, has always described it as "blue skies and golden sunshine" - in anticipation of it in the early morning, or with remembrance of it during cloudy or rainy days. This light will often be the first thing one discovers in the works from Taormina, Davies, and Lund, not simply by the quality of light itself, which the filmmakers capture meticulously, but the very particular world it illuminates (and shadows). These films depict a physical form of time, but also the time past in the traditions of the Americana. The two films that debuted this year at the Director's Fortnight, Christmas Eve at Miller's Point (2024) and Eephus (2024), directed by Taormina and Lund, respectively, display a diptych of passions: one equal part of rituals inscribed in a country's communal consciousness, on the other hand, secret societies hidden from public views.

The public and private lives of characters coverage in each film's formal gestures, locations, and gallery of characters. Therefore, this feeling of mystery often arises from actions deceptively familiar on the surface but ultimately unclassifiable in the eccentric gaps where the world collapses into deeply personal fiction engraved in the actors' faces, which they had filmed so much across five feature films, all of them ensemble pieces that walk through passing souls across day and night. If anything, in these films, most evidently with Taormina's, daytime faces and nighttime faces mark two completely different people.

Ham on Rye (2019), the collective's first opus, directed by Taormina and shot by Lund, riffs on the image of the all-too-familiar tradition of the High School prom, where young men and women, as if properly dressed maybe for the first time in their lives, walking or driving with their friends down the small town road to converge at the celebration. The title itself, a rhyme perfectly quotidian but slightly perplexing, more or less sums up the quality of the film. As always in these scenarios, anticipation is high with these rendezvouses, with the desire to play an adult, the prospect of a date, or the nostalgia for the care-free youth. But Taormina favors these gestures slightly differently; he aims to capture a feeling much more archetypal without the basis of a complete narrative, from a lighter being lit, an oversized suit, a half-eaten sandwich to those long walk-and-talks between friends that the filmmakers delicately stage.

According to Taormina's written reflection on Letterboxd, much of the extensive cast was only given pages of their scenes, and actors on set would exchange notes and try to piece together the whole story. Indeed, the film builds upon ellipsis, on characters entering and leaving the ceremony at any given time. If the slices-of-lives of these youths, despite their drifting away in the end, immediately give us a direct impression of their inner being, even with little screen time for each, it is because the ritual itself has already been the great archetype that this small-town life of the Americana - the diners, the main streets, the dances, the awkward first kisses, the-next-morning reconciliation, etc.. And finally, as the night arrives, the film plunges into the surrealist realm of melancholic stillness and the looming danger of abandonment. In hindsight, in these films, we all wait for the night. It is on those nights that the heart of the film conceives, revealing the dream at dusk as a beautiful illusion masking an inevitable decay, as Lund noted, reminiscent of the melodramas by Vincente Minnelli or Douglas Sirk that use dazzling colors as a sign of an unstable reality. Nonetheless, while the party is on, the film invents its unique gestures, like transforming a diner, "Monty's," into an almost mythic and timeless space, constantly changing in light and movement according its own rules.

But the question of where do people go after dark still troubles us. If the transition between day and night marks the loss of innocence, the films then find some comfort in the darkness, in the lives of perpetual night owls, meaning "adults," who remain awake with their unspeakable aches. Happer's Comet (2022), Taormina's 62-minute second feature, is almost entirely a nocturnal affair. Shot during the lockdown induced by the COVID-19 pandemic in the filmmaker's hometown of Long Island, New York, this largely wordless film, mostly starring Taormina's friends and families, is a collective portrait of a place and its denizens at night. The feeling of quarantine, although never made explicit, is felt internally through space, with these shallow lights expose to ordinary objects, as if these houses become permanently seized, an museum of itself closed to visitors. But there are still little stories in the film, tiny movements that cut through the stillness of this night: tranquil night-drives, unanswered phone calls, skaters converging at some mysterious location.

To describe the film as silent would ignore its multitudes of sonic pleasure - an early shot shows an unseen figure recording ambient sounds through his window - as the camera wanders through winds, trees, roads, and vehicles, capturing another luminance in those dimmed, pale nightlights that cast muted shadows across walls, grasses, waters, and sometimes into the dormant homes of the town's residents - some sleep, and some don't, listening to the surrounding that quickly becomes eerie. After watching a Taormina film, I often find myself staring at the immobile objects at home, glasses and plates drying in my kitchen, for example, barely lit by the small lamp from the cooker hood and a bit of moonlight. What is Taormina's idea if not this persistence to preserve these little lights in the dark?

What keeps the light lit in these filmmakers' cinema - always sensitive to the past - is a sense of temporal ambiguity, which often heightens itself in the ritualistic action that creates its inner logic, something already evident in films like Minnelli's Meet Me at St. Louis (1944), this highly decorative, snow-globe-like cinema where the town people's diligence to the ceremonial - an act that encompasses an entire system of mise-en-scene - creates the vortex that time will remain unchanged. If Christmas Eve at Miller's Point is simultaneously Taormina's most synthesized variation on the small-town ritual, this time a Christmas Eve gathering for an extended Italian-American family, it also inevitably fall into repetitions, as the forms become, in a sense, one and the same to this decorative flare from which the lost time must sustain.

Despite also being an one-night tale, the twofold structure from Ham on Rye remains, as its gallery of characters moves from the warmly-lit family home to their domain of neighborhood diners and neon-soaked convenience stores. But if the previous films pursued a secret rhythm, here, the filmmaker, tracking back to his childhood, only seeks fidelity. In a sense, this longest longing tradition, which grown-ups have imposed on children, may finally be wearing off its charm, and the film, despite its effort to abide by the festiveness, nonetheless finds solitude. In one shot or two, he suddenly sees a negative space at a corner of the house where a warehouse-eyed granny dozes off - reality returns. As before, individual dramas are kept at a minimum in favor of the grand ensemble - a glance at a face is often enough. Is it because the filmmaker, knowingly or not, always sets the film in past tense, knowing that everything is ending? The film often evokes the feeling of stumbling into a closing shopping mall right before the lights shut. It's all past. Nothing is for sale.

If the secrets Taormina seeks lie in the fabric of everyday events, his two other friends go to stranger places. When Taormina's film transforms a Californian small town into a total image of the American suburb, Jonathan Davies makes Los Angeles utterly unrecognizable with his debut feature, Topology of Siren (2021), also photographed by Lund. A fellow musician who formed with Taormina the drone band Fjords, Davies' film is a wriggling yet calming mystery that firmly searches what it desires, tracing back to the glorious era of the analog. Set in a hillside area around the Hollywood-land, Cas, played by documentary filmmaker Courtney Stephens, a sound engineer staying in her aunt's house, accidentally discovers inside an 18-century hurdy-gurdy a bundle of mini-tapes containing enigmatic recordings. In a sense, Davies' film is a sister to Memoria (2021) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (the two films premiered only a week apart), both seeking a history of the world through the instruments we have built, and both films become listening space for the audience, sometimes directly "toning" the film using its apparatus, as its wall-to-wall soundscape conjures ancient objects and mythic bodies. The film, if anything, is reminiscent of baroque-era harpsichords that hide paintings inside their lids or books that hide secret correspondences, as seen in another game of mysteries, Trenque Lauquen (2022) by Laura Citarella.

Conversations on musical history, often improvised, live performances of experimental music, vintage audio devices, there is a secret society to discover. Meanwhile, landscape study persists parallel to the intricate sound world; the physical earth on which our heroine travels becomes mystified. Always sensitive to the space, this serpentine terrain sculpted by sunlight and vegetation, Davies maintains its curls as the heroine makes her journey, tracing the origin of the tapes, each time passing through her fellow guardians of sound, music, even noises - NPCs or little angels if you will. Surprisingly, Davies named his biggest influence on the film "90s point-and-click adventure games" on PC. How can we not spot the similarities?

If the mountainous terrain of Topology of Siren harvests mysteries in the blind spot of our vision, Eephus would reach the same abstraction in the plain of a baseball field, in the same way that James Benning's films use the horizontal line as the starting point of his American fictions - see his The United States of America (2022), where Benning creates portraits for each fifty state of the country, each in one shot, in an extraordinary and deceptively simple measure. Carson Lund's film, co-written by Nate Fisher and Michael Basta (who is directing a film with Omnes, Raccoon), culminated all Omnes Films' collective interests in a concentrated vision. Set in a Massachusetts suburb, the film chronicles two teams of men playing one last game of amateur baseball on "Soldiers Field," soon to be demolished to build a middle school, combining portraits of a pastime tradition to a somewhat more perplexing series of movements, accessible only by an understanding of its secret rules. But granted, even an innocent viewer like this author, without ever playing or watching the sport, could appreciate the intimate bondage and the rhythmic movement displayed in these men playing a last game on their home ground - wins or loses means nothing here. Lund, not only an active film critic who envisioned here his own Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) but also a league baseball player, is not only precise in his direction/coaching but is also seeing the field through other eyes, often a critique of the image itself. But the film, more than anything, accompanies its players in time.

Once again, the title is a time metaphor: "a way of throwing a baseball that draws a very slow parabola, leaving the batter confused and having difficulty deciding when to swing," the experience of watching the film can perhaps be seen as both seeing an "eephus" being thrown mid-air for ninety minutes or one where we have no ideas when that precise movement happened. Indeed, even in a plain, the cinema hides many secrets from the eyes - the onscreen distracted by a movement offscreen, characters suddenly intruding with a hoax, or extended periods of tedious waiting followed by pensive monologues. In an ingenious meta-twist, Frederick Wiseman provides the opening narration. Despite fiction, Lund is in spirit with the American documentarian, whose films focus on institutions and landscapes that make the country, same as Benning, confirms the fact that America remains a country molded and seen by cinema. There are still many blind spots to see.

Like Taormina's films, Eephus is also a film about the wait for the night, but if the latter prefers a sudden transition into darkness, Lund strands his characters in twilight. Precisely an hour into the film, the sky turns to dusk. As if in "real time," palpable suspense begins to descend on the field as the players struggle to see exactly where the balls and the bats are going, and bit by bit, the filmmaker pushes his camera to the limit until there is barely anything to see. But will there be light at the end of an era? We won't spoil how he does it, but yes, there will be.

write by TWY