VERDICT: Malena Szlam uses in-camera editing to craft an evocative 16mm exploration of Australia’s vast central eastern ranges and their deep geological time.
Geological history is brought beautifully to life in Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya.
In early 2022, an eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano in the Tongan archipelago caused tsunamis across the southern Pacific Ocean. Its afterglow also lit up the mountains of the central eastern ranges of Australia, as depicted in Malena Szlam’s documentary film. Combining imagery of these illuminated peaks with other visuals of the surrounding landscapes from the Gondwana Rainforest to Mount Beerwah, Szlam conjures a beguiling sense of the landscape’s deep history and the geological forces – not unlike the eruption – that originally shaped it. The eponymous Bunya Mountains were themselves the result of volcanic activity millions of years ago.
Szlam’s deployment of overlaid footage using in-camera multiple-exposures, creates a visual manifestation of spatial and temporal movement within the landscape. On some occasions these are implied – two shots of the same outcropping are framed someone askew, implying the slow drift of the mountain across the screen, carried by tectonic shifts. At other times, a still and serene panorama is set against a panning shot that makes the movement feel literal and happening before your eyes. In other instances, still, the shake of the camera and the flicker of the shutter forge a febrile energy that emanates from the rocks. Further still, the images of the mountains cast aglow by the remnants of recent volcanic activity puts the impact of such activity into sharp relief.
The film’s intensely felt evocations are partly due to the incredible soundscapes created by the Australian artist Lawrence English, to which Szlam sets her images to. These include the teeming chirrups of forest life, to other less tangible audio that suggests the slow grind of shifting rocks and earth. Archipelago of Earthen Bones flattens time, to bring deep history into the present, but it also flattens the nature of our planet, combining the life that exist on the landscape with the geology itself. Szlam’s film might be wordless, and intentional unexplained, but it has a rumbling elemental power that is difficult to resist.