Blake Williams and any consistency which forms a set
FELT
a film directed by Blake Williams and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 4–14, 2025
Blake Williams’s recent filmography is composed using anaglyph colour filters—the 3D effect produced by a stereoscope of chromatic opposites. FELT is first and foremost 3D, and only really a film as a secondary effect of images being in some time-perception. This is to say, it’s an excellent film. You can intuit immediately an ambient world-ness through the two-fold movement of each image:
- The emancipation of the mobile camera through the somewhat stochastic recollection of purposeless Americana.
- The stereoscopic depth of multiple overlaid images presented in the same duration of time, which is manipulated to create a dense sensory-motor situation. For instance, the shadow of a fly on a windowpane might be displaced deep into the foreground of a long stretch of highway, and so the relative conditions of these distances coexist in a state of anxiety.
It’s a difficult movie to recommend—how many pairs of 3D glasses do you have in your home? At one point, the narrative digresses into the audiovisual omnipresence of telecommunications; the free-floating telephone wire becomes the camera’s muse, and, accompanied by electromagnetic field recordings, is expertly posed in America’s greatest sightseeing locales. Williams establishes each of these irregularities as a small-scale artifact of an abstract and self-similar distance, reproducing distances of road and distances of memory at various levels of a structure of general filmic recollection. Blake Williams assembles the Grand Canyon into a rich diversity of spatial perceptions, and the viewer is thought within this pseudo-organism’s vibrations or their apprehension of the film’s structural integrity.
I found FELT abruptly and enduringly arresting. I think taking the time to screen films like this—films that have logistical or economic obstacles preventing their mass distribution—should be the primary draw of TIFF, especially in a media sphere already so overdetermined by the aura of exclusivity and the speculative financial value of each cinematic decision. FELT’s central drive involves brief interludes of the director, as conveyed by a point-of-view shot, folding a single plane of origami paper into sub-multiplies of peaks and valleys. It’s one of those beautiful movies that proceeds entirely without objects, and just elaborates on the state of the composition, a kind of labour we can then encounter on our own terms. Really, FELT is one of the finest among the legacy products of so-called structural film—the movement of Snow, Frampton, Brakhage, Wieland, etc.—only reformulated towards today’s prevailing politics of ongoing spatial collapse.
I would also recommend Blake Williams’s website (blakewilliams.net), where you can access his assembled writings and videos. It’s a shame that, year after year, Wavelengths is further reduced into the festival’s novelty niche despite its programming so consistently offering Toronto’s most singular encounters with film as a medium. This year, previews of up-coming television series were given far higher weights of TIFF’s total screen time than the Wavelength programme, which pretty clearly demonstrates the festival’s endemic capitulation to the industry of movies, rather than the watching of movies. Regardless, FELT is perfect termite art, to borrow Manny Farber’s terminology. The entire particularly of America’s mythology is available to Williams’s omnivorous diet, even extending this buglike immersion in the process of filmmaking to an audience member’s disorientation in the chromatic aberrations that produce Williams’s 3D image; that is, if you accept the exaggeration of depth as a useful distortion of the cinematic environment, rather than a ’life-like’ gimmick. FELT inevitability culminates in this process of distortion, losing its objects entirely, instead hanging on the relational logic by which some structure (the Grand Canyon, the 2024 election) can meaningly contribute to a common mould of peaks and valleys without actually necessitating any particular mould. What’s striking about FELT is its extensibility across mould-to-mould distances, the exactitude of images being replaced with other images which we’re only beginning to seriously consider as a formalisation of whatever it is that we cannot experience immediately. In that sense, FELT is quite difficult to recommend. You should absolutely find some avenue to watch it.