Optic nerve

The eyes have it in “Views from the Avant-Garde.”

There’s a proviso in the press material for Ken Jacobs’s Dreams That Money Can’t Buy, one of the offerings in this year’s New York Film Festival sidebar “Views from the Avant-Garde,” that could easily apply to other entries: “Not for those who react badly to throbbing light.” Occasional sensory assaults aside, the films and videos in the program—now in its 11th year—provide a welcome alternative to the narrative tyranny of the festival’s primary lineup.

In addition to works by luminaries like Jacobs and Gregory Markopoulos (whose sprawling final project, Eniaios, is represented here in snippet form), “Views” wades into optical-punishment territory with two shorts from Michael Robinson. The must-see “Light Is Waiting” mercilessly fractures an episode of ’80s sitcom Full House as a means of interrogating empty pop-culture rituals and prepubescent trauma, while “Victory Over the Sun” juxtaposes beautifully balanced images of unnatural structures in natural settings—Flushing Meadows Corona Park figures prominently—with disorienting blasts of sci-fi psychedelia. (A less inspired spin on Robinson’s preoccupations, Damon Packard’s SpaceDisco-One, amounts to a fetishy nostalgia piece.)

Comparatively sedate, Ben Rivers’s five literally titled shorts are nevertheless striking for their degree of audience involvement. “Old Dark House” cannily exemplifies the cinemagoing experience by requiring viewers to piece together the “houseness” of its locale via small, inquisitive beams from several flashlights, whereas “We the People” is notable for what’s absent: Its fleeting shots of quaint village streets are eerily people-free.

Troubled terrain figures into other “Views” highlights. Initially a pensive visual symphony of dread, Olivier Fouchard and Mahine Rouhi’s Tahousse folds in on itself halfway through to become a meditation on hope; its wintry, optically manipulated alien landscapes suggesting volcanic apocalypse (to say nothing of Stan Brakhage) reappear unenhanced as totems of rebirth. Laida Lertxundi’s “Footnotes to a House of Love,” a minimalist memory riff on failed romance, unfolds in a California desert backwater with Lesley Gore on the soundtrack, while Fern Silva’s “Notes from a Bastard Child” consists of an unsettled but concise capsule portrait of interconnected fatherless entities, including a fading Portuguese village and Jesus Christ.

Mining similar material, Jacqueline Goss’s “Stranger Comes to Town” is a true program standout. Its mix of role-playing video-game graphics, a Department of Homeland Security promo film and personal interviews progresses from a potentially jokey exposé of American paranoia to a rich, ambiguous contemplation of identity and the arbitrariness of geopolitical borders—all without the benefit of throbbing light.

“Views from the Avant-Garde” runs Sat 6 and Sun 7 at the Walter Reade Theater. See Art-house & indie cinema.

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