A Good Adidas Commercial & Joel Potrykus’s Latest // shorts 7.14.22
Welcome to a rundown of media artifacts high and low, cinematic and commercial, short and shorter. These are some notable bits of worthwhile short media from 2022 I’ve caught recently.
Thing From the Factory by the Field (dir. Joel Potrykus)
Joel Potrykus has been making some of the richest, weirdest, most inventive film comedy of recent years. His breakout film Buzzard brought a lo-fi Michigan punk sensibility to a bit of anti-establishment absurdism in the vein of 90s Mike Judge (or, as professional critics told it, made “Office Space on crack”). His follow-ups were considerably less subject to diminutive White Guy From Indiewire esque witticisms; The Alchemist Cookbook and Relaxer found him imbuing his manic, frustrated protagonists with more explicitly metaphysical mindsets in increasingly claustrophobic and dystopian scenarios, setting each in one location at the turn of the 21st century and making his leads put the “scat” in eschatology. Relaxer in particular is a revelatory metaphysical journey in miniature — though its sedentary protagonist, played by his most frequent collaborator Joshua Burge, is determined to stay put on his couch in his cruddy apartment until he achieves the impossible in a game of Pac-Man, it feels like we’re joining him on a trip to Hell and back. The Alchemist Cookbook, alternately, showed Potrykus embracing the horror that sits at the edges of his other work, maintaining the protracted pacing and deadpan humor of the films that bookend it while adding an undercurrent of genuine supernatural menace.
Thing From the Factory by the Field, which Potrykus produced with students from the film program where he teaches in Grand Rapids, is of a similar tenor to Cookbook. Taking place entirely in the titular field, three kids embark on a misbegotten hazing ritual for a religious girl who wants to join their punk band. The characters are perfect Potrykus creations, muddying their conversations with confused references to various bits of punk, goth and horror pop culture as they stumble through half-considered rituals. The true genius comes with the hilarious ways Potrykus bridges the gap between the surface-level darkness of the punk kids with the genuine Pagan bizarreness of Christian ritual, with twinned takes on an urban legend finding themselves colliding in an unexpectedly kooky and playful narrative turn midway through the short film. An amazing coda throws the entire thing into relief — Potrykus and his young cast and crew ultimately deploy his trademark off-kilter mix of Tarkovsky and Tom Green to tell a good joke.
Thing From the Factory by the Field has, along with almost all of Potrykus’s previous work, blessed the Criterion Channel lineup with its demented presence. It’s also making some festival rounds.
Kerwin Frost x Adidas Summer 2022 Film (dir. Dan Streit)
“Surprised” is one word for how it felt to see the names “Tim Robinson” and “RXKNephew” side by side in a headline announcing an Adidas commercial. Robinson’s Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave has been the source of conservatively 70% of my household’s vernacular over the past year or so; not far behind in influence however is the depraved indie rapper RXKNephew, an artist so prolific that Alphonse Pierre was able to produce a Top 100 Songs of 2021 composed entirely of his work, and his crowning achievement, the ten minute opus “American tterroristt,” bests Bob Dylan himself in its stream-of-consciousness illustration of the death and life of the American cultural consciousness (this sounds high-minded, and it is, but it is also, importantly, insane, and funny, and frightening).
The two had no reason to intersect beyond their codefining of popular culture in 2021 and their influence on millennial inside jokes, and yet, worlds collide in Kerwin Frost’s short film announcing his Summer Adidas collection (is this a sensible description? I do not know how fashion works). After an obligatory shot or two of the shoes Frost designed (I assume? See above, I don’t know anything), the film proper erupts into a percussion-driven musical number whose buzzy digital visual pallette and diagetic sound-making invokes the lo-fi musical numbers in Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. Among the many (seemingly notable) figures present are Robinson and Nephew, who each get a spotlight. Robinson, introduced as one of the drummers alongside “wow he’s still a thing?” indie musician Mac DeMarco, quickly breaks the illusion of the piece and announces that he didn’t realize he was called in to participate in a choreographed performance; his bemused expression as he looks on as the piece becomes increasingly elaborate recalls many of his characters on I Think You Should Leave. As he confusedly exits, the number turns toward a verse from RXKNephew, who in his customarily matter of fact but Socratic style explains that he is there to show off his Adidas for his friend Kerwin Frost’s commercial. Robinson and Nephew’s spotlights encapsulate their comic appeals and shout out the film’s status as a product but crucially don’t distract from its genuine delight and eccentricity — it’s also simply a well-conceived and edited musical number.
Kerwin Frost’s Adidas Announcement Film is on YouTube. His very cool (and expensive, fashion is insane) new Adidas line can be found on the Adidas site and is coming soon.
Enterings (dir. Alan Resnick)
I’ve written previously on Alan Resnick’s short work thus far in 2022. Enterings follows these strong efforts with a menacing mirror of his 2018 short May I Please Enter, wherein Resnick, clad in a cowboy outfit, asks to enter the home of a couple and strange, almost childlike impressions of human interactions ensue. Enterings flips this on its head, with Resnick, now wearing a suit but otherwise sharing his previous character’s off-kilter deadpan delivery and stilted physicality, invading an empty house and proceeding to interact with its contents as if he were an alien experiencing a domestic space for the first time. Sputtery and seemingly drone-shot digital camerawork floats through the nondescript suburban environment, sometimes as if it’s Resnick’s first person perspective, sometimes tracking around him, and the film begins to evoke something like Michael Snow’s Wavelength and La Region Centrale, the camera its own unperceiving organism constantly processing visual information as coherent and not, completely unconcerned with a human presence, its gaze wrested away from its mechanical control by post-processed tilts and zooms. Resnick melts in and out of rooms, his voice distorted and probably ADR’d, talking at and to answering machines, living paintings, and a TV perpetually playing Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. He rides a bike in a garage. He hunts for mirrors around the house, delightedly acknowledges his reflection. He plays with a small dog.
May I Please Enter and Enterings form a bizarre diptych of a half-understood mirroring of human life. There’s something astonishingly wholesome about them, despite the varying tension in their atmospheres, moments always feeling just on the brink of something terrifying that never quite arrives. Resnick moves through the world like he is somehow enlightened, seeing beyond the confines of normal reality, and he seems to have returned to robotically reveal that everything is indeed what it seems, but that what it seems is, despite its mundane surface, completely surreal and extraordinary.
Enterings and other Alan Resnick works can be found on YouTube. May I Please Enter and Resnick’s other collaborations with Adult Swim can be found on YouTube as well, along with Adult Swim’s website and streaming apps.
There’s No End (dir. Mattias Evangelista)
In 2016, musician Phil Elverum’s wife Geneviève Castrée died, and like so many artists in this period, be they iconic, alternative or somewhere in between, Elverum turned toward music to process his trauma. Amazingly, despite the obliqueness and dreaminess of his music up to that point, first as The Microphones and then as Mount Eerie, Elverum’s account of his experiences with death, and his subsequent life as a newly single father, had a newfound rawness and directness: “Death is real. Someone’s there and then they’re not. It’s not for singing about. It’s not for making into art.”
This album under the Mount Eerie moniker, A Crow Looked at Me, was a sudden redefinition of what it meant to listen to a Phil Elverum record. Mostly gone is the fuzzy noise-infused ambience and eccentric, experimental compositions synthesizing folk, electronics and metal; it’s so often simply Phil’s voice and a guitar.
It’s one of several throat-clearing artifacts Elverum has produced in this new stage of his career, of which this short film, There’s No End, is another. It seeks in part to bridge the gap between the numbed trauma of A Crow Looked at Me and the backward-facing but not quite nostalgic album and film Microphones in 2020, the project Elverum released in, well, 2020, that recalls the history of his original musical project and recontextualizes it through the lens of his age and experience. He hopes to flatten the barrier between then and now, and between abstract and concrete; in the film that accompanied Microphones in 2020, Elverum films himself gradually stacking photographs taken during the periods of his life he’s recalling in the song, and the result is a literal accumulation of memory, instantiated as this physical object, a photograph, and it’s simultaneously large and small — just this one, single stack of pictures, but also, contained in and between them, everything.
Elverum excels in finding these universals and eternities between the gaps, and There’s No End gives him a sweet and small platform to explain his artistic goals while demonstrating that they are secondary to what his life really is now: raising his daughter. He describes the simple acts of preparing meals and making sure she goes to bed on time as sufficient to fill his life for the rest of his life, and so director Mattias Evangelista captures just these mundanities: Phil cleaning up the kitchen while his daughter walks up beside him and let’s him know the cat can’t have treats because he’s “being rude;” Phil getting in his car to drop her off at school and pick her back up; Phil putting on a record and sitting. The simplicity and quietness he cultivates in the spaces he inhabits is posited as a continuation of his youth, when until the age of seven his family was completely off the grid. But he recognizes these modern affects of his life, necessitated by the career he’s chosen and his responsibilities as a parent, are all contained in the same universe as that which is more abstract and unplaceable. As he memorably pronounced in “Through the Trees Pt. 2,” “I know there’s no other world: mountains, and websites.” Everything is so big, and so small. And everything is now: in spite of the devastation brought on him and his daughter when they lost Geneviève, this event is now contained in them, it is part of a holistic experience, and Elverum doesn’t want his work to be perceived as sadness to be endured. Taken as a whole, his work in the preceding decade is the very churning he sings about, a restless movement between states of life that is life. Here, in stirring images of the natural world which surrounds the Elverums, and their sweet, silly interactions, and everything in between, the filmmakers and their subject take a breath in, then back out.
There’s No End can be watched on YouTube. Almost all of Elverum’s music, as The Microphones and Mount Eerie, is available on his website and on the music streaming platform of your choice — it’s some of this writer’s all-time favorite work. In particular, Microphones in 2020, the album and visual accompaniment, is some of the strongest alternative music produced this century, and that can be found on YouTube.
