Pictorial Treasures From This Past 5 Days

Young Film Enthusiast

Erwin van't Hart - Filmbank curator archivist from Netherlands

Jason Wade on ladder & Josh in booth window

Dan Baker

Nick Army

JT Rogstad

Noah Manos

Sunday, October 15th

Whew...Sunday was a killer. There were no round table discussions or anything today so we got off to an early start watching films at 11:15. I missed the very first work of the first program, Living, but managed to catch the subsequent films in it, Passing by Harry, a mini-road doc by James Prange and Lay Down Tracks, a feature length narrative documentary about travel by Danielle Lombardi and Brigid McCaffrey. While both films took a significantly more sentimental look at humanity than any film in the festival previously or since, Prange's subtle interweaving of rather context-free homage (of Harry Truman?!?) with a deftly edited romanticizing look at childhood innocence made for an amusingly touching visual experience.

Hardly jettisoning a sentimental angle, but certainly making it less overt, was Lombardi and McCaffrey's documentary that dealt with both the personal sacrifices and pleasures of constantly moving. The subjects in their documentary were all quite diverse and though McCaffrey informed me after the screening that many people had had a problem with her father appearing in the film, I have to say that his presence was very welcome.

The following program, Where Am I? was a really off-the-wall collection of films. Starting with Gregory Godhard's direct-to-film manipulated A Darkening Slumber, we moved right into one of the most bitter, self-affirming, and personal works of the whole festival, Sandra Davis' amazing anti-medical institution tale of personal survival Ignorance Before Malice. Visually, the work was a combination of repetitious elements: religious iconography, MRI images, and text, which narrated her struggle in the first person while a voice over narrated in the third. All in all a very powerful piece.

The next film, Kerry A. Laitala's Orbit, while not quite as emotionally moving as the previous film, was certainly great to look at. Jorge Lorenzo's Blue-Up took a significantly different approach than almost any other film in the fest, mirroring his conceptual preoccupations with projection (both in the mechanical and psychological sense) and the formal properties of film.

Telemach Wiesinger's Augenblick N 38 came after and featured a high contrast black and white sustained shot of some sort of gooey substance. It was beautiful and came across to me like Jean Cocteau shooting a still life.

Unfortunately I missed almost all of the subsequent program, Freeze Pour Glide Dissolve, although I heard great things about many of the films and from my position just outside the theater (manning the door!), the use of sound especially seemed really interesting in this program. I did catch the first film, Gerard Holthuis' Careless Reef Part 2, which I've seen like 7 times in the past month. It's so awesome and so covertly hilarious, like watching one of the space ship docking scenes from 2001: A Space Oddysey on a lot of cough syrup. Totally rad!

For the second to last program, I got to do some presenting once again, which I don't think came across as well as I would have liked. Regardless, this was one of my favorite programs of the whole event ranging from some assured re-handlings of the hand-manipulated film process to bits of totally beautiful absurdity to a meditation on the exuberance of love.

There's really too much to talk about here, but suffice it to say, Ben Russel presented two completely black and white examinations of symmetrical optics, filmic artificts, and complete psychedelia in his series Black and White Trypps Number(s) 1 and 2. Though I completely adore 1, I was really pleased with how 2 actually looked in a theater.

Michael Robinson's two films, The General Returns From One Place to Another and And We All Shine On dealt with the numerous ways spirituality, heroism, and beauty are mediated, destroyed, or satirized in popular culture. Both films were willfully obscure, surfacey, and painfully touching all at once.

Telemach Wiesinger's second film of the day, Augenblick N 19 was another sumptuous (whoa) b+w still shot. Only this time, there was a sense of austere Japanese aesthetics and an absurdist interest in the two different kinds of planes (not to spoil the surprise).

Jason Livingston's film was brief but stunning, with the overall effect being that of a pet dog's POV on acid in a field of beautiful flowers. And it was all set to a warped version of Sam Cooke's "You Send Me"! Livingston claims the film captures the feeling of being in love and I believe him!

Finally, Dan Baker's gorgeous but somewhat frightening direct-to-film piece wrestled with the problems of "exploration", while I personally found it to be a visionary warning of a post-oil apocalypse. And everyone's entitled to their opinion, right? Right.

The last film of the entire festival came next, a totally rare showing of old school master Gregory Markopoulos' feature length artsy extravaganza, The Illiac Passion. In some ways mirroring the audience's complete filmic exhaustion at that point, Markopoulos' film combined all manner of well-lit nubile bodies, gay fantasies, complete absurdity, costumed spectacle, and maddeningly repetitious voice over. Truly an ideal choice to end the festival.

After stumbling out of the Starz theater that we had all collectively lived in for the previous 5 days, those of us inclined to do a little imbibing did just that over at Globeville Studios for the 2nd time that weekend. This was a slightly more sedate affair than Friday's party, with no keg, but a decent amount of champagne, cake, and pretzels. Plus, the group I was with brought some "borrowed" liquor! Our plans to check out some cool underground type noisy music following the party were totally stymied but some of us ended up at a diner and finally Chris May's lawn! What a blast! Thanks to everyone who came, spoke, emailed, watched, created, and contributed! You are all beautiful amazing people who will live forever!

-JT Rogstad

[Pics: Ignorance Before Malice by Sandra Davis & The Illiac Passion by Gregory Markopoulos.]

Saturday, October 14th

Saturday is going to be damn hard to top. Everything that screened was so bloody amazing. Jason Wade's Vasectomy was such an intense and powerful film, and Frank Beisendorfer's Introspection Part 1 was just so interesting for me. The Q&A with both of them afterward was amazing, both of them had so much to say. Frank's argument for using film over video gave me chills, and what Jason Wade had to say about Vasectomy sold me on him as an important artist.

Jason Halprin screened a personal and moving short film that I found particularly important, especially in the context of the Q&A.

The Luther Price screenings were awesome and I think just about everyone else felt the same way. I have more to say about these later, but for now let's just say Luther Price is a great filmmaker and has quickly become a favorite of mine.

The last screening of the night was Bill Storz's two-hour experimental narrative Beach Beast. Beach Beast was flat out exciting for me, I could almost not handle sitting quiet and still through such a brilliant piece. What's more, Bill was actually there helping project his film, making it that much more special.

-Nick Army

[Pic: Beach Beast by Bill Storz.]

Friday, October 13th

We bookended the day with two different examinations of sex and violence in experimental film. The first was our only round-table discussion of the day, which focused on that very topic, in large parts inspired by the viewing of Frans Zwartjes relatively gore-free, but nevertheless sinister and oppression-themed masterwork of the night before, Pentimento. The last bookend was our final program of the night, Dirty and Narcissistic Secrets, a collection of all manner of cinematic subversions of "normative" portrayals of identity, sexuality, and rancid cocks.

In between these two entirely engaging parts of the festival were several very impressive film programs. Shortly following the day's opening discussion, we all stayed in the Tivoli's creepy Gothic/Industrial wine cellar-like basement for a special viewing of Frank Biesendorfer's 8mm filmic diary, Introspection Part 2, a single element of what sounds like an ongoing life-project that Biesendorfer seems to be working towards wholly on gut impulse: a sustained documentation and subtle reconfiguration of his home and family life which he may plan to eventually turn into some sort of epic-length masterpiece of personal cinema. Observing his work and talking with Frank, one genuinely accepts this exciting possibility as a hoped-for inevitability.

Upon coming up from our lair, we moved back into the main house at Starz for a relatively brief but quite excellent program of 16mm works including an unusual hand-worked film by Jon Behrens contrasting starkly illuminated figures and hand made direct-to-film abstractions. The overall effect was creepy enough to properly prepare us for the following film, Brittany Gravely's Blood of the Earthworm, a half hour of sweeping cultural and political criticism wrapped in a self-consciously free associative, pop ADD anti-horror veneer that remained refreshingly free of cheap irony. Besides being one of the very funniest films of the festival thus far, it was also oddly touching.
Following this great start to the day were a couple of programs that I unfortunately had to miss but heard nothing but good things about since. Apparently Peter Rose's work, which dealt with a lot of text, left quite an impression on many of the viewers.

After what I imagine was another great program, Architectural Acuity, I got back in gear with the abovementioned skinarama program, which kicked off with some found poetry readings by me, followed by Jason Wade's dead-on reimagining of the phallus as a "site" of carnivalesque playfulness and outlandish self-abuse/glorification in My Rancid Cock. It helped that Wade had musical bud in tow, Jon Neilson, to supply some truly epic live distorted tape sounds to accompany the good vibes coming off the gourd in front. "Help me cum!" A more paranoid and overtly body-anxious examination of dicks came next, with Steve McIntyre's Steak Baby. A low budg horror comedy cum (heehee) masculine nightmare, Steak Baby was hilarious and simple enough to be relatively direct if not for all the beautiful little moments of completely wtf humor, including a robot mannacin meat deliverer and a temperamental stuffed cat.

The following film was a not terribly dissapointing mistake, in that we received the wrong Dirt. Originally, Piero Heliczer's avant-garde classic was to show, but instead we got an experimental dance/rape fantasy movie of the same name. It turned out to be nicely fitting with the mood of the program and an interesting counterpoint to the fantasy that came after, Jose Rodriguez-Soltero's narcissistic day dream of longing for gratification. At first the main character finds pleasure in himself but by the end, the filmmaker hints at possibile fulfillment for the individual at the "hands" of another.

Though not nearly as sexually complicated as the previous films, current science professor and former Factory type A. Keewatin Dewdney's Malanga was a triumph in editing alternating scenes of the same character reading and dancing to begin crossing the effects of hearing and seeing. Very mathy and very 60s!

Two films by Paul Bartel closed out the set and though Progretti possibly mystified a lot of people as to its scheduling, the last film, Bartel's cinematic manipulation satire, The Secret Cinema, was a funny and goofy presentation of his and maybe our latent fears of having one's life constructed without our knowledge and of the duplicity of friends in a film-within-a-film world. Sorta creepy, but quite funny as well.

After finally getting out of our silver-screened shrine, we all met over at Globeville Studios for a very swinging art party featuring film projections and drum circles, not to mention the dope cheap beer! If there's anything cooler than sitting around with a bunch of movie dorks it's talking to them while drunk. Plenty of cigarettes were smoked, bonding was done, and hopefully someone got laid, but we've yet to see an experimental film come out of it so who's to say?

-JT Rogstad

[Pics: Blood of the Earthworm by Brittany Gravely & My Rancid Cock by Jason Wade.]

Thursday, October 12th

Today was amazing. We sat through four awesome round tables before the first screening, Slow Space by Klaus Eisenlohr, which was great. Slow Space is a beautiful experimental feature about Chicago’s glass architecture. Mesmerizing hand held shots revolve, animating the amazing glass architecture, and Klaus cuts these images with interviews from people living in Chicago. What he’s getting at is the relationship between the public space and the people of Chicago, and he certainly succeeds in giving the beauty back to the places we all walk through without stopping to notice on a daily basis.


The second program, FRAGILE WINDOWS, was my favorite until the next one, and I’m sure this is a pattern that will continue to emerge throughout the week. Pablo Marin’s Blocking, a water damaged movie trailer subtitled in Spanish was something that really stood out to me. The intentional water damage left the film looking vibrant and intriguing, and most of the time the original image was completely replaced by beautiful and random blobs of color. But where the film really succeeds is in representing the nature of destruction and the beauty it can unleash. In this case the water damaged emulsion becomes infinitely more special than the idealized Hollywood images that had originally worked to oppress the chaotic beauty of the chemicals themselves.

All of the films in this program were amazing, making it easily my favorite until a few minutes later when PACK, SELECT started. Here was the first point where Chris’ curatorial expertise was blatant, and also the point where comments about the juxtaposition of certain films became an area of focus for the audience during Q&A.

Von Innen, Von Aussen was a painstakingly crafted stop motion film starring the filmmaker’s still nude figure as it rotates and multiplies throughout rural environments, urban interiors, and an all black background. This immediately poises the program as a conversation between films about control over one’s body in both natural and manufactured environments. It becomes terribly fascinating to see how each film will comment on the last and contextualize the next. In the case of Husks, which follows, the filmmaker takes the rural setting and slows things down for a nostalgic look at kids playing paintball on a farm and the farm machinery harvesting and husking the corn crop. The presence of life is contrasted by still wide shots of a solitary farmhouse on the countryside.

The rural environment in Husks sets the stage for Casey McGuire’s Tripartite, which takes the rural setting to the interior of a barn where the filmmaker is bound and attacked if not raped by a creepy horse as her toes curl and legs kick. As the haunting black and white piece persists it is eventually revealed that the horse is actually a part of Casey’s own hand and she is really beating up herself. Commenting on control over her body and how her own fears and nightmares are a type of personal torture, this film makes glaringly apparent the lack of control the women in the following film, Selektion, have over their own bodies. This found footage piece opens with a Hardgorian shot of a woman lying on a revolving pedestal surrounded by white cloaked males, and then cuts to a man perusing a porno magazine. There are is shot of an open cavity under surgery cut with males hitting women and erotic shots of women alone or with other women, suggesting to me that perhaps the world is better off without men. I disagree with this however, but to describe the process the filmmaker employed to make men look oppressive and violent I find the word “selective” coming to mind incessantly. Thus, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t actually a comment on the way gender relations in the present have actually worked to oppress the males through excessive acts of feminism. The whole thing was so laughably acted that it was either a parody of male violence or a parody of our obsessive nature to unfairly condemn these males.

The U.S. and quite possibly world premiere of Peng Peng was amazing. Shots of eyes gazing at each other are cut with a male and female having sex, a black sky with white lightning, and an oddly canted chair while a phone buzzes and rings in the background. There is an intense, homo-erotic tension between the two males gazing expressionlessly at one another as the mustached one chews and twists a toothpick in his mouth. It is so bizarre yet intriguing that one can’t help but be affected by the unsettling experience of Peng Peng.
Meat Packing House then turns all this objectification and commodification on its head as a propagandistic government film by experimental filmmaker Eduardo Darino. The film is absolutely hilarious with a real grindhouse feel (no pun intended) coming from both the music and color palette.

Meat Packing House shows the incredibly clean, humane, and sexy side of cattle slaughter, and at every turn we are reminded by real life Uruguayans that they really do have “the best beef”. Known for “good beef and good football”, this place looks like a tourist’s dream come true. People and cattle alike sunbathe on the beach and then the beautiful men and women go out to extravagant beef parties where meat platters flash in front of the camera and these swanky ladies sell me on the beef industry even more. What an amazing way to follow up the sex and violence of the previous films while making the element of parody even stronger in Meat Packing House.


Finally, Still brought the program full circle with its static shots of the place where the filmmaker had his first sexual encounter. These shots of a bench and a clearing in the woods bookend a conversation in white subtitles over complete blackness where two teenaged males arrange their first date at this location over the phone and talk about Guns ‘n Roses.

The next program was a fucking pristine print of Frans Zwartjes’ Pentimento, a film that upon release sparked mass controversy by angry feminists (how cliché right?) who, according to Zwartjes himself, took the projector, film and all, and threw it into the street. Today this film seems terribly tame, especially given that Chris, JT, and I are all huge fans of horror and exploitation cinema. What little violence there is Zwartjes merely implies, with hardly any really challenging material ever manifesting visually. What’s hardest for me to understand is why critics and audiences alike thought this was nothing but a self-indulgent piece that championed violence toward women when the very word pentimento is a term meaning there is something going on beneath the surface that serves to criticize the overt and superficial meanings.

Ironically, there were many moments where I truly felt like this was a feminist work. A man goes out and crawls through water and mud to catch the fish that a woman then eats while sitting nicely dressed at the head of a table, while a male servant feeds scraps to the breadwinner who cowers naked in a corner. If anything this is a representation of the democracy of oppression. Man and woman alike can be in power, the thing that breeds their equality is their ability to shit on all of us without discrimination. There are also obsessive shots of the high heel, a clear symbol of feminine inequality, but throughout the film the feet are liberated from their tethering high heels, which are then smashed by a man with a field hockey stick. What all of this means is ambiguous to say the least, but for me it was so much a critique of power structures in general and not male oppression of women. If this apparatus is more biased toward women, which is possible and suggested, then for Zwartjes to give us a lens through which to view the entire system is an invitation to understand and dismantle it with the tools he so subtly hands us.

Come back tomorrow for the 3:30 pm screening of Frank Biesendorfer’s Introspection Part 2 at Sigi’s downstairs in the Tivoli. It’s a beautifully dungeonesque space that is a perfect complement to Frank’s regular 8mm piece. I’ve seen a couple of his other pieces, which are thoroughly amazing, so you really need to make sure you get a ticket from the Starz box office and get to this damn fine film! Then we’re back in Starz at 5:00 pm to kick off a full night of programs which will extend to an after party at Surrealismo.

- Nick Army


[Pics: Husks by David Ellsworth & Selektion by Dietmar Brehm.]

Wednesday, October 11th

We kicked the festival off with the Dutch Master: Frans Zwartjes program. Frans' program opened with Sorbet III, a black and white piece that seemed an externalization of Frans' own neurosis and obsession. A girl repeatedly grasps a phallic flute of red wine, eventually chugging it ravenously and spilling the bloody looking liquid all over her light skin and dress.

Zwartjes' Spectator used two gorgeous actors to comment on the act of voyeurism and gaze inherent in cinema to remarkable effect. A man with binoculars looms over an undressing woman as Zwartjes cuts in beautiful black and white close-ups of her face and lips.

His third film, Living, stars Zwartjes and his partner, Trix Zwartjes, walking around a house, eventually sitting down to build their own small scale rooms with toy furniture in one of the house's real rooms. The color is phenomenal and Zwartjes filmed the entire piece with some mysterious technique such that it appears he's actually holding the camera the entire time, yet somehow framing everything with amazing precision while never looking into the lens. It's an effect that must truly be seen to be grasped, and Zwartjes' indecipherable expression throughout as he tastes his handkerchief adds this incredible bizarreness to the event.

The second program, Flow and Recall, was structured such that films about water and movement could act as a collective investigation of the process of memory. This was the first program to have a Q&A with the filmmakers, something we'll hopefully be doing a lot more with later in the festival as everyone gets settled in.

The final program, Domestic Blind Spots, was sold-out with people even standing in the back, one on a ladder. The event was in an intimate movie house with amazing full screen vibrant Super 8 projection. It opened with two very textural, color based films, and then A Dream In Kodachrome #25 offered a nice contrast with a stop motion animated mannequin hand. Scott Banning's Crackula was Nosferatu or Caligari gone bad, with a vampiring crack head in eyeliner stalking about a dark urban setting and busting out of a cardboard box to an intense score. More Bread Forever and Through Red Wine added a more light hearted, humorous contrast and were followed by our very own Jason Halprin's Small Gauge Politics. After two more films the program ended with an active Q&A with three of the attending filmmakers.

We're already into today's round tables with the filmmakers and VIPs, which have had a bigger turnout than expected. Tonight at 5:00 pm we're starting the screening with Slow Space by Klaus W. Eisenlohr who is already here in our round table.

-Nick Army