Writing of Joseph Cornell, Jonas Mekas remarked that his films “deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things…His works have the quality—be they boxes, collages, or movies—of being located in some suspended area of time.” One finds a similar sensibility in the films of Brian Frye, particularly so in a cluster of 16mm works completed around the turn of the 21st century, just as the end of small-gauge cinema seemed all too immanent. At once literal actualities and sphinx-like artifacts, Frye’s films might at first seem like outtakes from lost projects, or damaged archival isolates, bearing grainy images that beg for exegesis: Kennedy-era actors awkwardly intone lines from a portentous melodrama; a woman’s face flits in and out of legibility beneath a storm of visual debris; a old man points to a weathered gravesite, his lips mouthing silent words; Civil War soldiers maneuver at the edge of a forest. These moments play like misplaced bits of someone else’s memories, physical records of our world mysteriously unmoored from their origins.