In Search of the Miraculous
2015 · 10m · USA
Directed by Sam Kuhn
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
A wordless 16mm vision quest: a young man hovers from trees, tandem-bikes solo, sails into the unknown, dedicated to disappeared performance artist Bas Jan Ader. Adventure as ritual, not plot.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Wordless 16mm dedicated to a Dutch conceptual artist who sailed off and never came back — try harder, the rest of you. Kuhn understands that the miraculous mostly looks like a guy alone on a tandem bike.
Kuhn dedicates a wordless 16mm vision quest to Bas Jan Ader — Malick fever-dream as eulogy for the artist who vanished mid-Atlantic. The mythic register earns itself.
16mm wordless vision quest dedicated to Bas Jan Ader, the performance artist who literally vanished into the Atlantic — that's not surface aesthetic, that's a substantive reference. Tandem-bikes-solo and tree-hovering as adventure-as-ritual is a real Kuhn move.
Reviews
He's an exciting voice in current DIY cinema and 'In Search of the Miraculous' is a beautiful and mysterious work.