Water, Earth, Fire, Wind: The Elements of Film

Mid-October saw a shift in temperatures, the turn of leaves, and a tilt in the angle of the sun. The seasons weren’t the only thing changing—so was my entire understanding of film.

The Department of Modern Culture and Media’s Elemental Media Lab recently hosted the 2024 Elemental Media Conference. One of the events of the three-day conference was the Elemental Film Screening programmed by Adel Ben Bella and Irene Rihuete-Varea, which I had the pleasure of attending 

The four short films I experienced that day, selected to represent each of the four elements, have fundamentally changed how I think about film as a medium. I believe in an education of experience and observation, and so in my efforts to forgo film school, I try to learn something from every story I cross paths with; every theater is my teacher, and every screen presents a lesson. I learned four lessons from the Elemental Film Screening.

Lesson 1: Film is as much about listening as looking.

Mati Diop’s Atlantiques is about a group of Senegalese friends recounting a life-threatening boat crossing. Much of the film is set at night on the beach around a fire—where all good stories are told. Very few shots comprise the film. For most of them, the camera is still. Suddenly I wasn’t paying attention to what the camera wanted me to look at, but what was happening within the frame. Without jumping from visual to visual, I could sit with the characters. I could listen instead of only seeing, and what I heard was haunting. Atlantiques’s element in this screening was water, but I didn’t see the water so much as I heard it. It is ever-present; the sound of waves beneath the characters’ dialogue. The ocean is on their minds as much as it is on mine, and it is powerful for its simplicity.

Lesson 2: Film is simply images, one after the other.

Next was earth. Elisabeth Leuvrey’s At(h)ome broke film as a medium down to its essence: still images that occur in a sequence we perceive as movement. In At(h)ome, however, we stay with the photos—one after the other—portraits of people as we listen to their accounts of what happened to their home in the Algerian Sahara after French bomb testing. With other photos, of the landscape and abandoned buildings, we hear the narration of the photographer. The stills captured something I don’t think moving images could have.

Lesson 3: Film is made of light, and light is color.

The third film, El nido del sol from Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, represents fire. Like fire, it is alive, created from overlaying a fluttering hummingbird and the sun—the ultimate life-giving fire. In a mesmerizing dance of light and color, energy seems to emanate from the screen, following no discernable narrative and instead embracing the vast spectrum of visible light. Film is not a dead medium. Paper is dead. Film is made of light and all that that light contains, and filmmakers can take full advantage of it. Film is hyper-reality; it shouldn’t be limited to recording reality but enhancing it.

Lesson 4: Film is allowed to be poetic.

The final short film, Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, was the wind selection for the Elemental Film Screening, and it told the history and nature of Chile’s Atacama Desert. It was different from any kind of filmed piece I’ve ever seen. The elemental triangles appeared on the screen to represent the sounds one might not be able to hear—like the wind sharpening its teeth. The subtitles were poetry, unfettered from ideas like “show don’t tell” or “realistic dialogue.” Providing words granted sounds new meaning because poetry is meant to help us interpret such things.

The words that linger most in my mind are, “When the blackouts come, we’ll remember exactly what we’re made of.” They remind me of how much film has changed in my lifetime. Technology has reimagined what a filmmaker can do and what a film can be, and as I have imagined becoming part of the world of filmmakers, I feel a nostalgia for a past I cannot be a part of—when movies were passion projects, when you had to see something in a theater to see it at all. I wonder how on Earth I find my place in this technological era when I don’t know whether or not I want to embrace—or must embrace—its obsession with buttons in order to succeed.

I think of blackouts, and I remind myself of what film is made of: sound and silence, stillness and movement, light and dark, words and symbols. The elements of film are no technological wonder, but the same elements through which we perceive our world.

In “Water, Earth, Fire, Wind: The Elements of Film,” Nat Konowicz explores the elemental nature of film by reflecting on her experience at the 2024 Elemental Media Conference. The piece delves into both the profound impact of the short film and the ways in which cinematic techniques can mirror the elemental forces that shape our world.