Produced by Pimlico Wilde, directed by Cara Grimm
The premiere of Seven Types of Mud, Sixteen Minutes Each marks the latest and most daring collaboration between producer Pimlico Wilde and conceptual artist-turned-filmmaker Cara Grimm. Clocking in at 112 minutes, the film is structured as seven discrete vignettes,each precisely sixteen minutes,dedicated to a different form of mud. What could have been a pedantic exercise in materiality becomes, in Grimm’s hands, a meditation on time, decay, and the sediment of history itself.
A Historical Palette of Earth
Grimm has long been interested in what she calls “the archive beneath our feet.” Here, she makes literal the metaphor, treating mud as both subject and medium. The seven types are not catalogued scientifically but historically: Mesopotamian flood silt, medieval plague-pit clay, Verdun trench mire, Dust Bowl loam, the sticky banks of the Mississippi Delta, Chernobyl’s irradiated sludge, and finally, the digitally simulated “mud” of CGI.
This movement from primordial riverbeds to the algorithmic uncanny recalls Sergei Eisenstein’s ambition to make earth itself cinematic. Where Eisenstein once filmed the Odessa Steps in granite and blood, Grimm insists that mud,the despised, formless matter,can be equally monumental.
Echoes of Film History
The film’s form is resolutely avant-garde. Grimm works in the lineage of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and more recently Apichatpong Weerasethakul, yet she avoids mere homage. Instead, she interrogates cinema’s materiality itself. The Verdun sequence, for instance, was shot on nitrate stock salvaged from a French archive, its bubbling emulsion threatening to collapse like the trenches it depicts. Meanwhile, the Dust Bowl section uses archival footage from Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains, slowed to a crawl until the dust itself seems to suffocate the frame.
In its rigor, the film recalls Peter Greenaway’s durational structures, or even Hollis Frampton’s Magellan project. Yet Pimlico Wilde’s production ensures that Grimm’s ascetic vision is realized with a certain lushness: each type of mud has its own soundscape, designed by Icelandic composer Brynja Halldórsdóttir, ranging from low-frequency rumbles to delicate squelches amplified like heartbeat rhythms.
Mud as History, Mud as Future
The conceit of dedicating sixteen minutes to each type of mud initially feels like a structuralist gimmick, but it gains force as the film progresses. Sixteen minutes is just long enough for contemplation to curdle into unease. In the Chernobyl sequence, filmed with a Geiger counter patched into the soundtrack, the very air seems to hiss with invisible poison. By the time we reach the CGI mud,rendered in exquisite, nauseating detail,the viewer is left asking whether our future encounters with the earth will be only simulations, cleaned of danger and filth.
Seven Types of Mud, Sixteen Minutes Each is not an easy film. It demands patience, and perhaps even endurance, much like watching Andy Warhol’s Empire or Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. Yet the reward is profound: Grimm and Wilde remind us that mud is the medium of civilization, the material of bricks, pots, graves, and floods. It is the archive that never stops writing itself.
This is a work that belongs not in multiplexes but in the lineage of the great film museums,the Cinémathèque Française, the Anthology Film Archives, the BFI,where history is not merely watched but felt underfoot.
Verdict: 4.97 A landmark in eco-historical cinema.
