Some artists build careers over decades; others arrive and strike hard. Stom Sogo, who once described his movies as “mental eye candy that taste[s] sweet first” and produces a “seizure second,” belongs to this latter camp. His films propel images and sounds together in improvisational bursts, piling into dense, jittery assemblages that refuse to sit still. The works featured in Anthology Film Archives’ two tribute screenings—spanning the last decade-plus of the filmmaker’s life, 2000 to 2012—shift between Super-8 and digital video without ever reconciling their dissonant parts. Instead, they hurl deep-fried imagery and high-voltage sonics at each other, reveling in the shock of collision and the dizzying energy it generates.
This throw-shit-against-the-wall-regardless-of-whether-it-sticks approach hits hardest in Sogo’s shorter works. Ya Private Sky (2001), a three-minute-and-change flicker film set to high-pitched screeches and shrieks, exemplifies this as Sogo condenses his fascination with sensory overload into a disciplined, explosive blast that erupts in a flash of prismatic brilliance. Repeat (2006), which closes the first program, escalates these impulses into a 10-minute torrent, propelling overlapping imagery and sound at lightning speed, shifting from a club interior through what might be a hand-painted Brakhage imagined in Microsoft Paint, and finally out into a nighttime city street. The real thrill lies in the piece’s self-propelling descent, revealing the endless possibilities inherent in each fracture and abstraction, every shift in texture or color suggesting a dozen equally plausible trajectories of what might suddenly appear.
These sensibilities, distilled to their purest form, strike the central nervous system with surgical precision. In his longer works, Sogo’s method exposes a brittle, exacting logic. Culled largely from his personal video diaries, P.S. When You Thought You Are Going To Die (2003) unfolds as a restless, uneven chronicle of his final years in New York. Moments of visual corruption punctuate this obsessive ledger and the closing long take of an unsuspecting couple embracing stretches interminably, generating taut, almost unbearable suspense, as if something terrible might happen—but it never does. Slow Death (2000), true to its title, luxuriates over deteriorating Super-8 textures, allowing grain and decay to assert themselves before detonating into a multicolored light show. Here, Sogo trades the jolt of instantaneous shock for sustained accumulation—and yet, still, even when approaching the end, you’re left with the undeniable sense that just about anything could happen next.
“A Tribute to Stom Stogo” screens January 17-18 at Anthology Film Archives.
