*09/05/1982 *(Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo, 2025).

Thirteen years ago, in a lecture delivered at the University of Chicago, art historian T. J. Clark departed from photos of the then recent London riots to ruminate on possible answers to a straightforward, complicated question: “What would it be like for the image-world of our present societies to begin to fail—fail to convince or at least enchant, to direct desire and therefore oil the wheels of consumption?” In an introduction appended to the transcript—collected in Clark’s new book of essays, Those Passions—he recognizes that the events of the intervening decade, “the age of Xi Jinping and QAnon and Trump” (we might add TikTok and Gaza and AI and ICE), mean that his concerns “may already appear…well, light-hearted,” as irony is now unmistakably “the enemy’s weapon.” But Clark maintains that he was onto something when he speculated that late capitalism’s hold on its subjects is only tightened when it invites them “not to believe in the imagery of happiness and unhappiness on offer, but to relish that disbelief (that expertise) as consumerism’s highest wisdom.”

As overt authoritarianism and the collapse of reality consensus become evermore constitutive of our lived experience, art can no longer reasonably imagine itself as detached from capitalism’s broader image-world. Any reckoning with the crisis, or at least the listlessness, of the visual arts today has to face up to this dynamic of disbelief, the descent of irony into a gleeful nihilism. We might hope that the type of work the New York Film Festival’s Currents program exists to house—”new voices and inventive artists who are reshaping the language of cinema,” as the marketing copy has it—would be a source of useful framings and approaches, if not answers or ways out. It would be naïve to imagine that art can do politics in any meaningful sense, but we might at least expect it to picture the world, clarifying or condensing or travestying or rejecting it, in ways that make useful activity more available. To borrow again from Clark, “Politics is action, yes; but action always involves the invention—the renewal—of a language. Politics is practice plus persuasiveness. It is building an imagery to oppose the present.” And that gets at the deeper problem for our artists: to make work that’s as compelling as the best art of the past, to arrive at an imagery strong enough to oppose the present, they have to figure out how to make belief out of disbelief. It’s easy to be critical about the state of things—much recent art finally seems little more than criticism by other means—but what we need goes beyond this. To gloss Clark one last time, for art to be seriously engaged with the political, for it to have any shot at pointing beyond cynical content and disbelief, it must also succeed as art.

*Acetone Reality *(Sara Magenheimer and Michael Bell-Smith, 2025).

Across the sixteen features and twenty-four shorts in this year’s Currents lineup—many of which, in keeping with the program’s established tone, took up explicitly political subject matter—only a handful struck me as unmitigated artistic successes, demanding and holding my attention intensely enough that I was obliged to believe in them.1 Some people call this beauty. But even the failures often felt like useful opportunities to think about what I expect and hope for from art, to question why exactly they failed to compel me, what could have made things otherwise.

The most common formal strategy, one that unites works of wildly different sensibilities, is a direct engagement with image technologies, with the ways that the tones and textures offered by various tools for producing pictures can be marshaled in service of conceptual and thematic meaning, an interest that sometimes borders on fetish. This isn’t a matter of old-fashioned modernist medium specificity or the postmodern knowingness that replaced it. No one is now saying “This is all an image should be,” or “See, it’s just an image.” Both of those claims are insufficient to our present image-world. We need a new kind of irony, one that recognizes the exhaustion of the image’s power, takes it as a given, and then works not to reenchant the act of picturing, but to find new ways it can be made to communicate. There were glimpses here of what that new irony might look like.

Let’s start with two of the program’s major titles, Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf and Radu Jude’s *Dracula *(all films 2025 unless otherwise noted). While both were disappointments to my mind, they nevertheless would have improved the quality of a lackluster Main Slate. They marked out the two ends of the year’s tonal spectrum: Everything else could comfortably be placed somewhere between Koberidze’s gentle, wistful landscape studies and Jude’s crass, chaotic descent into brain rot. But despite their contrasting tones, weird similarities can be found, even beyond their shared use of long duration (both around three hours) as an immersive tactic.

*Dry Leaf *(Alexandre Koberidze, 2025).

Returning—after the relative sheen of *What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? *(2021), shot on 16mm and HD video—to the extremely low resolution of the Sony Ericsson (a mid-aughts phone camera) that he used on his first feature, *Let the Summer Never Come Again *(2017), Koberidze’s low-key epic grounds its tour of rural Georgia in a simple family scenario. A photojournalist has disappeared after abandoning an assignment to photograph the country’s makeshift soccer pitches, and her father sets out with a companion (who is, depending on your taste, either charmingly or tediously invisible) to retrace her planned itinerary in the hope of finding her. That’s the extent of the story; it’s enough to get Koberidze from one field or village to the next.

Much of the writing on Dry Leaf to date has invoked Impressionist painting when discussing Koberidze’s photography of these desolate rural locales, but this gets both the Impressionists and Koberidze profoundly wrong. The painters, working in the wake of Delacroix (and Romanticism more broadly), were looking for a way to acknowledge human vision as fundamental to making any true picture of a landscape. Koberidze’s project, in contrast, depends entirely on making his technical mediation conspicuous, and his means for doing so—the Ericsson, with its 260p resolution, 15fps shooting rate, and limited color range—comes between the viewer and the subject of his depiction in every frame. Its handling of light, the way it pushes these arid landscapes toward a range of burnished ochres and pale yellow-greens shot through with harsh, blown-out highlights and shallow shadows, does perhaps warrant a comparison with the Monet of the Haystacks, and with Félix Fénéon’s withering criticism of those pictures: that they make nature grimace—that is, strain under the demand to put on its most striking face.

However much I disliked Koberidze’s images, I was at least as taken by the way in which they draw out and deepen the film’s survey of post-Soviet rural life. It’s not just a matter of using an outdated technology to show places left behind and emptied by modernization. More than anything, Dry Leaf reminded me of the experience of watching films on miserable video rips via torrent trackers in the years when the Ericsson was still a cutting-edge piece of technology. While I assume Koberidze knows Hito Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image” by heart (that canonical piece of media criticism is now, somehow, almost as old as his camera), his film’s sentimentality gives it a new aspect. In the age of low-effort “digital restorations” and a booming streaming economy, the circulation of “poor images”—which continues unabated—acts more as a kind of curatorial farm system than it does as a space for “disruptive movements of thought and affect.” There’s no danger of Dry Leaf disrupting anything. What’s productive about Koberidze’s use of the Ericsson isn’t that it betrays its obsolescence or jams flows of capital, but that it creates uncanny, intriguing images with a sense of having a history, a sense that harmonizes with both the real and imagined people missing from these landscapes.

*Dracula *(Radu Jude, 2025).

Dracula appears to stake out whatever the opposite is of Koberidze’s effort to find a renewed humanism. In the film, a Romanian director has been commissioned to adapt his country’s most visible national myth. Having had his version rejected by the producers—it involves a burlesque dinner theater where guests bid to bed the aged vampire (though he has performance issues) before ritually chasing him and his assistant through the village streets—he turns to a bespoke AI model and tasks it with suggesting more commercially viable adaptations. Jude moves between these alternatives, which range from endearingly idiotic to entirely tiresome (though one involving a worker uprising at an XP-farming sweatshop for American gamers is admittedly fun), and the “original” adaptation, in which a night at the theater devolves from playacting to real bloodlust.

Jude’s film is among several in the program to deal with AI, both thematically and as a VFX tool throughout. My position here is simple: Just don’t. Failing principled refusal, I suppose Jude’s bitter condescension and vitriol is the appropriate tone, though I’m not convinced that it lets him get around the usual “master’s tools” trap. Hate-using the technology helps sustain a bubble that threatens to wreck both the global economy and the environment. If Jude travesties the image-world of AI in a clarifying way, his intervention remains basically literary: These thin, ridiculous, outlandish images, whether generated or photographed, all reflect back on the model, the homespun “Dr. AI Judex 0.0,” that has ostensibly scripted them. They illustrate his polemic, rather than becoming its subject.

*Their Eyes *(Nicolas Gourault, 2025).

Several shorts took on the nature of AI material, whether audio or visual, more directly. The generated found footage of fictional—yet entirely familiar—political violence in Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo’s *09/05/1982 *and the generated audio of Myanmar’s dictator singing lullabies in Lin Htet Aung’s *A Metamorphosis *both remain comfortably within the bounds of common disbelief: They offer nothing but the weak pleasure of skepticism. Sara Magenheimer and Michael Bell-Smith’s Acetone Reality manages something stranger, as its babbling generated voices play like a vaporous podcast against its inscrutable flow of photography and animation; sound and image constantly flirt with harmonizing into legible meaning, but pointedly, it never quite arrives—the real is nothing but dissolution.

The most cogent analysis came in Nicolas Gourault’s Their Eyes, which explores the offshored work of annotating urban spaces for autonomous vehicles, the kind of monotonous human labor that precedes the implementation of AI. While visually bland in the way desktop films tend to be, it is a fine piece of journalism, with a clear narrative of how informal and geographically disparate workers might still organize for improved wages. It is also a fine piece of architectural criticism, with an equally clear presentation of how different kinds of urban environments are more or less amenable to ingestion into AI systems, which require the physical world to be precisely described—facilitating a fleet of Waymos is one thing, but the labor we’re shown applies as well to whatever the ghouls at Anduril and other battletech firms are currently cooking up.

Jude’s sentimental streak in *Dracula *may not be so far away from Koberidze’s whimsical humanism. In both the culminating hunt sequence, where the warmth of the leads’ intergenerational precariat friendship plays in counterpoint with savage mania of the bloodthirsty horde, and, more mawkishly, in a coda that leaves Dracula out of the frame to tell the story of a trash collector showing up to his daughter’s school pageant in the course of his rounds, Jude leans as far into pathos as he ever has. The question is whether we’re willing and able to accept this sentiment in the context of the slop that surrounds it. A winking line from the director’s avatar late in the film acknowledges that probably none of this was written by AI, as is claimed, but do you find it easier, or more tolerable, to imagine that a large language model would invent a simple, effective narrative about class-based shame or one in which a harvest yields a crop of magical dildos rather than corn? Would you feel betrayed—feel stupid—if you discovered that an AI had made you cry, rather than laugh at its unhinged output?

*Give It Back: Crimes Against Realty *(New Red Order, 2025).

One of the questions that lingers after Dracula—whether it’s cynical or about cynicism—can also be asked of the short that’s stuck with me most, New Red Order’s Give It Back: Crimes Against Realty. Fashioned after one of the urtexts of millennial consumerism, *MTVCribs *(2000–10), Give It Back offers a single-channel précis of NRO’s previous installation work on the “rematriation” of stolen Indigenous land. I’d never quite found a way into those earlier exhibitions, a solo presentation at Artists Space and a Creative Time commission titled The World’s UnFair, sited on a soon-to-be-redeveloped piece of land in Queens—it was not given back. The collective’s slapstick pileup of ugly, garish visuals and serious ideas felt too art-school clever, too much like the bad irony of brilliant people shitposting. The overall tone and construction here isn’t much different, but streamlining things into a 30-minute video lets the whiplash land on the right side of overwhelming.

The central strand of Give It Back follows the downtown actor Jim Fletcher—now a regular in the NRO universe, identified as a “reformed Native American impersonator” after having performed in redface as part of the Wooster Group’s 2014 production of Cry, Trojans!—as he leads a *Cribs-*style tour of the massive, gaudy Manhattan home that he’s “given back.” Threaded around this are conventional documentary vignettes with individuals who have actually taken part in land-back projects. Fletcher’s performance, by turns manic and touching, provides for a wide range of commentary and complication, running from a numbered list of “tips to help you get started on your rematriation journey today” to a passage where he plays both parts in a therapy session, wondering, “Am I encouraging Indigenous people to accept capitalist conditions?” (Therapist Jim scribbles furiously.) The tone that emerges from weaving these sequences with the very earnest documentary material is as goofy as it is unsettling. By going all in on exhausted, clichéd forms—pop consumerism, activist talking heads—to sell an idea that common sense says is outlandish, New Red Order has found a way to torque that exhaustion, that disbelief, into something that refuses the comforts of cynicism. Instead, this strange new irony induces the right mood to consider the possibility that real ethics, contra liberal norms, are no guarantor of feeling smart and enlightened and good, that we have to live with doubt in order to get things done. Whether this leads onto meaningful political action is out of their hands.

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1. Maybe it’s no surprise that the films I saw as fully successful in the moment—Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza, Sharon Lockhart’s Windward, Blake Williams’s Felt, Jodie Mack’s Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love, Basma al-Sharif’s Morning Circle (though I’m still not entirely sure about the modulation into its psychedelic finale)—tended to be those that most elegantly and intelligently refined, expanded, or reworked recognizable forms and approaches drawn from the history of political and/or avant-garde filmmaking. ↩