Its Unbroken Marvelous Curve
During a recent conversation with my predecessor Sarah Minor, now the video essay editor at Brink, Minor inspired me to think about language in video essays as a texture or a character. Our conversation reminded me of when I studied video essays at the University of Iowa with Corey Creekmur, and I saw first kogonada’s beautiful collage of various shots of hands in the films of Robert Bresson. kogonada’s film, devoid of voiceover or text on screen, prodded me to ask, How can a video essay convey an idea without saying anything? What can montage do in place of language? These questions were at the forefront of my mind when curating the 2025 summer issue for TriQuarterly. Each of these three films are preoccupied with language to varying degrees, though not every film coheres around the communicability of language. Rather, language is both legible and indecipherable, a grain and a feeling, something that narrates and something that obscures. I’m thrilled to continue to think through this multimodality genre that can break apart or sculpt language anew through the lens of Katherine Franco, Rana San, and Auden Lincoln-Vogel’s work.
Filmed on black and white 16mm, Auden Lincoln-Vogel’s cinepoem Its Unbroken Marvelous Curve is an elliptical exploration of surfaces and landscapes that includes the celluloid on which this film is made, as well as words that flash across the frame. Though the film begins in darkness, we fade in and out of an almost ghost-like desertscape before the words begin to appear one by one in bright, harsh bursts. With a soundscape that seems to be an optical soundtrack (a sound recording physically printed on the film itself), Its Unbroken Marvelous Curve is less about what is revealed and more about what is withheld. The words’ appearance, punctuated by a grainy thump of noise, do not offer answers to the images (which gradually depict a skatepark), but, rather, demonstrate how the juxtaposition of words and images can create a dialectic few other mediums can achieve. Brace yourself for the bristling visual and aural impact.
