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.]
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.]
posted by p.marin at 3:53 PM
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