Blake Williams remains one of my favorite experimental filmmakers working today. His use of 3-D and the exploration of this medium remains unique and unparalleled in contrast to many of his contemporaries. He is his own one-man crew on many of his productions, oftentimes not just directing, but also doing the sound, the cinematography and his own editing. He may not have the budget or the means to compete with the more commercial 3-D fare that Hollywood tends to churn out every now and then, but his ideas are always interesting, and they’re vast. A lot of the appeal of his movies feels intuitive on the surface – I feel like you could show many of his films to an audience unacquainted with experimental cinema, and they may find themselves blown away by some of its details even if they may not understand where all of it is coming from – this is the case even for someone like myself, as I wouldn’t exactly define myself as an expert on experimental cinema or anything of that sort. These two particular films – PROTOTYPE and Laberint Sequences – only serve to show the full depth of Williams’ work and his creative vision.

In PROTOTYPE, Blake Williams himself said during his Q&A that he was looking to explore the idea of cinema being a database, about experiences without needing to adhere to a defined timeline. There is a loose narrative going on that reinforces many of the images in the film, a personal one connected to Williams’ own grandparents and their village – although this is not something that can easily be inferred by the film itself. We start with photos of the 1900 Galveston hurricane aftermath, its devastation over the land. The film shifts to multiple analog TV screens, the only sources of light within the pitch black darkness. These screens start displaying other black-and-white footage, some foregrounded over others at the same time. There’s something haunting about looking at this assortment of footage in this way, with the people we see on these screens appearing like ghosts wandering around these various interiors. It gives the effect of peering through an old museum full of memories of people and things long gone if that museum was at the edge of the universe – in fact it is no coincidence that there’s also a shot here involving people wandering through a museum exhibit. The very images within these screens also contain so much endless depth within the three-dimensional space it’s like you’re peering out a window instead of watching a TV. I’m thinking in particular of a shot of clouds high up in the sky, framed through one of the TV screens as if you’re really watching the clouds out of an airplane window. But it’s also more than that – we also get some black-and-white binocular rivalry effects where the black and white colours blend together in ways that are very hard to describe using just words, as well as odd compositions like an off-centre close-up of a statue, or tidal waves curving around the surface as if we’re watching them from the edges of the Earth. The latter in particular seems to be the beginning of a recurring motif that would appear again in FELT.

As for Laberint Sequences, it’s like if you could make many possible variations of a film about a certain topic – in this case, the subject matter being about navigating through a maze – except if you put all these variations together into one movie. What’s most impressive about it is that it’s only around 20 minutes long, and yet the film does so much with so little. Much of the film takes place in the Laberint d’Horta in Barcelona, as Blake Williams’ camera takes us through the maze, its plants and trees, its fountains and the tourists walking around. It’s hard not to think about the connection to Jean Luc Godard’s work experimenting with 3-D in films like Goodbye to Language, with the appearance of the fountains and the depth of water plus the objects in them. A lot of the camerawork is less about getting us to explore the physical dimensions of the space, or about getting ‘lost’ inside the maze itself, but rather about manipulating these dimensions and getting lost within those manipulations of the space. To illustrate this with an example, one such sequence feels like the image of the maze folding in on itself, like peering inside a 3D image within an angled planar surface bouncing around the screen. Later on the film incorporates footage from a much older 3D film titled The Maze involving two women trying to navigate a maze using a candle. Much of this footage is also manipulated, as we get a segment featuring Deragh Campbell who is sitting there watching the footage and provides voice dubbing for the dialogue of the characters in replacement of the original recordings. There’s a moment where the outlines and silhouettes of the picture slowly disintegrate through flashing bright colours and lights, a very cool effect if a little hard to describe in words – as is the case for many other scenes in this film that will leave you in awe.

The overall effect of these works is incredibly immersive and boundary-pushing – maybe not in the way that James Cameron is trying to innovate with regards to 3D (and motion capture) technology, but it’ll make you see the world in a much different way. If you’re looking for cinema that will warp your perception of what it is that film has to offer as an artistic medium, look no further than these two films.