Irakli is looking for his daughter, Lisa, who is somewhere in rural Georgia, photographing football fields. He's accompanied by Lisa's friend Levani, who we can't see, and was supposed to go with her. Because Irakli and Levani are only driving in search of Lisa, we don't see Lisa or her photographs either. Instead we see the places Lisa is photographing, recorded by Alexandre Koberidze at 144p, on a Sony Ericsson W595. Had Lisa been anything other than a photographer we would not have to wonder about the gulf between the photographs we don't see and the footage we can, but as it is, the low-resolution of the latter obtrudes. The imaginary clear image recedes, just as Levani evades the frame, and Lisa Irakli's search. These disappearances weigh on and even constitute the imaginative space of Dry Leaf, for to recover what's missing in the image would be to kill the film.
Disappearance and imagination go hand-in-hand, while the Sony Ericsson W595 can understand only what's before it. The low-resolution, and removal of even primary handles (lense, aperture, shutter-speed), all points to an adherence to picturing reality unaffected by mechanical, algorithmic, and authorial control. Siegfried Kracauer might say the camera follows "the realistic tendency": "Pictures which strike us as intrinsically photographic seem intended to render nature in the raw, nature as it exists independently of us" (18). Dry Leaf embraces the paradox where the noisier record seems to have been affected by its referent, and is thereby closer to physical reality than the clean record which has stripped away the noise of the world in the interest of the human eye. Put another way, the heavily mediated image, more noise than nature, implies a direct exchange in which the physical landscape has inscribed itself directly into photographic matter. Of course untreated footage from a DSLR would achieve its own sense of 'nature in the raw', but the noise in Dry Leaf is accompanied by our cultural awareness of the W595's retrograde status. It's difficult to watch low-resolution digital footage and not think of all the devices that once impressed us and we've since thrown away. And the minerals and metals mined for the production of devices designed for landfill. It feels as though the W595 has been excavated from landfill, used to document the world through the eyes of dirt, and reinterred, leaving us with images not obsolete but ancient.
Irakli and Levani seem to routinely arrive at their football fields at sunset. The lower light means the W595 struggles to capture detail in the forms (even within its already limited means). Sometimes wind will come and send a shudder through the walls of undifferentiated green. Most of the time everything is still. Looking at these walls of green, one cannot tell trees from shrubs, much less individual blades of grass. These clustered pixels are like bricks or tiles, except rather than steadily repeating themselves they convulse at one frame a second. There are fifteen frames a second available to the W595, but in these conditions only the broadest movements in the scene can be registered, and so we count the convulsions, like pulses through the front of the head. There are some compositions where a section of the visual field has movement through it and the rest does not. The foreground continues to pulse at one frame a second, while the background trembles at fifteen. We perceive the frames available and count the aberration, only now animate life and not stillness seems uncanny. Near the end of the film Koberidze does the unthinkable, and introduces a zoom. Digital zoom works through cropping the frame, reducing image fidelity, and magnifying the already lossy image. Here loss itself is monumentalised. What would otherwise appear still now swarms and tessellates. Looking at animated loops of plants moving at a few frames a second, Lev Manovich once commented that it's amazing how little will pass for life. Counting the frames in Dry Leaf, it's not whether or not the digital image has successfully simulated the real, but that each has metamorphosed the other through an alien rhythm.
Transformation and loss are the key concerns of Dry Leaf's Georgia, and the logic of the digital image. Football fields for Koberidze reveal that place is never fixed:
They usually represent what is happening in a particular place. If a field has become overgrown with trees and tall grass, it means that nobody has played there for a long time. It means that there are no young people left and that the village is slowly becoming empty. But if there is no high grass, even if you do not see anyone playing at that moment, you can feel that someone takes care of the place, that people still come there from time to time. It means that there is still some energy left.
Often we'll see quiet or empty villages, and then people congregating at the fields, waiting. The question then becomes how to capture something that is always changing, that will become other to itself the moment after it is photographed. The W595 is again important here, for the way it exposes the real-time work of rendering the scene. Style here is a matter of ontology. Had Dry Leaf been shot on film, material permanence would be imposed on the transitory. The celluloid would visibly contain the scene it has captured. Digital on the other hand severs the link between reality and the image, transforming it into arbitrary code. We cannot directly read the image from the code, because the image does not reside anywhere in it. It is forever latent, always about to come into being. The computer is made to interpret this code live whenever we want to experience it as media, and once we've experienced it as media, it returns to non-indexical code. Because the scene must be actively constructed every time we want to access it, Wolfgang Ernst writes that "On this microtemporal level, memory is literally permanently in transition" (97). On one hand reality is gone forever, relegated to an empirical nowhere. On the other hand it's always being retrieved by restless, defective memory.
There's an intensity of place that makes itself known in even the noisiest arrangement, and this has as much to do with realism as it does the work of memory. Koberidze reasons a lower fidelity means the production of empty space in the image. He views this as a positive, because the viewer is left to interpret and fill this empty space. I found myself moved to tears throughout the film, as places I'd forgotten flooded back, but only partial, eroded. I've never been to Georgia, and have barely left Aotearoa. Staring at these walls of noise, I thought of fields of long, damp grass, in the waning sun around the Bay of Plenty and Waimarino Plateau, that I'd run through as a child, and that I cannot place or name. Let's misplace the emphasis in Koberidze's statement on empty space: every image records loss, and the camera reproduces a void. This helps to explain why remembering the traces of sites via Dry Leaf feels less like reverie than like dying. I'm not convinced I've now recovered memories that must still exist somewhere. Rather I've been exposed to the vastness of my forgetting. The empty space in the picture is not a field of possible recovery. It's what Todd McGowan (following Lacan) calls a "stain" in the image. This stain, this emptiness, is our gaze, is the void around which desire orbits, without hope of restoration. To recover what's missing would be to empty the film.
Dry Leaf's realism is marked by pockets of emptiness that sustain, rather than contradict, the realistic tendency. Fairy tales have been cited as an influence, but I think it's important to remember that the fantastical in Dry Leaf is always a field of absence. That is, instead of promoting a fantasy in which the magic of everyday life is recovered through the intervention of the fantastic, Dry Leaf bestows dignity on reality by articulating its lack. Reality breaks down, exposing us to its horizon, its incompleteness, as well as our yearning for the sublimity of what has and will be: the thing, that is, that we will always have forgotten.
22 April 2026