Ryland Walker Knight

A bad day for Willow only gets worse, like the weather.

For two teen girls, a clandestine night sharing secrets and raiding the liquor cabinet in an uncle’s townhouse is transformed when there’s a power failure.

On his first day out in the world after being released from a 5250 (the police code for a mental health arrest), Stanley is beset by troubles at every turn in the road as he walks around Oakland looking for something to hold onto.

Ryland Walker Knight’s Mann’s Sparks is a hypnotic essay film that stitches together footage from Michael Mann’s iconic filmography with Beach House’s 2015 album Depression Cherry into an editorial masterstroke. As much as the film stands as a testament to Knight’s craft as editor, it also acts as a thematic dialogue between the dream pop band’s music and the images by one of cinema’s greatest auteurs, spanning Mann’s work from Thief (1981) to Blackhat (2015). It’s a mesmeric work, both visually and sonically, acting also as a document of Knight’s own development as an editor after suffering an injury and using Mann’s footage and the band’s album to relearn how to edit. Mann’s Sparks is a spellbinding celebration of cinematic language and how it can be reused, relearned, and reimagined into new possibilities.

We are meant to dilate at the sight Of paper’s lightweight handheld printing

A meditation on life as text, and how we may outlive our finite selves in the realm of the imaginary.