Following closely in the indelible, adventurous footsteps of Robert Gardner, Robert Fenz returned to the distant Ethiopian, New Guinean, and Indian sites of Gardner’s influential ethnographic trilogy in order to mark the passage of time and establish a critical and poignant distance from documentary classicism. Fenz uses lush, shadowy, and silent black-and-white 16mm in response to Gardner’s exotic colors and stentorian voiceover, offering a subtly poetic meditation on the ambitious dreams and poignant failures of the ethnographic project. With its striking imagery and rigorously hypnotic montage, Correspondence confirms Fenz, together with Nathaniel Dorsky and Ben Rivers (note the unremarked upon “correspondence” between these two young filmmakers), as one of the last great, heroic artists of the photochemical avant-garde.
