The speeding and slowing of things, set to ominous music

A friend of mine came and plunked herself down in the seat next to me after the second of two experimental film shorts programs that I've now watched. I hadn't seen her in the audience previously... my brand new earring had just broken and I was duly concerned with fixing it, sans pliers. You know, I used to carry pliers with me everywhere. And yards of steel wire. When I'd ride the trains back and forth between my college campus and Manhattan, I'd sit there and make hundreds upon hundreds of these little wire sculptures. During that project, my wrists were constantly torn to shreds. Rough-cut metal wire has sharp ends. I've never been shy about shedding my own blood for creative endeavors, have I? But I suppose, appearing as though I'd tried to off myself with a Daisy razor doesn't so much say "sacrifices for her art" as much as it says "participates in a half-hearted malaise." (Um. Consider this paragraph an topical anomaly of this post, yeah?)

Anyway, the title of this post is a (terribly reduced and probably hopelessly misquoted) paraphrase of what my friend said her reaction to the experimental shorts was. And seen en masse, she's right. It DOES seem as though, if one were to define the concept of "experimental films", based on this year's NaFF offerings alone, one would have to concede that there is a great deal of screwing with speed settings and eerily percussive music in them. However, I attribute these commonalities to the venue, rather than the actual films. It's tough to watch a whole bunch of this stuff at once. They're non-narrative, so there's not much on which you could hang a hat. Some of them are long and pointedly repetitive. They are often hypnotic. If you've been running, as I have, from the second that first dog nose inserts itself in some very personal part of your body (usually it's either into an armpit or between my buttcheeks... I love how dogs have no boundaries, eh?) every morning of your "vacation", it can be a little tricky to maintain consciousness throughout. (Falling asleep in public is getting to be a recurrent motif with me, isn't it? Perhaps I should break my only-one-cup-of-coffee-per-day rule. To hell with my fucking lumpy breasts!)

But if I'm going to be fair, I feel as though it's really quite necessary to forget about all the rest as I watch each one. Honestly, one of the real boons of getting to go to film festivals is that you get to see some of this weird stuff. It's not as though you'd even begin to know where to look for it on YouTube as most of it is so abstract that it's virtually unsearchable. But it interests me greatly that film, as a medium, can be used to do something that is neither narrating stories, nor reportage. So, in the interest of taking each one within only its own context, I'm going to try to plow through some snapshot analyses of each one and I hope this post doesn't get too fatiguingly long.

The first series of experimental shorts was screened on Saturday. It contained a handful of films from the Canyon Cinema archives, marking the 45th anniversary of Canyon-- which is the premier distributor of experimental film. Here's the roster:

Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, director, 1998): This one is probably the most easily digestible short in the program. And, as it was a little respite from all the more painterly stuff, it was very easy to fall in love with it. Basically, the director took little clips from this old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland film and edited them to completely bizarre and often hilarious effect. The Film Festival's program listing book give this synopsis: "Arnold remixes a[n]....Andy Hardy film to form an erotic Oedipal musical." And that's kind of accurate... but it's more than that, too. At one point, you hear Mickey Rooney yell, from off camera, "I'm coming!" and then you watch a clip of Judy Garland, as she is supposedly about to start singing, but the clip is seamlessly stopped, rewound, restarted, stopped, rewound, restarted such that Judy Garland appears to be having a big ol' sighing spasm.Even putting aside the jokes, though, the craft of the thing is truly remarkable. The editing is so smooth and precise that you really can't help but marvel at it.

Autumn Leaves (Donna Cameron, 1994): This one is a paper emulsion film that uses some shots of a family playing in some leaves. But it goes way down deep into the grains of color in the film itself. This one reminded quite a lot of a series of work by the artist Roni Horn that I saw in a gallery in Chelsea years and years ago. She had taken some photos of oceans waves or something and had blown them up so big that you could actually see how the points of pigment in the photograph itself separated when blown huge and then fused together in more distant iterations of the print to create the image that registered as something the eye could understand. This one was only 6 minutes long, which is good, because it was pretty for a minute, but would have been boring if it had lasted any longer.

China Girls (Michelle Silva, 2006): The blurb in the book says that this one is supposed to be some commentary on women and the aesthetics of fashion. It takes what appear to be 1970s-era film stills of women with skin tone palettes under their faces and intersperses them with those 9, 8, 7, 6 countdown things such as you might see at the beginning of film strips. If commentary was attempted, I'm not real sure it was achieved. The whole thing felt a little underfleshed, perhaps.

Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (Stan Brakhage, 1991): Stan Brakhage is a pretty huge name in experimental film and I was quite excited to see this piece. I've been aware of his name for some time, but have been feeling underexposed to his actual work. This one did not disappoint. The blurb says he used a fancy-pants hand-painting technique to "approximate the hypnagogic process whereby the optic nerves resist grotesque infusions of luminescent light," Aside from wondering after the redundancy of the phrase "luminescent light," I really don't know what that means. "Hynogogic" means "intending to induce sleep," though-- so, now I don't feel so bad about being sleepy through much the program. In any case, this film is really and truly visually beautiful. It's like a kaleidoscopic look at a melting Tiffany window, perhaps. Simultaneously liquidy and glassy, with some shadowy intimations of the macabre. A lovely exercise in expressionism. Remind me later to further investigate Brakhage via NetFlix.

Eaux D'Artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953): At 12 minutes, this one bordered on too long. A woman wearing period costume and a massive feathered headdress trots through a complex infrastructure of staircases and fountains in an Italian garden. I'm not entirely sure what's experimental about this film, other than the fact that it's non-narrative. It was pretty, I guess, despite the extremely grainy film quality. Perchance it went over my head. I don't know.

Ellipses (Frede Devaux, 1999): This one is apparently made from taking found footage, cutting it up and sewing the strips back together. And it's supposed to convey something about "celebratory apocalypse". To me, it conveyed film footage, cut up and sewn back together. It made for some visual interest, sure, but I cock an eyebrow to its proposed message-y-ness.

Georgetown Loop (Ken Jacobs, 1997): This one takes some old 1905 footage of a train running through the Rockies and runs it in mirror image to itself, then turns it upside down and loops the whole thing over and over and over and over for 11 minutes. It's sort of blinding and snowy and a mountain appears to eat the train and then itself. OK. Now what?

Kaleidoscope and Color Flight (Len Lye 1935/1938): These two shorts are cheerful little color studies set to Cuban dance music. They look a lot like animation as they're basically hand-painted spots, splotches and color fields that swim and wave at you until they resolve themselves into some advertising slogans for cigarettes and for an airline, respectively. Apparently, Len Lye was one of the pioneers of camera-less filmmaking experiments, so these tickled my yen for film history. I'm not sure how else I might ever have seen such things.

And the last in this program was Psalm III: Night of the Meek (Phil Solomon, 2003): The blurb calls this thing a kindertotenlied. Oh, how I love the German language. Not only do they have words that mean evil twin (doppelganger... is this really such a problem for Germans that they actually need an independent word for it?) and taking joy in the misery of others (schadenfreude), but they have a word that means "song for the death of children." Unlike the intrinsically humorous Yiddish, in which every insult is a synonym for cock (a fact that makes me giggle relentlessly), the German language grunts along like every curmudgeonly stereotype one could imagine. Anyway, this film mostly feels like an interminable 23 minutes of silvery-looking acid bubbles on a black surface. Occasionally a recognizable image of a swastika or some hatted Gestapo marchings or an old button emerges from the sweeping silver winds. But again, it's painterly and abstract and quite beautiful, but it's an effort to remain patient with it for nigh on half an hour.

So then, the second experimental short program was screened on Sunday afternoon. Every year, NaFF puts together a show they call Film Without Boundaries and last year, sadly, the screening conflicted with something else I'd wanted to see. But this year, I managed to drag my mom with me and I think I liked this program better than the archival Canyon one. It contains a selection of the best of this past year's filmic experiments and, despite the slowing and speeding and ominious music, I really do think it showed pretty great variety.

The Drift (Kelly Sears, 2008): This film is a coy, ironic paean to slackerishness. I think. It reminds me of a Dean Young poem. It takes some vintage photographs of people working for NASA and tells a curious story about the siren song of outer space and, I guess, posits that song as responsible for the counter-culture revolution of the 60s. It has a lovely lyrical narration that is at once foreboding and nonchalant.

Sera/Sera (John Murphy, 2007): The director of this one was in the audience and, during his Q&A, he explained the process through which this film was made-- and frankly, I didn't really follow it at all, so full of technical jargon it was. But he said he made it to prove a point to his students at Pratt: you don't need a camera to make an interesting film. He took some old newsreels, I think, and some atomic bomb footage, layered it, set it to a reggae remix of "Que Sera Sera" and voila! A little anti-WMD-proliferation film! Ah, what would the world be with Macs?

Number One (Leighton Peirce, 2006): I think this one was my mom's favorite. Indeed, it was a beautiful collage of glowing water, wheat, grasses, fire and human body images. It's both atmospheric and tactile. My mom, who's currently deeply immersed in her own painting projects, doubtlessly responded to its references to more static imagistic arts.

Dig (Robert Todd, 2007): When was the last time you actually took note of the urban hieroglyphs of the construction site? You know, those little spray-painted arrows and markers of other sorts that all say, "Dig here!" or "Don't dig here!" Well, this film runs a rapid montage of those little doodles over a rhythmically edited recording of jackhammers. And then in the middle of it, it splices in some footage of strobe-lighted flowers. It appears to suggest a simple, if vague, environmentalist message of some sort. I do wish it had articulated its point just a little more clearly, but it was only 3 minutes long, so I don't know what I'd expected.

96 (Ariana Gerstein): Gerstein is one of the co-directors of my all-time fave documentary, Milk in the Land, that I saw at last year's festival. I know, I know, I know... I talk about how much I heart that movie all the time. But now, I can see something of the division of labor that went into its making. Monteith McCollum, the other director of that movie, is clearly the narrative structure guy. One of his other films, Hybrid, is stylistically interesting, but lacks the facility with stylistic technique that Gerstein brings to the table. This little short of hers, essentially an abstracted portrait of a woman's life, between the ages of 6 and 96, is just gorgeous. She's devised a very particular method for handling time-lapse photography and animated overlay with which I'm totally in love. It's creepy and Romantic and very recognizably hers.

Light Is Waiting (Michael Robinson, 2007): The idea behind this film makes me laugh-- probably quite a bit more than the actual film did. It takes an episode of the ever-insipid Full House and makes it eat itself. It begins with a straight, unchanged scene in which DJ and Kimmie Gibbler try to take the living room television upstairs, but accidentally drop it over the banister. And then it explodes the narrative, using footage from the episode in which the family went to Hawaii (or some such locale wherein they could wear a lot of floral clothing). And quickly, the whole thing devolves into a hell-scaped incestuous orgy in which Uncle Jesse becomes the multi-armed Hindu demon-king. He's, for sure, the ring-leader of this luau-turned-nightmare. And whichever Olson twin was on duty that day becomes Chucky (c'mon, it's not that big a stretch, is it?). Bob Sagat begins making out with himself and Lori Laughlin remains beautiful... which, of course, means that all her mirror-imaged hair-swinging does little other than set her up as sacrificial virgin in this little rite. There are loads of flashing lights and very distorted images, but it is, indeed, a proper come-uppance for those of us who *might* have had just a little crush on DJ when we were 11. I'm just saying. I'm not proud of my preteen television viewing choices, but at least I can admit to them at this here 20-year remove.

Sevilla [arrow, open parens, infinity symbol, close parens] 06 (Olivo Barbieri, 2006): Please forgive my butchering of the title of this thing, but Blogger won't let me insert symbols. A bunch of slightly smeared aerial footage of the city of Sevilla. The blurb says, "a tale about the perception of Europe in Africa from the vantage point of an airplane." Huh? I really missed the part about Africa, as literally, this is nothing but aerial video of the city of Sevilla, with the edges of the frame kinda blurred out. It's well edited and, again, we've got some of the eerie percussive music going on, and I thought it was visually interesting-- I thought it was kinda cool that I recognized some buildings I visited when I was in Sevilla several years ago-- but I have no idea how this thing is a comment of Afro-European relations.

Harrachov (Matt Hulse, Joost Van Veen, 2006): It's hard to avoid cuteness when you animate inanimate objects. In this film, we follow the story of a bunch of junk-- tin cans, an abandoned tricycle, some other crap-- as they are all inexorably drawn to some big junk-monster, who we never see in full light, in a barn. Our hero, if you will, is an old tire on a spindle. He appears, and reappears, rolling down roads and through the woods. He's the only piece of junk who has his own traveling music (and this, I suppose, is why I've mentally assigned him a gender). He, too, goes to visit the scary junk-monster, but ultimately, he commits suicide, launching himself through a glass window from the upper story of the barn. But then we learn that's pretty much what's become of all the trash, as there are trash-shaped holes in many of the barn's windows. So, this film is working REALLY hard to not be cute. But, still, it kind of is.

Kogel Vogel (Frederico Campanale, 2006): Close-ups of guns and bullets going through glass in extreme slow motion. Very visual, very obviously statement-y, as you can't have images of guns-made-beautiful without it meaning something. But it reminded me a lot of this Nick Knight video. I guess I'm questioning, just a little bit, how experimental this technique really is.

Kip Maskar (Maria Petschnig, 2007): The blurb says this film "disguises body parts in altered pieces of clothing to create semi-abstract compositions that defamiliarize the human form." If that's actually what this film is doing, that's one hell of a daunting task. We are an egotistical species, for sure. We see human faces in everything from the front bumpers of cars to cinnamon buns. When you're looking at human skin, even in weird configurations, it's pretty difficult to become disoriented. I mean, yeah, there was a shot that I *think* was of elbows, but it was clearly supposed to look more like tits. And those "altered pieces of clothing" made some kneepits look like they were receiving some serious atomic wedgies. But essentially, when you're looking at flesh, bound up in elastic straps and whatnot, you know you're walking through a landscape of human eroticism. Now, set those visuals to a soundtrack of heavy breathing and, I dunno, some noise that sounded like the nylon strips of a woven lawn chair heaving under the strain of a body's weight (creaking, wheezing, subtly frictive), and you've got a VERY familiar point of reference. This might, actually, have been one of my favorites from this program (gee, betcha couldn't have predicted that one, eh?). I do think it's a successful little work, but I don't think it "defamiliarizes" a damn thing. Bondage is always bondage, even if it's only bondage with elbows.

The Green Bag:Documentary Happens (Tim Sharp, 2007): When you see a plastic bag caught in the wind, what's the first thing that pops into your head? American Beauty, right? That video from that movie has become an iconic shorthand for all that is abstractly beautiful ever after. In another film I saw yesterday (one I hope to discuss in another post), there was an extended shot of a woman's hair blowing in the wind. It's the same thing. As far as I'm concerned, you really can't reference a plastic bag or something caught up in a windgust without it being about American Beauty. And yet people are trying really really hard evade the reference. This film is a single shot from a camera posted on the roof of a hotel in Gondor, Ethiopia. It shows people walking back and forth, in and out of doors, with a plastic bag blowing around under their feet. The bag blows out of the shot and then back in and out again. It takes on personality, much in the same way that the trash in the Harrachov short did. The bag is playful, but persistent. It's territorial and it knows the camera is watching, even though all the people who enter the shot ignore the bag completely. And maybe if I'd never seen American Beauty, I might think that this was doing something new, particularly with that "Documentary Happens" subtitle. But no, it's just American Beauty, set in Gondor.

And the last, finally-- Daddy I'm Scared (Tijmen Hauer, 2006): This one employs an interesting technique in which it layers 13 different clips from mainstream animated films (I think I recognized The Hunchback of Notre Dame and maybe Lilo and Stitch?), one on top of the next to create a mostly-red visual cacophony. And the soundtracks are layered, too, so it sounds like a restaurant crowded with panicked children. The effect was a little creepy, I guess, but when you have the technique explained to you, that's pretty much all you see. It doesn't ever become a sum of its parts. Rather, it is what it is-- a palimpsest, rather than an amalgam.

Phew! I think I've gotten through them all. Though this kind of stuff might not be to everyone's taste, I can't help but feel like these shorts programs are one of the real treats of going to a film festival. It's the real art-for-art's-sake creative work happening in the medium and I'd never get to see any of it otherwise. For the purposes of my own continuing self-education, I find much value in all this weirdness. Even if it is all set to looming and sonorous tones.