“April is the cruelest month,” wrote the poet T. S. Eliot in 1922 in his poem The Wasteland. Today, during our own April of 2025, the sudden and severe cruelties wrought by the state of the world are overwhelming many of us. In such a climate, sharing art—especially art that does not deny pain or fear, but also attends to the precarious beauties of the world—can be a balm for the soul. The experimental filmmaker Jonathan Schwartz's 16mm works speak to this dichotomy and provide an opportunity to collectively share in moments of despair, hope, and exaltation.
“Winter Beyond Winter,” curated by Dan Stangl and named after one of Schwartz’s films, is the first solo program of his work in New York in five years. (The 57th New York Film Festival honored him with a program titled “Appearances and Disappearances” a year after his untimely death.) Spectacle’s series features six films, made between 2007 and 2017. They range from his final two films, A Leaf is a Sea is a Theatre (2017) and The Crack-Up (2017), to earlier works shot during New England winters over a number of years. On the surface, the program follows seasonal changes, beginning with the brilliant colors, longing, and sadness of autumn in A Leaf, and then moving through the violence and stunning beauty of winter in The Crack-Up, If the War Continues (2012, pictured at top), For a Winter (2007), and Winter Beyond Winter (2016). The program ends with the promise of transformation, alluded to in the New Year’s Sun (2010). On a more profound level, these six films embody Schwartz’s gift for combining personally meaningful texts and existential questions with lyrical images of nature that arise from his own idiosyncratic aesthetic approach. His attention to transformations occasioned by light, his physical movements with the camera, and his in-camera winding and rewinding of film stock all embody his and the world’s fortuitous memory and fleeting hold.
While Schwartz’s oeuvre contains numerous films made while travelling the world—in India, Israel, and Turkey—Spectacle's selection focuses on those shot near his home in New England, with the exception of The Crack-Up, which was mostly filmed in Iceland in the early winter of 2017. The expressive handheld and gestural camerawork, in-camera superimpositions, and whimsical, generous gaze present in Schwartz’s lens conveys his delight and awe at his surroundings. Between depictions of seasons, places, and loved ones, fragments of texts—including excerpts from Susan Howe, James Tate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy, and Herman Hesse—materialize and situate the philosophical and emotional tapestry Schwartz weaves for viewers in film. Doubt, fear, and despair commingle with his stunning affirmation of the splendors of life.
His last film, The Crack-Up, can be seen as a work for our moment: a philosophical call to action of the mind or body. He, like Fitzgerald, urges us to “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” The Crack-Up expresses personal struggle, but also a cry for the earth, for the time and mass of glaciers, and for all of us. One can “crack in many ways” Fitzgerald writes, and Schwartz’s film suggests that such cracking besets, or will beset, us all. It is this that makes us human, vulnerable. His depiction of the ineffable battle between despair and hope, between anguish and buoyancy in response to this cracking from inside and out is profoundly moving.
WINTER BEYOND WINTER: The Films of Jonathan Schwartz screens tonight, April 11, and on April 13 at Spectacle. After the screening, there will be a talk between Jonathan’s partner, the landscape designer Emily Drury, and the writer and scholar Rebekah Rutkoff.
