The Wonder Way review – artists grapple with the outdoors in study of beautiful chaos | Film

This dense yet maddingly diffuse work by Swiss documentary maker Emmanuelle Antille starts with the director reflecting on her late grandmother’s intense devotion to her suburban garden, of which she made more than a thousand drawings. From this, Antille builds out an ambition to explore a number of outdoor spaces framed by extraordinary imaginations.

Several of these are professional artists, well established names such as Charles Ross who builds monumental observatory-like concrete and earthwork structures to engage with the cosmos. A division or two down in renown come collaborative artists Anne Marie Jugnet and Alain Clairet, also known as Jugnet + Clairet, who work in various media that engage with landscapes, from paintings that reproduce regular Ordnance Survey maps but with key bits of information left off, or marble sculptures of clouds. Elsewhere, we’re introduced to the very intriguing legacy of the now deceased Noah S Purifoy, more of a classic outsider artist who worked with found materials and scrap, building himself an outdoor museum in the California desert.

Antille somehow manages to connect this all together via a sinuous way with the editing suite, the disparate sections and musings shellacked together with airy quotes from Michel Foucault, archive clips of Marcel Duchamp, and yet more footage of her gran’s prodigious production. Does it all hang together? Not quite, especially when we veer away from all the art production to watch some typically out-there Christian fundamentalists rant and dance with snakes in a deeply sad-looking church. The pine cladding on the walls and fluorescent lights are enough to induce a sense of despair.

And then Antille is off again, back to watching her grandmère’s Super 8 films, making noises to match the silent footage of her mother with wire brushes. Later Antille sets up the camera to record herself cavorting naked in the forest, waving a plate about for no obvious reason. The cinematography is beautiful throughout, and the subjects often compelling, but it doesn’t always cohere.

The Wonder Way is on True Story from 14 March.

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