Creating Something Out of Nothing in For the Plasma

For the Plasma, Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan (2014)

It isn't until a good two-thirds of the way through For the Plasma that one comes to realize one's feeling of having missed something pertinent to the driving story arc was planted by the filmmakers intentionally.  Perhaps it's silly to try to extrapolate one grounding thesis statement from For the Plasma, but if I must, it is a thesis statement rooted in irony.  For the Plasma's lack of identity is its identity. 

 

At surface level, the film is a series of disjointed conversations against a scenic backdrop with abrupt tone shifts that could cause whiplash.  The synth score fittingly waffles somewhere between charming video game music and something that would be placed in a horror movie.  

 

The plot boils down to two women living in a quaint summer house in Maine who study the correlation between shifts in financial markets and the changes in footage of forests.  Helen (Rosalie Lowe) had been doing this for some time before her friend Charlie (Anabelle LeMieux) arrives, documenting her findings and managing to make a steady income in the process.  While unaware of where exactly this income is coming from or what company she's working for, Helen still opts to take advantage of the opportunity and spends her time in Maine carefully studying an image that logically shouldn't directly correlate to any meaning within the global financial markets.  Charlie questions the validity of this arrangement but nonetheless continues to work as Helen's new assistant. 

For the Plasma, Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan (2014)

Filmmakers Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan toy with the viewer's kneejerk inclination to search for meaning by posing twenty questions and answering none of them.  Because she is thrown into this without many clear answers, one could argue that Charlie is the audience analog— although that would also imply that Charlie has clear motivations, which she does not.  One could equally argue that Helen is the audience analog because of the way she, like us, searches for meaning within an image of which there may not be any.  "Any depth or dimension is entirely mine" is a line spoken by Helen that could perhaps mirror any various interpretations of this piece.  At one point, the two main characters walk around an art installation wherein the paintings on the walls seem to skew more crooked within the frame throughout their conversation.  It's a brief but dizzying sequence that forces the audience to re-assess the lens through which the girls are observing the aforementioned forest footage.  "Why not keep the image of the tree but change my purpose for looking at it?"

For the Plasma, Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan (2014)

A frequently recurring image is of two dots and two curved lines, which appear on the flag that Helen uses to beckon Charlie's assistance.  When Charlie spots the same image on a badge that a checkout girl wears at the corner store, the girl insists it's a symbol of the neighborhood watch; Charlie thought it was a signal flag for boats.  Furthermore, Charlie's cryptic phone calls with an unknown person regarding a past happening that involves Helen fuels a vague sense of uncertainty without going so far as to say the activity in this house is suspicious. 

 

Toward the end, two men appear— they are interested in recruiting Helen to observe satellite images, but provide evasive answers in regard to exactly what type of work they do.  As they exit the house, they say "For the plasma of it."  In an interview with John Magary of Filmmaker Magazine, Bryant and Molzan explain this title, which comes from Jerry Lewis' book The Total Film-Maker.  Bryant explains, "It seems to mean, 'for the heck of it'... titles are a miserable, horrible punishment, and this is our best attempt to capture the spirit of the film in a title."  Molzan elaborates, "He's saying movies are his blood.  The phrase is describing a way to justify making something, to justify making fun."  In other words, the title of the film suggests that filmmaking is about finding meaning amongst nothingness.  

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Essay by Marisa Winckowski

Assistant Curator, Filmatique