Seeing Clearly
By Lawrence Garcia
New York Film Festival 2025:
Dry Leaf
Dir. Alexandre Koberidze, Germany/Georgia, Cinema Guild
It is a basic requirement of watching nearly any movie that one be capable of not just identifying but also reidentifying objects, places, people. To count as having viewed a film, that is, one must generally be able to say, from shot to shot or scene to scene, that some character or location is the same character or location, perhaps at different times or under different circumstances. Throughout cinema history, filmmakers have challenged this: consider Buñuel’s use of actors in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) or Godard’s tendency to frame figures with their heads cut off. Experimental artists, for their part, have engaged this capacity by reflecting on the possibilities and limits of various media, as in Nathaniel Dorsky’s investigations of silent speed 16mm or Sadie Benning’s use of the Pixelvision camera. But whether narrative or experimental, such filmmakers draw attention to the basic markers of continuity that we so often take for granted in our viewing. Through varied formal means, they confront our fundamental ability to apprehend relations in space and time.
Dry Leaf, Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze’s audacious and frequently astounding third feature, stands out not only for its 186-minute runtime but also for its use of a format that no other artist has explored at such length: a Sony Ericsson phone camera. Like his debut feature Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), which was shot with the same camera, the film accordingly comprises footage that would not even qualify as lo-fi by present standards. Faces are difficult, if not impossible to make out; human and animal figures frequently blend into the background; ordinary spatial relations are distorted to the point of incomprehensibility. At times recalling the impasto intensity of late Godard, its images are vibrant and smeary and altogether beautiful. What distinguishes the film from other digital experiments, however, is how Koberidze capitalizes on the specifics of his chosen format: for instance, the way that silhouettes register with a uniformity and flatness that would be more difficult to achieve at a higher resolution, or the way the camera responds to changing light conditions with a noticeable lag. Another conspicuous difference from other digital formats is how the image visibly “refreshes” at a steady frequency, creating a hypnotic pulsating effect. At times, it’s as if the image itself had a kind of heartbeat.
Dry Leaf does have a wisp of a narrative, following a man named Irakli (David Koberidze) as he goes in search of his daughter, Lisa, a sports photographer who has disappeared. Apart from a letter instructing her family not to find her, Lisa leaves behind an unfinished project to shoot a series of football fields for a sports magazine. With no other clues, Irakli thus sets off on a voyage following the trail of these fields, making Dry Leaf a road trip of sorts. But unlike certain films of Abbas Kiarostami, such as And Life Goes On (1992), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), all of which serve as visual reference points, it differs in that the trip is not meaningfully elaborated in terms of psychology. Even more so than in his previous feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), Koberidze here proves far more casual about integrating his varied pictorial play with a nominal plot. Over the film’s extended runtime, the countryside journey mainly serves as a pretext for a series of intensive investigations into the possibilities of his chosen medium.
While there are certain tonal limitations to Koberidze’s approach, Dry Leaf nevertheless astonishes for how it forces us to effectively relearn how to watch movies. We are continually compelled to translate the formal film grammar we expect, conventionalized over roughly a century of cinema history, into an entirely new register. The possibilities of the match cut, for instance, are at once expanded and contracted by the shooting format: the lower resolution means that visual connections from shot to shot become more prominent, but at the same time it becomes more difficult to differentiate objects and locations from each other. The camera’s peculiar responsiveness to light also means that our usual cues for distinguishing day and night are thrown off. Even our capacity for orienting ourselves within a landscape becomes destabilized, as in a dazzling image of a sunset perfectly reflected on a lake, where the texture of the water is momentarily indistinguishable from that of the sky.
Indeed, we are often unable to reliably identify characters. Early in the film, voiceover narration introduces Levan, a colleague of Lisa’s at the sports magazine, who accompanies Irakli on his journey. But if one is confused about the nondescript, apparently empty shot that accompanies this information, this is because Levan, as the voiceover continues, “like many others in this film’s reality, is invisible.” Not so much a magic realist gesture as an object lesson in cinematic perception, the line is a playful acknowledgement of the extent to which our ordinary film viewing, too, is built on the perception of ostensibly “invisible” phenomena: as when voices emanate from offscreen space, or compositions are so dark that shapes and figures meld into each other, recalling Hegel’s phrase about the “night in which all cows are black.” Often in Dry Leaf, the search for Lisa digresses into depopulated landscape shots of the Georgian countryside. But even calling them landscape shots is perhaps saying too much—for who’s to say whether or not the film’s invisible beings are present?
In considering the artistic force of Koberidze’s decision to shoot on the old Sony Ericsson, it is useful to recall Lisa’s job as a sports photographer, for it is a profession with a marked tendency toward higher frame rates, more resolution, 360-degree capture—in short, to the sort of technological perfection that Dry Leaf refuses. Indeed, it is in perhaps in sports photography that one today finds in its most intense form what André Bazin called the myth of total cinema—the drive to develop a technology that would completely reproduce reality, rendering all its details without remainder. In choosing to make Dry Leaf the way he did, Koberidze clearly rejects the myth. But more than that, he also denies artistic interpretations which tacitly assume it, such as those of viewers, for instance, who see in the Impressionists and post-Impressionists only a willful abstraction from a pre-given reality, and who would see Dry Leaf, also, as no more than an artfully hazy approximation of our natural perception. The appearance of two bowls of apples inevitably calls to mind the paintings of Cézanne. And if the reference is apropos, this is because Koberidze, like so many modernists before him, rejects the idea that art ought to be measured up against the representational norms of our everyday vision.
Since his first film, Colophon (2015), Koberidze has established himself as a contemporary filmmaker with a deep interest in the expressive possibilities of silent cinema. Both Colophon and Let the Summer Never Come Again make ample use of intertitles and onscreen text, the latter also including sped-up footage in the manner of a silent film gag. His 2018 short Linger on Some Pale Blue Dot offers a kind of Vertovian play with scale and rapid montage, while What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? uses a bevy of techniques—voiceover narration, elimination of ambient sound, profusions of music, and so on—to reveal, so to speak, the silent film “beneath” the sound film. With its intense pictorial play, Dry Leaf extends these investigations into the expressive resources of a prior era, principally by estranging ordinary relations of image and sound. In addition to the fact of voices emanating from invisible characters, the indiscernibility of faces means that dialogue is firmly decoupled from facial expression. Likewise, whereas conventionally shot films tend to privilege the human voice, Dry Leaf by contrast manages to place music, noise, and dialogue on the same plane. Koberidze’s project is not an anachronistic attempt to simply return to the silent era. Rather, it is an effort to recover, or to rediscover, the unbounded formal curiosity of a time where formal experimentation had not yet calcified into convention.
By the end of Dry Leaf, Irakli’s search for Lisa does in fact resolve—though like so much in the film, this resolution remains offscreen, invisible. Lisa remains to us just a name. Rather than a meeting between father and daughter, what we see visualized are a set of instructions from Lisa to Irakli, conveyed by letter, about how to find her. The instructions include, of course, spatial directions. But in addition, they also include precise variations on what to look out for depending on what time of day he is to arrive and hence what available light conditions there are. In case there was any lingering doubt, it confirms that Dry Leaf functions principally as an adventure in perception—an invitation to look, and look again.