Ewelina Rosinska

"Another Spell of Light: Unstable Rocks + Sanctuary Station"

Premiering in the US at Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival earlier this month, new films by Ewelina Rosinska and Brigid McCaffrey are two anti-capitalist cine-poems in the most capacious sense of both terms.

There is a politics to this filmmaking that embodies the slowness both films purport we must embrace in order to socially and spiritually thrive.

Towards the end of Ewelina Rosinska’s short film Unstable Rocks(2024), made in collaboration with Nuno Barroso, there is a brief montage of various gourds, swollen and cracked, in close-up. The amber fruits gleam, warm and fat as an autumnal sun. Rosinska then cuts to a long shot of a painted orange wall limning a water reservoir. Though the juxtaposed images are completely different environments (one agricultural, the other industrial), the color palates echo across the disparate spaces creating a chromatic associative link. The cut from one orange surface to another, as well as the movement from a close-up to an extreme long shot, evokes the Aramaic word Ephphathafrom the New Testament, meaning “be thou opened.”Rosinska’s formal move reminds us to open ourselves to the world, to slow down and take in as much splendor from our surroundings as we can possibly bear.

Unstable Rocks precedes Brigid McCaffrey’s Sanctuary Station (2024) at the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2025 First Look Festival, where both films had their North American premieres on March 14. Unstable Rocks arises from ethnographic and associative impulses: Rosinska and collaborator Nuno Barroso juxtapose a colony of vultures against fossil trails or intuitively bridge nature conservations with bird hospitals. United in political, social, and formal concerns, these are two anti-capitalist cine-poems in the most capacious sense of both terms. Both repeatedly return their viewers to the earth: close-ups of a hawk's carcass ferned with green azolla in a bog; sea anemones blooming amongst barnacles; trees flecked with lichen. And both explore ecoactivists and egalitarian communities who live off the grid, in Portugal and California, respectively.

If utopia is, as Bernadette Mayer writes of Zeno of Elea, “a society without marriage, without religion, without laws, without money, and without property,” then Sanctuary Stationand Unstable Rocksadhere to, and surpass, this edict in many ways. And yet, there areprofound spiritual undertones within these spaces, especially in Sanctuary Station,which utilizes text from former Catholic nun, environmental activist, and Beat poet Mary Norbert Körte throughout the film. In addition to Körte’s poetry, McCaffrey often employs in-camera editing with her Bolex camera. The rapid cuts feel like a blinking eye, as if almost overwhelmed from a glut of images. There is a kind of ecstasy to the speed as we careen from a stained-glass table lamp to woven rugs to the geometric pattern in an exposed brick wall.

In Sanctuary Station, McCaffrey specifically explores spiritualism and ecoactivism within communities of women. The gorgeously shot high-contrast black-and-white film opens with a series of tracking shots through a sunstreaked forest and across a wooden train track, before finally landing on a sign that reads, “Save Old Growth.” We have arrived at our destination. Here is the matriarch’s (Körte’s) house, full of knick knacks, photographs, and patched quilts bathed in light. Körte reads aloud a poem while the camera explores her small house and then reflects aloud on the writing of the poem in non-diegetic voice over. “Mother Superior used to say, ‘Feelings don’t count! Feelings don’t count!’” Körte reminisces, “and I understand and side with what she was trying to say which was, ‘No matter how you feel, you do the do.’” Later, a small group of environmentalists walks down a road branding signs that read, “Save the Oaks.” The group is small but mighty, lightly beating drums, laughing, and, finally, holding hands. If their cause doesn’t move you, McCaffrey shows (rather than tells) why their politics matter. After the protest, McCaffrey cuts to a long shot of a forest, utterly silent and still. The frame holds for several beats, luxuriating in the majesty of the impressive trees. A bird trills somewhere in the cloudless ether. This is the “do” of which Mother Superior spoke—participating in the making of, and looking at, the world.

Reflecting on his pairing of these two films, First Look’s Senior Programmer Edo Choi says:

Brigid’s film confronts the question of how we might continue to live in our industrially scarred world in a more authentically and ethically rooted way, and it does this specifically through the lens of the experience of several women living in or working with the California redwoods. Likewise, Ewelina’s film emerges from her and her collaborator Nuno Barroso’s association with artists and eco-activists working at the margins of Portuguese society. I might describe the grammar of both these works as back-to-basics avant-garde filmmaking with an emphasis on the peculiar tonal and rhythmic reveries one can only achieve through the textures of 16 mm film. What’s so thrilling about the way these films speak to each other and to our present is how their intimate, handmade means feel so aptly scaled to the lives of their subjects.

As Choi notes, these films achieve “intimate, handmade means” by choosing 16 mm film as their medium. In Unstable Rocks, evidence of the celluloid’s materiality appears in white scratches that periodically rent the frame of vultures in the sky like heat lightning. In our accelerated attention economy, the physical act of slowing down—whether by working with hand-processed film, farming, or writing poetry—is a radical act of resistance. Each act requires patience over long passages of time. By engaging with such analog material, the director must endure the period between what is shot and when it is subsequently seen. In other words, there is a politics to this filmmaking that embodies the slowness these films purport we must embrace in order to socially and spiritually thrive.

In Körte’s 1969 text A Generation of Loveshe writes, “walk with me in / another spelled light / too tentative for / speaking // it is enough / to be / aware to that touch / inside the limitless / confines of your hand.” Körte’s poetry, often marked by a fierce attentiveness to the natural world, also intertwines moments of the quotidian and the sublime. In her penultimate line “inside the limitless,” she offers up a paradox to her reader. There is no inside or outside of the infinite, no “confines” to an immeasurable force that always already surrounds us. And yet.

Körte unifies this impossible idea by cradling the three words (unbroken by enjambment) on a single line. Unstable Rocks and Sanctuary Station similarly offer up seemingly impossible ways of being. Shot in “spelled light,” these environments undulate, glisten, or team with larvae, insects, and faunae; a praying mantis scuttles down the side of a computer; the camera pierces the smallest of spaces, like the inside of poppy, charred black like cinders, or tilts up to revel in the magnificent, furred redwood trunks. In her director’s statement, Rosinska notes that Unstable Rocks“was composed in a very intuitive way.” The pleasure of her film is in the details of where that intuition takes her.

When was the last time you looked up, waded in a tidal pool, or imagined (as Wittgenstein does) the sensations of stones? Though each of these actions offers no material gain or political solution, what they do offer is reverie, attention, and light. Thus, through their medium and subject matter, Unstable Rocks and Sanctuary Station invite new opportunities for how we look, and ethically live, in our increasingly uninhabitable world.

Unstable Rocks (Ewelina Rosinska, 2024)

German filmmaker Ewelina Rosinska is one of the few artists to have emerged on the scene in the last ten or fifteen years who has commanded attention almost immediately. She is a consensus favorite, someone whose films are so meticulous and accomplished that they almost seem to take form right in front of your eyes. She exhibits a classical sense of aesthetics that makes one think of Robert Beavers. But her rhythmically astute editing is more like Warren Sonbert, in that she combines shots in ways no one else would think of, but those edits then seem entirely obvious, as if there were no other logical way for the images to be joined.

Unstable Rocksis Rosinska's longest film to date, and it encompasses many of the predilections found in her previous works. She is interested with landscape and architecture, but frequently toggles between regarding those spaces as abstract forms, and examining them historically and anthropologically, considering their cultural use. Unstable Rockswas shot in Portugal, and one gets the sense of Rosinska's fascination with a landscape not her own. The first part of the film follows birds in the sky, allowing their flight patterns to organize her camera movements. But then she expands on this avian theme, showing dead birds on the ground, as well as owls, kestrels, and cranes, all being handled and rehabilitated by human hands. This connection -- nature both free of and tied to the human world -- is one that Rosinska explores across the entire film.

There's a disparate array of material in this film, one that sometimes suggests a more conventional type of travelogue. But Rosinska zeroes in on the relationships between two different elements: rocks and water, animals and objects, people and the landscape. This gives her quite a lot of latitude when it comes to editing, since she can either carry one type of subject matter through to the next shot, or the absence of the previous material can be inexplicably felt in the subsequent images. Additionally, Rosinska makes very odd, contrapuntal use of sound, sometimes musical, at other times ambient, but always in a manner that brings out some latent compositional element in the image track.

This is a film I've seen three times and I'm still figuring it out. But one thing stays on my mind. The title of the film comes from a sign warning people to take care in a field of boulders. They are stacked like giant cairns, and so we understand that their instability was the result of human artistry, or some spiritual inclination. We make our mark in the landscape and destabilize it. This is a pretty good summation of what Rosinska does to the things she films.

Ashes by Name is Man (Ewelina Rosińska, Germany / Poland)

This is a film that is attempting something rather new, and as a result it took me a couple of viewings to really understand Rosińska's overall approach. In its broadest sense, Ashes by Name is Man is an expansive formalist study of the place of the Catholic Church in Poland, how it impresses itself upon the landscape and embodies its precepts in architecture. But it is also an observational portrait of an elderly couple, seen at home, walking in the woods, and in the final shot, peeling an apple. One speaks of "going to church," but one doesn't always consider how the church comes to you, how a life of habitual faith can moot distinctions between culture and personality. In its firm handheld cinematography and regard for light, Rosińska's film shows the possible influences of Robert Beavers and Ute Aurand. But where Beavers typically restricts himself to a small number of elements and organizes them into a fugue, or Aurand composes even her longer works out of brief, complete ideas, Rosińska seems to apply Peleshian's "distance montage" concept, creating relationships that tug at our mind's ability to fully perceive them. One of the year's most challenging works, and indeed one of the best.

First Look is Museum of the Moving Image’s annual showcase for “adventurous new cinema.” The programs have historically shed light on some of the most exciting new voices in film, and this year proved the same with featuring works by folks who deserve to be heralded as major voices in the avant-garde and beyond. This year, the festival ran from March 15th to 19th, and films are also again throughout this weekend. Below, find reviews of 13 different films that screened at the 2023 edition of MoMI’s First Look.

Earth in the Mouth (2020) and Ashes by Name is Man (2023) are diary films which transcend the autobiographical nature of the form.

Ewelina Rosińska’s films, both receiving their North American premiere this month, are built from elements which individually have an intimate and observational character: the interactions of friends and family, church services, travel, a gravestone sharing the artist’s last name. But Rosińska arranges her material more in the manner of musical forms than of narrative, crafting rich but ambiguous layers of meaning from their harmonies and dissonances. She invites the audience to engage with that meaning actively and critically rather than to share in a lived history.

The films are musical in more than just the metaphorical sense. Sound is key to their confident rhythm and formal cohesion. A piece of audio will last through a number of cuts, tying a sequence together and shaping its inflection. In Earth in the Mouth, sound and image have a contrapuntal relationship which is largely syncopated but allows for added emphasis when they sync up. Frequent changes in the source and character of the sound create a soundscape on equal footing with the photography. Sometimes the music is diegetic, as when a choral piece begins and a few shots later the film cuts to the choir singing it, but other times the sound is independent from the images, or even sharply contrasts it, as when a synthy new-wave song plays while the camera shows an organist playing for a church service. In one stunning sequence, the film goes completely silent while a rock band is shown rehearsing.

If Earth in the Mouth is something like an intricate baroque suite, Ashes by Name is Man is closer to a mass: solemn and contemplative. Its rhythms are much slower, its editing less circumspect, and while it employs several pieces of sacred music, its sound relies more on natural soundscapes than on a score. Despite these differences, the two films are of a piece in their search for the symbolic threads connecting spiritual life, personal relationships, politics, and the land. Ashes connects Catholic iconography with the Polish landscape, the artist’s grandparents with the ceremonies and architecture of the church; Earth contains multiple sequences that cut between the root systems of trees or collections of seashells and the singing of church choirs or the raising of a flag, and switches deftly between these sequences and scenes of friends and family enjoying casual moments at home or on the lakefront. Both films use visual motifs of fruit, birds, books, and cemeteries to represent cycles of life and culture as connected to the land.

Rosińska’s films eschew clarity of detail in favor of more universal ideas, but in a certain way it feels as though we get to know the artist better for it. We don’t learn about the facts of her life and relationships in the way we would in a Jonas Mekas-style diary film, but instead see the aesthetic and intellectual concerns that preoccupy her mind and structure her practice. Toward the end of Earth in the Mouth, we’re shown a page of a critical theory book with an underlined passage that reads, “Autonomy is an ideal which capitalist society itself brings forth but which cannot be realized under it. The autonomy of the individual is a necessary illusion of the capitalist mode of production…” This passage resonates with Rosińska’s approach in these films: to understand other people, we must understand the physical and social landscape which produced them and continues to reproduce them.

Mauro Lukasievicz: Allowing a dialogue between nature and urbanity by mixing all the mysticism and religion it can contain is not an easy task. How did the idea for Ashes By Name Is Man come about?

Ewelina Rosinska: My general practice is to collect images without a specific film project in mind, but there are still certain motives that are the driving force behind my work. So what you see in the film was shot in a state that involves the very contradictory attitudes of controlling and not controlling the process of making the images.

The footage for 'Ashes by name is man' was collected between 2017 and 2021 and revolves around a theme that has been very important to me for many years, which is the feeling of growing up in Poland, where the process of forming a national identity has never lost its importance, and where war (mainly the Second World War) and post-war history are constantly present. When thinking about national identity in this place, the institution of the state and the Catholic Church have been inextricably linked for centuries. The extreme national Catholic narrative, characterized by the victim myth and national pride in the country between Eastern and Western Europe, continues to influence generations in Poland, leaving people in a state of inner confusion. Various strategies for deconstructing this feeling have been very helpful in overcoming this inner conflict, up to the point of immersing myself in stereotypical images of the state and religion, familiar rituals or emblems that project historical or spiritual greatness. After their previous rejection, I wanted to reclaim all these elements and highlight my personal relationship with them. Within this approach, I decided to play with my affinity for nostalgia, spiritualism, drama or pathos.

During my visits to historically charged places, animals began to appear in front of my camera. Intuitively, I began to film them, seeing them as a kind of protagonist of temporality, highlighting the existence of the environment and sometimes feeling like a messenger between the infinite and the present. Just like the two old characters who are my links with the history of the last century.

ML: Between the mixture of the ancestral and the current, there is a certain tension at all times, between the urban invading nature or nature invading the urban. How did you decide what material to use and what was the final editing process like?

ER: Since I don't work with a script, the film only emerged during the editing process. At the beginning of this process, I decided to use four main categories to guide me through the collected material: State Power, Religion, City, and Nature. I would call this a vertical orientation, referring more to meanings, symbols, or metaphors. As a horizontal line, I decided to follow the chronology of the four seasons, starting with spring. With these two patterns in mind, the editing of images and sound is largely based on my intuition, sense of rhythm and a certain flow. There is also a strong level of personal history, you can see my grandparents in the film. This level relates to their experiences, their state of mind, and their memories. If one knew their history, one would recognize certain elements of their lives.

ML: Why did you decide to film in 16mm?

ER: Since 2016 I've been shooting mainly with 16mm and I always find the colors that come out and the ability of the material to transmit a certain light very impressive. I think this beauty, the magic of the sun, and chemistry are the main reasons for my choice of this medium.

“Las cenizas de un ritual”

En muchos aspectos, la convivencia entre urbanidad y naturaleza permite el diálogo de imágenes que suscitan una relación, en el sentido de un montaje armónico que establece analogías y diferencias, pero también una distancia de cómo esas planos pueden generar una ruptura con sensaciones propias de un modernidad que tiene la posibilidad de registrar aquel mismo diálogo establecido y ahí definir una narración, un contraste. De este modo, un síntesis mística y religiosa se interpone para tratar de homologar ambas.

Es el caso del cortometraje Ashes by name is man de Ewelina Rosinska, donde la convivencia entre ruralidad y sus entornos suscita una interrelación y una convivencia donde el ser humano se encuentra dentro. Entonces, se establece una serie de imágenes con cierta reminiscencia melancólica circunscritas a un microcosmos que bien podría simbolizar la comunicación entre una especie y su contexto en términos místicos.

El inicio muestra alguien tocando el piano en un claroscuro pictórico como advirtiendo el tono nostálgico que recorrerá el corto. De ahí en más, la campiña se establece como el punto de partida y de referencia para una sucesión de cuadros que evidencia una armonía entre naturaleza y pueblo, entre lo salvaje y lo urbano. Sin embargo, esta relación también se erige sobre un carácter ritual y espiritual. De esta manera, las escenas que se vinculan con el pueblo son de orden religioso, ya sea rezando en una iglesia o una procesión. Si la naturaleza es y supo ser elemento mítico y religioso, de adoración y de devoción, también se nos muestra esa conversión hacia lo que efectivamente terminó imponiéndose en la cultura occidental. Por ende, imágenes de cristo, de gente arrodillada con las palmas en el gesto de rezo, de cruces, de sacerdotes, se interponen con las del sol, la luna, el bosque y el mar.

La iglesia y el afuera se fundan en esa sinfonía de planos que atraviesa no solo la relación simbiótica sino también tensionada y apesadumbrada. Al calor de un sol de verano o la frescura de la luna, también puede haber desolación y soledad. Así, lo humano se cola en lo natural para habitarlo en términos de espacio y de escena, en una convivencia para consigo mismo y para con su entorno silvestre. Es en estos rituales que se arraiga la pertenencia tanto a un plano terrenal como celestial. Las cenizas y el cementerio entonces encarnan esa conexión astral y ancestral donde la tierra recibe esos cuerpos para luego alimentar las raíces mismas de una civilización.

La cámara, con sus movimientos y sus planos fijos, registra pretendiendo dilucidar una aparente comunión con aquello que filma y observa, desde posiciones variadas siguiendo un ritmo in crescendo que está al orden de un montaje rítmico que sabe cuando tensarse y aflojarse.

Las texturas y los paisajes sugieren contrastes y paralelismos donde lo católico y lo natural se funden en un postura barroca que culmina con el corte de un cuchillo que más que pelar una manzana, está preparando el fruto de su propia cosecha.

Ópera prima

Quisiera señalar la importancia de un cortometraje

Ashes by Name is Man (Ewelina Rosinska).

Ya se proyectó en Alemania, pero tendrá su estreno internacional en la próxima edición de Rotterdam. Se trata de una impresionante película experimental en 16 mm, en la tradición de Jonas Mekas o Ute Aurand, pero que ha encontrado su propio lenguaje. Impresionista, con un sorprendente sentido del montaje y del movimiento de cámaraque puede apreciarse en sunivel rítmico, es un retrato muy subjetivo de una región del sudeste de Polonia y de las personas, plantas y animales que la habitan.Película erigida en «destellos de belleza» que hipnotizan; me conmovió mucho.

Erde im Mund begins with the comforting clanking of hooves. Not only has our image moved into the higher fidelity of 16mm, we are now basking in sound—until a scene of a filmed band practice is brilliantly rendered in silence (and black and white, which weaves throughout the mostly-color film seamlessly). Rosińska’s camera captures her travels in a diaristic mode, yet in place of a Mekasian frenzy we are treated to a more deliberate approach to movement, careful to present photographed reality wherein the montage produces new associations alongside movements of a higher velocity which only smear the image on occasion. The soundtrack moves in and out of complementary resonance, never working against the image but never perfectly synchronous either; a shot of fabrics is set to the sound of their previously being torn, a shot of an iron to the sound of its potential for steam emission, the pouring of champagne set to the sound of its bottle being opened. It’s a subtle play with temporality, and one which is carefully nested into a film about the endless playful possibilities of life.