Waiting for the Appearance of Something Unknown
On Armand Yervant Tufenkian’s In the Manner of Smoke
Amina Cain
In the Manner of Smoke
Director ARMAND YERVANT TUFENKIAN
Year
2025
Country USA, UK
In what ways do we watch a film? Emotionally or
intellectually? As a form of escape or relaxation? Each of these ways, of
course, and other ways too, in different measure each time. In his essay
“Leaving the Movie Theatre” (1975), Roland Barthes writes that the very
situation of the cinema is “pre-hypnotic,” the film itself a “lure.” To be
hypnotized is to have an experience; it is to fall under a spell.
Armand Yervant Tufenkian's In the Manner of Smoke is such a lure, offering its own kind of hypnosis. At times, I felt hypnotized by its images, by its voiceover, by the strange story it is telling. And I had an experience while watching it—an aesthetic one. I think our narrator must be having an aesthetic experience, too, as he gazes out at the Sierra Nevada mountains from a lookout station called Delilah, and haunts the empty streets of the old Chinatown in Fresno.
Smoke billows upward in the opening shot of the film, filling the screen in shades of white and grey. It fills it for a long time. Right away, I think that this is beautiful. The smoke resembles storm clouds, close together and moving fast. When it thins, or the wind has blown it out of the camera’s view, we catch glimpses of dark green through the smoke, pine trees and mountains. It’s a relief to see them. Later, we’ll see flames begin to light up through the smoke and lick that landscape. The flames will grow taller. This image of fire is beautiful—but burned things never are. As someone who lives in Southern California, I have a lot of feelings about the wildfires of today, made so much worse by climate change. They put me on edge.
Then we are looking at a painting, at the color grey—like the grey of the smoke—being pushed around a canvas. I can’t help but feel that Tufenkian experiences his work as a lookout aesthetically and creatively, because throughout the film, we return to painting, to those blocks and splotches of paint that together form mountains, that mirror the landscape of the Sierra Nevada.
We return as well to those hypnotic shots of the landscape. I’ve been in those mountains many times over the years, camping and backpacking. I’ve gazed up at them from the car while driving on the highway. They call to a person, it’s true. We come to the lookout station, with its all-around windows, the Sierra Nevada in every direction. How much I like the lookout station; our narrator does too. It’s a place to which he has been drawn, gazing up at the mountains one evening while outside the local flying school in Fresno, watching the planes take off. He tries to imagine the fire lookouts stationed there, and imagines himself there, too.
In a voiceover that is mesmerizing and gentle, our speaker tells us how and why he came to be a lookout. It both is and isn’t straightforward. He feels a strong desire to join those “whose jobs were to simply wait for the appearance of something unknown.” It sounds mystical, spiritual—but the music that accompanies this statement is a little foreboding.
We take a turn into something new, or perhaps we go further into what already exists. The one who watches and waits may begin to feel watched in turn, may look for someone who doesn’t come into view, but is sensed, nevertheless. At the flying school, and in that empty neighborhood in Fresno, the film morphs into mystery. Komoto’s department store, the Azteca movie theatre, the Asia hotel—all closed down, receded into the past even as their structures remain. It feels as though our narrator is almost as alone as he might be at Delilah. Is it him who is blurred going up the stairwell of the parking garage? Is he haunting Fresno, or is something in Fresno haunting him?
I like this turn, or this way of going further in. Suddenly, I don’t know what I’m watching—but did I ever? At the end of the film, we gaze upon a painting of animals, one section at a time. By zooming into each animal, Tufenkian makes the painting move, bringing each to life. It makes me think of those animals who must flee fire when it comes. And it makes me remember the animals I’ve run into on the trail—bears, marmots, deer. Once, a bobcat.
I won’t speak of the film’s final image, and what I think it means, only that it sent me into a peculiar, mysterious silence. You’ll want to have seen and experienced it on your own terms. It may send you somewhere different.
Amina Cain is the author of, most recently, A Horse at Night: On Writing and the novel Indelicacy, both published in the UK with Daunt Books.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screenings of In the Manner of Smoke at Close-Up Cinema, 10 & 11 May 2025.
Armand Yervant Tufenkian's In the Manner of Smoke is such a lure, offering its own kind of hypnosis. At times, I felt hypnotized by its images, by its voiceover, by the strange story it is telling. And I had an experience while watching it—an aesthetic one. I think our narrator must be having an aesthetic experience, too, as he gazes out at the Sierra Nevada mountains from a lookout station called Delilah, and haunts the empty streets of the old Chinatown in Fresno.
Smoke billows upward in the opening shot of the film, filling the screen in shades of white and grey. It fills it for a long time. Right away, I think that this is beautiful. The smoke resembles storm clouds, close together and moving fast. When it thins, or the wind has blown it out of the camera’s view, we catch glimpses of dark green through the smoke, pine trees and mountains. It’s a relief to see them. Later, we’ll see flames begin to light up through the smoke and lick that landscape. The flames will grow taller. This image of fire is beautiful—but burned things never are. As someone who lives in Southern California, I have a lot of feelings about the wildfires of today, made so much worse by climate change. They put me on edge.
Then we are looking at a painting, at the color grey—like the grey of the smoke—being pushed around a canvas. I can’t help but feel that Tufenkian experiences his work as a lookout aesthetically and creatively, because throughout the film, we return to painting, to those blocks and splotches of paint that together form mountains, that mirror the landscape of the Sierra Nevada.
We return as well to those hypnotic shots of the landscape. I’ve been in those mountains many times over the years, camping and backpacking. I’ve gazed up at them from the car while driving on the highway. They call to a person, it’s true. We come to the lookout station, with its all-around windows, the Sierra Nevada in every direction. How much I like the lookout station; our narrator does too. It’s a place to which he has been drawn, gazing up at the mountains one evening while outside the local flying school in Fresno, watching the planes take off. He tries to imagine the fire lookouts stationed there, and imagines himself there, too.
In a voiceover that is mesmerizing and gentle, our speaker tells us how and why he came to be a lookout. It both is and isn’t straightforward. He feels a strong desire to join those “whose jobs were to simply wait for the appearance of something unknown.” It sounds mystical, spiritual—but the music that accompanies this statement is a little foreboding.
We take a turn into something new, or perhaps we go further into what already exists. The one who watches and waits may begin to feel watched in turn, may look for someone who doesn’t come into view, but is sensed, nevertheless. At the flying school, and in that empty neighborhood in Fresno, the film morphs into mystery. Komoto’s department store, the Azteca movie theatre, the Asia hotel—all closed down, receded into the past even as their structures remain. It feels as though our narrator is almost as alone as he might be at Delilah. Is it him who is blurred going up the stairwell of the parking garage? Is he haunting Fresno, or is something in Fresno haunting him?
I like this turn, or this way of going further in. Suddenly, I don’t know what I’m watching—but did I ever? At the end of the film, we gaze upon a painting of animals, one section at a time. By zooming into each animal, Tufenkian makes the painting move, bringing each to life. It makes me think of those animals who must flee fire when it comes. And it makes me remember the animals I’ve run into on the trail—bears, marmots, deer. Once, a bobcat.
I won’t speak of the film’s final image, and what I think it means, only that it sent me into a peculiar, mysterious silence. You’ll want to have seen and experienced it on your own terms. It may send you somewhere different.
Amina Cain is the author of, most recently, A Horse at Night: On Writing and the novel Indelicacy, both published in the UK with Daunt Books.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screenings of In the Manner of Smoke at Close-Up Cinema, 10 & 11 May 2025.