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In Discoveries, which riffs on a minor genre of 17th-century Dutch painting, Pryce employs microscopic close-ups of plants to unveil their underlying abstract structures, adding both geometry and poetry to the film’s disciplinary mix. While the blurs and stutters of her films are attributable to chemistry and physics, botany is also always close at hand. Her experimental films and magic lantern shows use dimmed reveals and stark detail to powerful effect. Pryce is as close to an alchemist as you’ll find in cinema.

Hypnotic effects also define the intensely artisanal cinema of Charlotte Pryce, including her silent 16mm short, Discoveries on the Forest Floor (2007)-a film I first saw two years ago at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Here too the sensation is of being mesmerized, this time by the film’s sonorous lullaby, which sometimes plays in the absence of the moving image, with brief title cards repeating the “toli toli” refrain. More than once the entire screen bleeds red before it slowly morphs into other hues. In voiceover, the film’s narrator chants a children’s song about a butterfly’s chrysalis (“toli toli” in Guadeloupean Créole) pointing the way to the sea while creating “an elsewhere inside.” That elsewhere, which Bianiany’s elliptical short attempts to visualize, is volcanic, mysterious, and often impermeable. Minia Biabiany’s Toli Toli, in Program 2: Acts of Refusal II: The Persistence of Invisible Traces, is equally quasi-mystical. Placed alongside other films centered on human subjects, Wasteland expands the focus of ethnography beyond the exposition of cultural customs and history to include the camera’s fleeting encounters with nature, which reflect on our inherent subjectivity as viewers. Although my optical nerves and brain had clearly been outwitted by the mechanical apparatus into believing that the film’s range of elements was wider and more complex, there was also a peaceful, restorative surrender in letting the flicker seep in, as if cinema was something you inhaled with your body. It wasn’t until I did the unthinkable and paused individual film frames-since I was previewing the program at home and could-that I realized that the film is, in fact, a jazzy riff on a handful of images: shots of plant roots, twigs, and flower petals in melting ice cubes. 2: Hardy Hearty, in Program 5: Collaborative Survival, images of flowers and plants flicker rapidly, conveying an impossible textural density. In this sense, they embody the postcolonialist thinker Édouard Glissant’s “aesthetics of opacity” as a main tactic to counter hegemonic positions of spectatorship. They reflect the varied ways in which filmmakers increasingly avail themselves of technologies to layer, splinter, or otherwise obscure images, displacing geographic and temporal markers. While historically ethnographic nonfiction aimed to “explain” cultures and peoples, creating an illusion of its subjects’ transparency, the visual techniques on display in “Counter Encounters” complicate and disrupt our modes of reception. With nine lucidly interwoven programs of short and medium-length films, the eighth edition of the Art of the Real festival, entitled “Counter Encounters,” brings together iterations of ethnographic cinema that subvert the power dynamics of the tradition.

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This article appeared in the November 18 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing.