Matthew Buckingham
Murray Guy
453 West 17th Street, Chelsea
Through April 12

Two spellbinding new films by Matthew Buckingham isolate crucial moments in personal history and the history of art, spinning them into fictional (or semi-fictional) worlds.

The 16-millimeter film “False Future” (2007) revolves around Louis Le Prince, an inventor who developed a form of early cinema some five years before the Lumière brothers. (Le Prince disappeared, mysteriously, while taking a train from Dijon to Paris in 1890.)

Inspired by one of Le Prince’s eight-second films, “False Future” consists of a 10-minute static shot of the Leeds Bridge in England. Over the unremarkable action a narrator speaking in French speculates, with liberal use of the faux-future tense (used in historical narrative), about the kind of films Le Prince might have made had he not vanished. “False Future” is both a neat grammar lesson and a parallel story of the birth of cinema.

The two-screen video projection “Everything I Need” (2007) explores an episode in the life of Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986), a psychologist and writer on homosexuality who was exiled from Berlin in 1933 but returned to give a lecture in 1978. Text from her autobiography, inspired by the journey, is paired with shots of the vibrant orange interior of a 70s-era passenger plane. Her memories of love, sex and self-discovery in Weimar Germany are fascinating, but the video’s long takes of the empty aircraft become tiresome after the first few minutes.

Mr. Buckingham’s layered sense of time and place will be further tested when Creative Time screens his 40-minute film about the Hudson River, “Muhheakantuck: Everything Has a Name,” aboard a New York Water Taxi over this weekend and next. (All the showings are sold out.)

KAREN ROSENBERG