With Forever Presence

In September, when he knew his time was not long, Jonathan Schwartz wrote to explain that he would try to retrieve previews of his films for me but that he was dealing with many logistical concerns in order “to be in emotional spaces with utmost presence.” I keep coming back to this phrase in the weeks since Schwartz’s death for what it says about him and his lyrical work in 16mm. The unusual poignancy of his films flows directly from their radical attentiveness, which in turn flows every which way. This makes me think of an essay by Mary Ruefle, a poet much admired by Schwartz, in which she contends, a little mischievously, that the problem with much so-called sentimental poetry is that it is not sentimental enough: “Don’t be less of a flower,” she instructs an imagined student, “but could you be more of a stone at the same time? Could you have sympathetic feelings in more than one direction? And can you think at the same time?”

Schwartz’s films certainly thread the needle, being at once tender and insightful, exuberant and contemplative. This clarifying complexity is rooted in the dynamic interplay of sound and image, each granted its own degree of immediacy, its own time to lead. (“Non-sync” doesn’t begin to describe the expansive effect.) Schwartz’s is a holistic collage style, producing a strong feeling for the volume of present experience, its saturation of the singular. What makes each film’s multiple motifs cohere,