As media art evolved across the twentieth century, it was energized and encumbered by fantasies for its future, as well as for our own. Cinema was born amid a dramatic shift in social relations that it in turn helped produce: the fin-de-siècle clamor of modernity and urbanization, its sights and sounds. By the mid-1960s, small 16-mm cameras had ushered in new waves of independent production the world over, sometimes in tandem with insurgent sentiments. Early video collectives armed with Portapaks saw themselves in a utopian moment of their own, one defined by the democratizing ethos of electronic art; they hoped “guerilla television” would cause a sea change in the way moving images were developed and disseminated, upending the top-down hierarchies of commercial broadcasting. Even when the price of 16-mm film stock rose dramatically circa 1980, with Kodak responding to a monopolized market for silver, the critic J. Hoberman optimistically looked forward to the “super-80s,” a small-gauge renaissance around the bend. Economic crisis was transformed into aesthetic imperative, the promise of a vanguard fashioned with the tools of home movies. As recently as the ’90s, the advent of new media inspired speculation about the potential latent in networked culture.

It’s difficult to imagine such ideas—technological determinism as utopian scheme, the artist as oracle—taking root today; ours is a chastened perspective. Yet their proponents’s influence is indelible, if not exactly as intended. This accident of history partly accounts for the timeliness of Michael Robinson’s Victory over the Sun, made in 2007. Refiguring the romanticism of epochs past, his film elicits sober reflection on their radical aspirations while offering ecstatic glimpses of 16 mm’s continued (if endangered) capacity for fresh pleasures of texture and tone. Robinson affirms a notion that filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh once suggested (quoting Napoleon): “The purpose of the avant-garde is not to advance, but to maneuver.”

A red cloud bleeds immediately through the first frames, a flare signaling the end of a camera roll. Time is literally running out. Then a sylvan path leads to the monuments of depopulated World’s Fair grounds, the designs of which, angular and severe, recall the abstract compositions of Kazimir Malevich, who designed the sets for the original Victory over the Sun, the infamous Russian Futurist opera of 1913. These icons of dilapidated modernism are surrounded and obscured by foliage, creating tableaux at once serene and postapocalyptic, and punctuated by psychedelic interludes. Here as elsewhere in Robinson’s films, references and raw materials are blurred to the limits of discernability. The strings of a half-remembered pop song fade in, and our subconscious is forced to give it shape.

Midcentury World’s Fairs were both occasional venues for landmark experiments in film and music—in 1958, Brussels hosted Jordan Belson’s expanded cinema and Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique—and eerily prescient dreamworlds of global capitalism, where nations and corporations held court in their own pavilions. It seems appropriate, then, to present Robinson’s guided tour of abandoned frontiers, still humming with possibility, as May ’68 is commemorated and critics struggle with the lessons of that singular moment, its victories and its failings. The echoes of revolution grow distant, but this fallen city’s on fire.

—Thomas Beard