As
with the best avant-garde filmmakers, Robert Beavers crafts unique experiences
of space and time that defy easy verbal description, eschewing typical movie storytelling
for pleasures borrowed from other arts: the luminescence of painting, the shifting
tempo of music and the casual imagist structures of poetry. His 16mm films, shot
in Old World sites of great rustic and architectural beauty, are airy yet profound,
conceptually complex while formally elegant, and confident in referencing their
own production without devolving to mere textbook self-reflexivity. Despite parallels
some might see with the work of other artists of his generation–the geometric
camerawork of Michael Snow, the lush acoustic landscapes of early James Benning,
the sun-dappled light studies of Nathaniel Dorsky–Beavers’ filmmaking
constitutes a sublime world all its own.

Although
he has been making films for three decades, Beavers’ works had rarely been
shown to the public in North America, until recently. The New York Film Festival
presented a short program of three films in 1999, his film Ruskin screened
as part of the Whitney’s "American Century" program soon after,
and the Toronto Film Festival ran a mini-retrospective of eight works last fall.
This Sunday, May 6, Lincoln Center will present three previously unseen short
films as part of its increasingly active Image Innovators series, which has become
one of the most important showcases for experimental work in the city.

Raised
in the small Massachusetts town of Weymouth, Beavers became interested in film
as a high school student in the 60s. After coming to New York and visiting Jonas
Mekas’ Filmmakers’ Cinematheque–then center of an influential and
dynamic underground film boom–he decided to drop out of school and focus
on his own development as a filmmaker. He also met Gregory Markopoulos, who had
been making avant-garde work since the 40s and was already established as a major
artist in the movement. The two developed a relationship that spanned three decades,
until Markopoulos’ death in 1992. The pair immigrated to Europe in the late
60s, where Beavers has remained since, visiting the US only sporadically in recent
years.

Still
Light, the first work in the Image Innovators program, was created in 1970
when Beavers was 21. Beavers re-edited the work in 2000, slimming it from an hour
to a trim 25 minutes. Re-editing his own catalog is an ongoing process for Beavers,
a project he began in the late 80s. "I simply had the impulse to do the work
over," he says. "It’s a question of seeing certain things very
clearly, and still trying to reach them, and feeling that you can get closer to
it by approaching it again."

It’s
also a creative luxury rarely available to commercial auteurs, and pertains particularly
to Still Light, which is itself an audiovisual song of innocence and experience.
The first half of the film explores delicate nuances of lighting, color and depth
as Beavers shoots the face of a young man in various locales on the Greek island
of Hydra, using a variety of customized masks and filters. The environmental sounds
of surf and countryside rise and fall, as the camera’s depth of focus shifts
in and out of the red-blue-green-yellow filters, creating glowing color fields
and shimmering penumbrae. The man’s face remains constant throughout, surrounded
by iconic elements in the landscape, like a pulsating Renaissance portrait.

Still
Light’s second half was shot in the London flat of art critic Nigel Gosling.
Disassociated snippets of Gosling discussing Beavers’ films are laid over
carefully composed images of the critic’s bald head, his burning cigarette,
books in his library, and a space heater shoved in a marble fireplace. The two
halves of Still Light bring to mind any number of structuralist binarisms:
youth and age, creation and criticism, action and reflection, living landscape
and mummified text.

Beavers
distilled the 26-minute Sotiros in 1996 from an original 50-minute trilogy.
Filmed in Athens and Peloponnesus in Greece as well as in Austria, much of Sotiros
is structured around another binarism: two repeating intertitles marked "He
said" and "he said." Each title introduces a set of visual phrases
with loosely parallel camerawork. The images are careful and delicate studies
of light patterns in a hotel suite and at a cafe, rolling hills populated by a
lone shepherd, Eurostyle modernized storefronts, a blind man begging in the street.
The film’s title refers to one of the appellations of the Apollo, in his
role as savior or healer.

In
the course of shooting the original Sotiros trilogy, Beavers endured a
serious traffic accident, and the end of the film records some moments of his
convalescence, including images of a long scar on his leg. Markopoulos appears
briefly in the film as well. Images of twin mirrors, each with its own sink and
shaving kit, index yet another unspoken set of two.

Previously
screened as a work-in-progress at the 1999 New York Film Festival, the final version
of Beavers’ The Stoas will make its world premiere this week. It’s
perhaps the most subtle and elusive of the works presented. The title refers to
the colonnades that led to the shady groves of the ancient Lyceum, here remembered
in shots of industrial arcades, bathed in golden morning light, as quietly empty
of human figures as Atget’s survey photos. The rest of the film presents
luscious shots of wooded streams and hazy glens, portrayed with the careful composition
of 19th century landscape painting. Again, humans are largely absent, referred
to only metonymically, when the sounds of distant workers’ hammering fills
a tiny valley, or metaphorically, as the heavy branch of an overhanging tree leans
gently down to kiss the face of a sparkling stream below. An ineffable, unnamable
immanence flows through the images of The Stoas, a kind of presence of
the human soul expressed through the sympathetic absence of the human figure.

Discussing
the works of Carl Dreyer, Beavers hits on a description that might serve as well
for his Stoas. Dreyer, he says, "has an intuition, which combined
with the restraint of the composition give the spectator something that is very
rich and peaceful. It gives the spectator something which is the exact opposite
of the clutter of the ‘well-made film.’" The Stoas also
gives the viewer the fruits of Beavers’ lifetime project of sussing and summoning
rare bits of captured life through hand-made cinema. "Younger filmmakers
are totally enraptured by the techniques of art," he remarks. "You’d
be very surprised if a young filmmaker ever thought about this other quality that
I’m trying to speak about. First comes all the pleasures connected to technique.
Then comes… the special, essential sweetnesses."

My
Hand Outstretched: Three Films by Robert Beavers plays Sunday, May 6, 8:30
p.m. at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th St. at Broadway), 875-5600.

Few people have had the chance to see Fotopoulos’ works.
He’s only screened them in public fairly recently, and then only at a handful
of festivals. Next week, however, the Chicago director will be in town to screen
his two features, Zero (1997) and Migrating Forms (1999), plus
eight of his most recent shorts.

Fotopoulos grew up in Norridge, IL. His background was solidly
working-class. His father was a policeman and his mother a hairdresser, and
Fotopoulos himself currently works in a warehouse. He also happened to grow
up just a few houses away from the razed former residence of John Wayne Gacy.
"I don’t like to say that too often," Fotopoulos remarked recently.
"I know that people will say ‘Oh, that’s why.’ But when
you’ve always known this empty lot, and what went on there, it can’t
help but make you think."

He displayed an early aptitude for drawing as a kid, but became
fully devoted to filmmaking by 15. After doing a series of 16 mm shorts, he
started shooting his first feature, Zero, at 18, in his first year of
film classes at Columbia College in Chicago.

Hardly the typical film school fare, Zero is a 142-minute
study of the inner and outer life of a young, sociopathic loner, less a narrative
than a temporal portrait. The unnamed protagonist, a gangly lad in shabby, hickish
garb, meanders through gentle wilderness, covers the walls of his bunker-like
home with pornography and anatomical diagrams, dissects a cow’s head, masturbates
violently to magazines and curses loudly to himself about Jews, blacks and women.
Especially about women: the man endlessly laments his loneliness and lack of
love. In a distinctly Dahmeresque move, he finds sexual satisfaction with a
female mannequin, whom he begins treating passionately as his inanimate inamorata.
All this time, a cancerous cyst grows on the man’s arm, increasing in size
as his mental state further deteriorates.

The character’s life is both a grungily realistic depiction
of the now-familiar psychological extremities of serial killer types, as well
as a harsh metaphor for all heterosexual male desire, pathetic and pathologized.
"I think Colin Wilson wrote something like, ‘Everything that Ted Bundy
did, men do,’" Fotopoulos says, quoting Wilson’s History of
Murder. "A lot of these people, they’re sexually obsessed, but
not too different than most teenage boys. They just go further."

The film is structured as a series of compulsively repetitive
narrative slabs, interspersed with increasingly baroque experimental sequences
that exteriorize the man’s hyper-masculine desires and mutated mentations.
These range from relatively straightforward shots of meatlike, naked bodies
to hand-painted, optically printed firestorms to ominous organic sculptures.
Color plays a key emotional role, as it does in some of his more recent short
films. The tinted monochrome stock shifts from sepia to orange to purple over
the two-plus-hour run, broken up by bursts of thick painted-on color in some
dream sequences. The sound design is equally concrete and expressive, including
many of the staticky bad-signal fuzzes and neo-industrial electronic drones
that provide the signature sonic atmospheres that permeate his works.

After completing Zero (shot in only five days over the
span of more than a year), Fotopoulos showed it to a local film critic known
for his support of avant-garde film. The critic, however, was less than supportive.
"He couldn’t say it was bad, but wouldn’t say it was good,"
Fotopoulos recalls. "So he just tells me, ‘You can’t do this.’
He told me that I couldn’t mix narrative and avant-garde techniques."

Nevertheless, the feature garnered limited video distribution
through the small label Provisional, run by noted rock writer Joe Carducci.
Despite his genre-bending, transgressive film style, Fotopoulos himself isn’t
a video-geek indie wannabe or trendy scenester. Conservatively dressed and socially
reserved, Fotopoulos is less Film Threat than Film Culture. Once
his interest is sparked, however, he passionately discusses his deep admiration
for canonical auteurs like Welles, Ford, Hawks, Godard and Fassbinder, and expounds
strikingy complex explanations of his own art. There are few other filmmakers
his age who would assert in conversations that "color in cinema is a big
problem today" or "the best actors understand themselves as objects,"
but at the same time, his expectations of his own work are relatively understated.
His own films, he explains, are "very insular, very interior things. I
do them thinking that no one’s going to watch them. So what if it’s
two-and-a-half hours long and people can’t sit through it? I can’t
worry about that. If they even show in five good-sized cities, that would be
great."

Fotopoulos has received more recognition with Migrating Forms,
which won awards at the Chicago and New York Underground Film Festivals and
continues to play around the world. Migrating Forms reworks many of the
same structural and thematic concerns of Zero, but in ways that are more
subtle, controlled, abstracted and detached. The story takes place in the unremarkable
urban apartment of a young man who is having an affair with a slatternly blonde.
Most of the film consists of their awkward interactions before sex, interspersed
with silent anamorphic dream images of women’s bodies, suggesting a vaguely
unsettling, oceanic escape from crushingly mundane reality. As their affair
continues, an impossibly large cyst grows on the woman’s back. Whereas
Zero dealt with the problem of exteriorizing the main character’s
sexual and thanatological drives, Migrating Forms takes these concerns
and disperses them into the diffuse atmosphere of the film. At only 80 minutes,
it feels like a pure, perfectly crafted object.

His short films vary widely in scope and purpose, sometimes
feeling like working sketches for the features, but always done with a stand-alone
integrity. A couple of very brief silent shorts–Two Cats (1999)
and Breathe (2000)–are each less than a minute long. These continue
Fotopoulos’ interests in the exterior depiction of interior states, each
fluttering moment seeming to capture the essence of a fleeting, perhaps oneiric
memory. Other shorts play like cubist horror films, juggling images of meaty
skulls, murdered corpses, and grotesque alien anatomies. One of the most powerful
and direct shorts, Drowning (2000), plays with shooting images entirely
off a video monitor. With colors shifted into electric blues, the film depicts
a thin, smiling young woman taking her clothes off for the camera, and shifting
around on a bed in various stereotypical porn poses. Her movements are sped
up to herky-jerky silent film speeds, and the camera zooms in to focus on still
video frames of her hair and eyes. The effect is profoundly antipornographic,
perhaps even spiritual. It’s an attempt to force a glimpse of redemptive
humanity out of the dehumanizing esthetics of pornography.

Working at a breakneck exploitation-style speed, Fotopoulos
is currently editing a third feature, Back Against the Wall, set in the
world of Midwestern "lingerie modeling"; shooting a fourth feature,
Esophagus, which takes place over 500 million years; and beginning production
on a fifth feature, Christabel, based loosely on the poem by Coleridge.
His devotion to filmmaking is no less obsessive and overpowering than the psychic
tumult depicted in his films, yet he’s fully aware that he’s living
a kind of mystically monkish anachronism through his art.

"If I had to work in film in some other time," he
says, "I’d want it to be the silent era. It was all new. The notion
that you were shooting in this way, that was new. You’re inventing everything
as you go. You’re making like 400 movies in the middle of the desert."

Zero screens Tues., Nov. 21, 9 p.m., at Collective Unconscious,
145 Ludlow St. (betw. Stanton & Rivington Sts.), 254-5277, www.rbmc.net.
Migrating Forms and short films by James Fotopoulos screen Nov. 24-26
at Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave. (2nd St.), 505-5181. Zero can
be ordered from www.fantasmainc.com.

Views from
The Avant-Garde
Flying
in the face of complaints that rising rents, commercial strip-malling and gentrification
are indelibly harshing New York’s artistic vibe, the underground cinema
scene has been booming in the city for more than a couple of years now. Going
on its third year, Bradley Eros and Brian Frye’s Tuesday night Robert Beck
Memorial Cinema continues to screen celluloid hermeticisms to an avowed art-core
crowd on Ludlow St. In Williamsburg, the Monday night screenings by Ocularis
at Galapagos have become increasingly popular, serving up a mixture of underground
oddities, live music and video mixing, film festival showcases and classic experimental
fare, sometimes going head-to-head with similarly eclectic guest-curated offerings
on the same nights at Tonic. Up until last May, curator Astria Suparak rounded
out the week with Wednesday avant-garde film screenings at Pratt, spun with
a superlative curatorial taste that combined a savvy political consciousness
and sexy indie-rock-style showmanship without ever losing crucial nerd cred.

While this curatorial energy
may have brought back New York’s edge as cinematic tastemakers in the avant-garde
realm, similar smaller scenes are flourishing all across the country. There’s
hardly a metropolitan area now that doesn’t host some kind of underground
festival or ongoing experimental cinema series. Some of the most engaging and
interesting work isn’t being produced in New York, but by small cadres
of artists in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore,
Washington, DC, and more obscure locales. Building off the burgeoning downtown
interest in avant-garde work, uptown’s art mafia has stepped up its response.
Since its "American Century" film series, the Whitney has been ambitiously
programming avant-garde classics nonstop. The curators at Lincoln Center racked
up an impressive slate of showcases of new work in the past year as well. The
Film Society’s Video Festival in July appeared to attract larger crowds
than ever before. The newly energized "Image Innovators" series has
presented popular one-man shows by Lewis Klahr, Luis Recoder and Nathaniel Dorsky,
and even hosted a program of new Super 8 work produced by young filmmakers from
downtown and Brooklyn.

In the wake of this remarkable
wave of activity, the selections available for preview screening from the New
York Film Festival’s annual "Views from the Avant-Garde" showcase
seem all the more disappointing. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the necessity
of the sidebar’s film-only purism. One can’t fault the programmers
for not trying, however. The slate includes an impressive set of premieres from
big-name avant-garde luminaries: Jean-Luc Godard’s Origin of the 21st
Century, Michael Snow’s Prelude, Guy Maddin’s The Heart
of the World and In Absentia, a film by the Quay brothers with an
original score by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Of these, Maddin’s
is the only hands-down astounding work, a five-minute feature done in the style
of an Eisenstein-era Soviet science-fiction film (a la Aelita, Queen of Mars).
Scratched and superannuated to a greater degree than his previous feature-length
excursions into perverted nostalgia, the film is packed with early cinema’s
trick-film trickery, cut to an insanely spastic millennial pace. Not as breakneck
but still impressive is Godard’s piece, a somber meditation on the psychological
and moral extremities of the 20th century, as seen through archival footage
and clips from the works of fellow auteurs ranging from Kubrick to Kurosawa
to Jerry Lewis. Snow’s piece, produced as a trailer for the Toronto Film
Festival, is a dull one-shot time-puzzle trifle with amateur actors. In Absentia,
produced by the BBC and the Quays’ first new film in six years, retreads
their now-familiar style to tell a tediously grim quasi-parable about a writer.
The Quays’ slick Lynch-meets-Svankmajer style has been copped so many times
by music video and commercials that I half expected either Marilyn Manson or
a Volvo to swing into frame at any second.

More endearingly scrappy
is Abigail Child’s Surface Noise, a collage film built from home
movies, travelogues and other small-format oddities. The jittery montage recalls
the anarcho-random pasteups of Arthur Lipsett, always on the verge of complete
nonsense. As with many nonnarrative films, the soundtrack is what gives Surface
Noise its true kick. It’s a bizarre multitrack sonata filled with back-masking,
electronic bleepage, cartoon sound effects and fluxoid Ono-esque utterances,
produced by experimental music faves Christian Marclay, Zeena Parkins, Shelly
Hirsch and Jim Black.

A couple of less established
directors steal the show from the old school. Bobby Abate’s The Zero
Order is a fractured narrative about a twentysomething depressive lad (played
by the director) obsessed with Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Shot on moody 16 mm, The Zero Order engages in a complicated dialogue
with the 60s, not just in its protagonist’s object of obsession, but in
the director’s choice of film format and color scheme, the amateurish Factory-esque
actor ensemble and central image of the tragically fey, sensitive, sad young
man. A completely different strain of 60s excess provides the genealogy for
Stom Sogo’s darkly psychedelic Slow Death, an abstract epileptic
epic of flashing light, color, obscured images and intensely fucked-up sound
design. A key personality on the downtown New York avant-kid scene for the past
few years, Sogo creates his remarkably advanced works through dizzingly complex
rerecordings of Super 8 and video. Completely divorced from the tired academism
and banal traditionalism of many lesser offerings on view, Sogo’s films
are powerful and utterly unique works of sublime transportation and oblivion,
not easily forgotten.

Despite a handful of impressive
films, however, the preview program as a whole suffers from a lack of diversity
of tone. Unlike the dynamic Video Festival, which screened everything from subcultural
docudramas to structural feminist essays to manic performance tapes, the film-only
"Views from the Avant-Garde" plays out one long, somber note of funereal
formalism. The videomakers look both forward and back in time for inspiration,
while almost every experimental film here wallows in death-of-film nostalgia.
There’s also the intrinsic limits of a dying medium. Only so many times
can one gush about the colors of Super 8, the possibilities of found-footage
collage, or the Tinkertoy wonders of emulsion-scratching and hand-processing
before most of the films seem like unadventurous repetitions of familiar formal
elements. The current avant-boom is decisively multiformat. While there may
always be a few new hardline celluloid geniuses in the retro genre of experimental
film, perhaps it’s time to concede that, for film, the experiment is over.

Jay Rosenblatt
It
may seem contradictory to propose that a director could be at once formally
experimental and generally accessible, but there have been many instances in
the history of avant-garde filmmaking. Many of the more well-known have worked
with reassembled found footage. The proto-trippy antics of Bruce Conner, the
paranoid Unabombastics of Craig Baldwin and the turntablistic scramblings of
Martin Arnold are just three of the more prominent examples of work that plays
well to a wide variety of audiences–who’ve been already softened,
perhaps, by the mass-media ubiquity of archival footage in commercial use.

In the featured films, created
from 1990 to 2000, Rosenblatt refashions materials evoking a boomer childhood:
Hollywood moments, newsreels, home movies, educational and industrial films
from the 50s and 60s, and some newly staged scenarios. In a number of these
works, he lays a deadpan male narration over the images, discussing topics ranging
from the filmmaker’s boyhood to the sex lives of 20th-century dictators.
In the narrated films, the images frequently take an illustrative backseat to
the voiceover.

Originally a practicing
mental health therapist in San Francisco, Rosenblatt steeps his films deeply
in a fuzzy Bay Area liberal humanism that some may find comforting, but will
strike others as cloying, verging on smug. If Clinton-era "I feel your
pain" sensitivity could be articulated as an ideology, Rosenblatt might
be its Dziga Vertov. Middlebrow newcomers could find his films interesting–perhaps
even profound–while hardcore avant-junkies will more likely be bored by
his sometimes facile messages, occasionally cliched motifs, unmusical editing
and psychiatric melodrama.

The earliest film in the
series, 1990’s Short of Breath employs hospital training footage
found in a dumpster outside a facility where Rosenblatt was employed. He reworked
the timeworn images into a kind of medical theater of the absurd. There are
a couple of marvelously transportive moments here, particularly in his use of
a film for the training of therapists. Questions and answers between actors
portraying a deadpan psychiatrist and his histrionic female patient are reedited
into a dadaistic fugue. In one instance, Rosenblatt skillfully stretches out
the image and sound of the woman crying into a beautifully disturbing series
of gasps, wheezes and shudders. But for the remainder of the film, the choice
of saccharine string music and overly precise sound design deflates the film’s
impact, a fussy professional polish dampening the footage’s explosively
raw potential.

The two narrated collages,
The Smell of Burning Ants and King of the Jews, tread into quasi-autobiographical
territory, relating angst-ridden tales of male childhood. Ants is like
an earnest Triumph of the Will for the postfeminist men’s movement,
piously dedicated "for my brothers." Taking on the process by which
boys become men in an atmosphere of violence, emotional distance, homophobia
and competition, the film weaves together somewhat enigmatic images of boys
from educational films and home movies with images of the destruction of ants
and scorpions. Portentous episodes from a typical boyhood are retold through
a third-person narrator whose youthful newscaster timbre moves forward with
subdued, self-righteous outrage, reminiscent of the offhand distance of spoken-word
poetry.

King of the Jews
tells the story of Rosenblatt’s boyhood fear and fascination with the figure
of Jesus, and his sense of displacement as a Jewish outsider in a Christian
society. An attempt at an ecumenical spiritualism of forgiveness is played out
over Hollywood images of Christ. The result is odd and uncomfortable, with a
drawn-out graphic sequence of the crucifixion meant to stand for, perhaps, the
historical oppression of the Jews.

Despite their laudable intentions,
the sentimentality of Jews and Ants grates as squarely West Coast
liberal. Both works are a touch too hammer-on-the-head, forcing their points
rather bluntly for my tastes. Perhaps someday they will be recouped as prime
examples of 90s p.c.-era kitsch.

A completely different tack
is taken with the longest film, the 30-minute Human Remains, probably
the most subtle work in the show. Created over a span of four years, Human
Remains plays on the contemporary obsession with the private lives of political
figures by presenting a preponderance of minutiae on the personal foibles, habits,
tastes and sexual proclivities of some of the 20th century’s most notorious
and hated dictators: Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mao and Mussolini. Over compilations
of newsreel footage of each man, narrators read scripted lists culled from a
number of biographies and historical accounts, detailing intimate factoids ranging
from mundane to humorous to deeply disturbing. We learn that Hitler had trouble
with flatulence and "could never resist chocolate eclairs." The pompous
Mussolini loved American movies and thought that men who were not attractive
to women were worthless. Mao hated his father, seldom rose before noon, had
an insatiable appetite for sex with young women and suffered such constipation
that a normal bowel movement "was a cause for celebration" by the
Chairman’s staff. This wealth of unusual information brings the dictators
down to human level, while at the same time portraying them as unusual characters–astoundingly
driven, obsessed by sexual and bodily hungers, and mentally volatile.

As interesting as this new
take on historical villains may be, I couldn’t help wishing the visual
aspects of the work were stronger. The newsreel footage of each man seems rather
unremarkable, edited without flair. And there’s the question of why this
project needed to be a film at all. Couldn’t the same effect have been
achieved, and reached a much wider audience, as, say, an article in The Atlantic?

The only film in the program
that could be recommended without reservation is a one-minute collage short,
Restricted. A speedy collapsed remix of patriotic 50s shorts, it wins
through a more creative sound design than his other films, droning a musically
rhythmic found mantra of phrases: "take a chance/don’t do it."
The contradiction of these two prerogatives may embody what Rosenblatt’s
films lack–a sense of risk. While his moral messages all seem forthright,
his means to express them through film feel too middle-of-the-road. Rosenblatt’s
films present a cleanly digestible, professionally produced and morally sound
cinema, bereft of the carelessness, immorality, overreaching and indulgent lunacy
of much experimental work. Unfortunately, those characteristics are exactly
what I love about the medium. Rosenblatt may intend to explore the banality
of evil, but after watching his films, this thrill-seeking cynic found himself
more concerned with the evils of banality.

New York Video
Festival
When you go
out on a limb, don’t expect everyone to follow you there. The same might
be said of experimental video. The cheap format and relatively easy means of
editing, distribution and exhibition mean that every artsy oddball nowadays
feels he has something profound to say using stock footage, swerving camcorders
and carefully unfocused cinematography.

There are, however, a number
of long-form works that stand out strongly, and should not be missed. Trent
Harris’ "Beaver Trilogy" is a set of three short pieces
that culminates in the underground tape-traded classic The Orkly Kid.
Harris shot the first part of the trilogy, a short documentary called The
Beaver Kid, in 1980. While working for a local tv station, Harris encounters
a cornfed, flare-panted 21-year-old in a Beaver, UT, parking lot. The kid’s
madly eager to "get on the tube," and gushes for the camera, doing
impersonations of John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone and Barry Manilow ("I’m
the Beaver Rich Little!" he grins). Days later, Harris receives a handwritten
letter from him, imploring the director to cover the Kid’s debut at a Beaver
talent show–as "Olivia Newton-Don." Harris brings us to a local
funeral parlor, where the Kid gets dolled up by the facility’s makeup artist,
making sure to tell the camera that "I enjoy being a guy–I really
do!" while excitedly donning a dingy blonde wig, silk scarf and high-heeled
boots.

The talent show is filled
with a breed of shaky-voiced provincial amateurism that urbanites love to snort
over with uneasy self-satisfaction and empathy. But the Kid’s appearance
as Olivia Newton-Don is truly stunning. He neither sounds, looks nor acts anything
like her, yet emotes a trembling desire for the acceptance and transcendence
of tv stardom that touches on something lonely and desperate at the melancholy
core of media ambition that the current spate of reality programming never dares
to breach.

Then things get weirder.
A year after this event, Harris recreates the documentary in The Beaver Kid
#2 with then-little-known Sean Penn playing the Kid. Shot on black-and-white
home video, the restaging is an odd mixture of line-for-line reenactment of
the Kid’s on-camera dialogue, reedited b-roll footage from the original
documentary and new scripted narrative elaboration, including the insertion
of "Terrance," a cameraman stand-in for Trent, who gloats and chuckles
throughout over the great footage he’s getting. It’s impossible to
tell when watching how much of the "off-camera" elaboration is based
on reality, if any, and you wonder if the piece is partially a means to expiate
a sense of guilt for Harris, who directs the actor playing Terrance as a sleazy
exploiter.

Harris returned to the Kid’s
story one more time (this time shooting on film with a larger budget and changing
the name of the town) for The Orkly Kid with Crispin Glover 1985. Much
further from the original source material, this final melodramatized version
focuses more strongly on the Kid’s inner crossdressing struggle and the
purported hostility of the townspeople (although the original documentary doesn’t
suggest the locals were anything but entertained by his antics). The trilogy
as a whole is a stunning and complex exercise, an elaborate karaoke-upon-karaoke
that snaps right into place with contemporary obsessions with celebrity, fame
and media.

Similarly fixated on the
troublesome lines between restaging, documentary and repetition compulsion is
Elisabeth Subrin’s The Fancy, a sharp-witted, starkly lush and potentially
controversial visual essay on the career of photographer Francesca Woodman.
Woodman, who committed suicide at age 22 in 1981 by leaping from the window
of her East Village apartment, created stilted pseudo-Victorian erotic self-portraits
that were embraced by late-80s feminist art historians still giddy from the
Madonna-esque rise of Cindy Sherman. Subrin avoided all contact with the notoriously
controlling Woodman estate for the creation of The Fancy, relying only
on a limited number of publicly available documents, which, according to the
documentary, primarily consist of the three published monographs of Woodman’s
work. In fact, Woodman’s parents probably don’t even know the tape
exists, and certainly won’t be happy when they find out.

Issues of copyright and
the legal status of artistic reappropriation have informed a great deal of art
from the late 70s on, beginning with hiphop sampling and leading up to 90s culture-jammers
like Craig Baldwin and RTMark. Subrin is no stranger to this arena, having meticulously
recreated an entire documentary on feminist icon Shulamith Firestone with her
previous work, Shulie, which is currently undergoing legal threats from
its angry subject. Shot with a rigid but colorfully rich digital cinematography
and set to a repetitive tape-looped electronic score, The Fancy pushes
copyright boundaries as well, but is structured so tightly around its own legal
limits that it practically dares a lawsuit.

The tape consists of elaborately
staged visual lists based on Woodman’s work and life. One segment portrays
a number of interiors that closely resemble locations from her photographs.
Another beautifully shot sequence tracks over piles of evidence–bagged
shoes, clothing, flowers and other items resembling props from the photos. The
titles of her photos are presented using a forged version of the photographer’s
handwriting. In one of the most disturbing lists, contemporary women (none of
whom look anything like Woodman) mime the uncomfortable positions and moves
the photographer acted out for her self-portraits. Subrin includes stark images
of Woodman’s residences, culminating in the spot by the window from which
she leaped to her death. The tape’s voiceover notes that curators and writers
curiously avoided the issue of Woodman’s suicide in their writings about
her work.

Troubled young artists attempt
suicide all the time. The Fancy attempts to shake up this jaded truism
by prompting us to ask, at least in this instance, exactly why, and ruthlessly
challenging Woodman’s parents to answer. There’s an interesting esthetic
issue at work here as well. In a departure from the established mode of experimental
video, which tends to stress the shakily handheld aspects of the medium, The
Fancy is forthrightly DP-ed, distant and cold. It attempts to discard the
notion of video-as-television and embraces a new look that could only be called
video cinema.

Also satisfyingly cinematic
is Miranda July’s Nest of Tens, a disturbing set of dysfunctional
and compelling scripted scenarios involving babies, middle-management self-helpers,
lower-class preteens and the mentally retarded. As July’s title card stresses,
this isn’t a grubby 90s-style performance tape. It’s truly a "movie,"
shot with a compelling skill of pace, color and composition. Sitting somewhere
between the high fashion surrealism of the Cremaster series and the dirt-ass
bargain-bin culture-dredging of Gummo with a squirmy neurotic twist,
Nest of Tens deftly avoids the cheap exploitation elements of both Barney’s
and Korine’s works.

Also worth checking out
at the festival is an in-person tribute to underground pioneer George Kuchar,
who has been shooting comical video diaries since the 70s when he moved from
the Bronx to San Francisco. Prior to video, George and brother Mike were known
for their handmade 8 mm and 16 mm mini-epics like Hold Me While I’m
Naked and Sins of the Fleshapoids, which ran like $10 versions of
contemporary trash melodramas, complete with stirring sickly sweet soundtracks
and bombastic title sequences. Although the B-movie is now a lost form, Kuchar
retains these elements for his newest video diaries, adding elaborate cinematic
flourishes to the mundane actions of his old friends, art school colleagues
and, in his three-hour miniseries Secrets of the Shadow World, a weird
panoply of UFO researchers and parapsychologists who themselves present an odd
mix of the everyday and the truly kooky. A hybrid of tv, home video and cinema,
Kuchar’s tapes play like a cable-access soap opera broadcast directly out
of the director’s brain.

Puzzled by Jay-Z’s
"Big Pimpin’" lines about "spending cheese…/And we be…big
pimpin’, on B.L.A.D.’s"? Then you’ve got a problem with
the language of pop. That’s the subject of Armond White’s "Coded
Language," a music video presentation from Macy Gray to Krust, Ol’
Dirty Bastard to Bjork. At the New York Video Festival, Mon., July 24, 8:45
p.m.

In "Magenta,"
Recoder threads an old, scratchy first-aid instructional movie through the same
projector twice, so that the silent film is superimposed upon itself with slight
temporal lag. On a second projector, he does the same time-delay trick with
another film, but plays only the soundtrack, an easy-listening version of a
Pachelbel tune. The resulting combination forms an exquisite, balletic diplopia.
Two slightly different images of a gauze bandage rolling around an injured wrist
are transformed from mere textbook sparseness into a spectral Baroque mandala.

Similar double-vision spectacles
are crafted from a cheapo 60s western in "Ballad of…" and black-and-white
sports newsreel footage in "Moebius Strip." In these projections,
a more anarchic mix of images creates an odd and disconcerting sense of scale.
At one point in "The Ballad of…," a frontier couple appears to roll
around in miniature form on a dining room table. In "Moebius Strip,"
tiny hockey players are battered about by their own gigantic doppelgangers.

Although not all of Recoder’s
work involves such intense real-time mechanical legerdemain, they’re all
crafted with some level of unconventional trickery. "Paper Print"
was created by xeroxing the film print of an old discarded documentary onto
regular office paper, cutting out the images and meticulously pasting them onto
clear leader with doublestick tape, then tearing the paper off, leaving a splotchy
ink ghost. When projected, the footage appears deteriorated by some unknown
process that seems at once organic and electronic. What’s more astounding
is the optical soundtrack, which actually plays, albeit within a heavy haze
of Edisonian aural static. The tone and timbre of the boring male narrator comes
through clear, though the individual words are completely inaudible.

At his most coy, Recoder
verges on the poker-faced peekaboo antics of conceptual art and Fluxfilm. He
created "1977 Leader" by cutting out all the clear portions of an
old, dust-covered reel of editing slug and splicing them together in sequence.
The audience thus watches about 10 minutes of dust, scratches and hairs. The
sounds of static reach a subtle crescendo before each splice.

Similarly simple and semiautomatic
but far more compelling are his three light-flare films, a series called "Available
Light," made without a camera by exposing raw color stock under slightly
different conditions. The results are like sensuously pulsating color-field
paintings with differing intensities of yellow, orange and red. For the most
impressive and beautiful piece, Recoder turns the projector on its side, creating
a tall window through which billowy pomegranate shapes float and flutter across
a shifting horizon.

Recoder is a soft-spoken
but articulate twentysomething with an air of happening nerdiness, dressed in
spiffy thriftstore mod and sporting a healthy East Bay tan. In conversation,
he refers frequently to the legacies of earlier experimental auteurs and couches
the way he speaks of his own work in the polite institutional shoptalk of academic
smarty-pantisms. But despite his controlled demeanor, there’s an undeniable
spark of generational rebellion in his work. Like a number of his contemporaries,
he combines the formal elegance of traditional avant-garde concerns with the
do-it-yourself shenanigans of underground film and the implicitly nostalgic
flea-market esthetic of postslacker culture.

An experimenter in celluloid’s
End Times, Recoder revels in playing with the technology of 16-mm projection
with the loving gusto only a fellow member of the last pre-VCR generation could
muster. At the beginning of the century, the most adventurous filmmakers positioned
themselves at the vanguard of the newest developments in cinema. At century’s
end, the avant-kids have fallen back on sensual aleatory nihilism, eschewing
revolutionary grandiosity in order to tinker and toy with smart retro grooviness.

Recoder presents "Ciné-Povera"
twice this week. First at the Pratt Insitute’s Wednesday Night Film Series
this Weds., Dec. 8, at 8:30. Admission is free (Enginering Bldg, Room 371, Dekalb
Ave., betw. Hall & Classon Sts., Brooklyn, 718-636-3422). Then at the "Vertigo!
Go! 2000: A DJ/Video/Film benefit for WFMU and Smack Mellon" on Sat., Dec.
11. Tickets are $10 (Smack Mellon Studios, 56 Water St., Brooklyn, for info.
call 201-521-1416 x230).

"The Hubley Studio
Show" Films
by John, Faith and Emily Hubley
Groovy
retro kiddie-flicks of a more literal sort are offered up at the Quad starting
this Fri., Dec. 10, with a weeklong tribute to indie animation legends the Hubley
family. Parents John and Faith created The Hubley Studio in New York in the
mid-50s, producing a mixture of innovative personal animation with tv commercials
and other commissioned work. Like a cartoony Cassavetes clan, the whole family
got involved in production. Sons Mark and Ray and daughters Emily and Georgia
provided dialogue for films and later helped with the animation process.

John and Faith’s joint
films from the 50s, 60s and 70s fall into two related camps. One group are dreamlike
flights of childhood make-believe based around their kids’ kooky improvised
dialogue. In Moonbird (1959) their two sons chatter on about a hunt for
a magical bird, and the parents’ animation keeps step with their fanciful
banter in colorfully blobby bebop sprightliness against a dark nighttime background.
Their daughters gurgle and giggle through later films like Cockaboody (1973)
and Windy Day (1969), creating more crazy preteen surrealism.

Other films had a more socially
relevant, adult spin. In The Hole (1963) Dizzy Gillespie and actor George
Matthews provided improvised dialogue as two construction workers. A number
of Hubley works were created by basing animation around improvised music from
contemporary jazz musicians like Gillespie, Benny Carter and Ella Fitzgerald.

If the earlier Hubley films
evoke the fairytale splotiness of Chagall, Faith’s later solo work is reminiscent
of the clean neoprimitive surrealism of Klee and Miro. Taking on topics like
the myths of Native Australia in Cloudland (1993) and human artistic
beginnings in Africa (1998), Faith’s work has a whimsical, new-agey
jitterbug quality that verges further onto formal abstraction. Rounding out
the series are a couple of films by daughter Emily, including Pigeon Within
(1999), a cut-and-paste inner journey with a soundtrack by her sister Georgia
and Ira Kaplan, both of Yo La Tengo. While some of the longer Hubley works may
try the patience of your inner child, the earlier work of John and Faith are
classic gems, and the series as a whole feels like a funky family reunion.

Spectres of the
Spectrum
directed
by Craig Baldwin
Working
out of his gadget-cluttered basement studio in San Francisco’s Mission
district, Craig Baldwin has handcrafted a unique body of subcultural cinema
in the past decade. He’s the unabashed Unabomber of underground film, assembling
volatile collages of found footage into paranoid stream-of-consciousness narratives
that touch on conspiracy theory themes and lunatic radicalism. Baldwin has covered
sampling and copyright controversies in Negativland in Sonic Outlaws (1995),
the colonization of the American southwest in ¡O No Coronado! (1992), and
the CIA, flying saucers and mind control in Tribulation 99: Alien Anomolies
Under America (1991).

In addition to his own films,
Baldwin has curated the Other Cinema series for 14 years, screening a wide array
of experimental and underground films. He’s an entrenched San Francisco
sublebrity who can still be seen on the streets, pasting up fliers for his latest
shows.

His newest film, Spectres
of the Spectrum, takes on the theme of electromagnetism in the history of
speculative science, touching on a panoply of fringe figures like Edward Teller,
Wilhelm Reich, Nicola Tesla and Korla Pandit in a futuristic fantasy narrative
involving time travel, millennial apocalypse and psychic warfare. Baldwin discussed
Spectres of the Spectrum with his characteristic nonstop verbal overload
in this recent transmission from his subterranean lair.

Well, there’s certainly
more than one source. One was the concept of HAARP, which is an acronym for
High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. For me this represented the
perfect metaphor for some kind of military-industrial doomsday machine, but
in fact it probably isn’t. It’s probably just some kind of everyday
research, and it might even be defunded by the time the movie’s done, but
it had this metaphorical status because it did represent a completely unprecedented
use of the ionosphere as a possible armature for military application. That
rung very heavily, very profoundly with these kinda science-fiction-resonating
ideas that I want to exploit, to bring to my essay to give it a kind of genre
feel. When I started reading about HAARP I got the feeling that it was something
within the landscape of electromagnetic research and development that I could
build a story around. Now at the other end–what I call the material end–were
these kinescopes from the Science in Action show. Here the impulse came
from the material itself, which were these beautiful eerie haunted poetic black-and-white
artifacts from an earlier day. They had an incredible kind of attractive quality,
a weird quality, so I wanted to work with the grain of the artifact, the kind
of metallic shimmering you get, the grain of the live video on film, the halos
around people.

So the film kind of worked
toward the middle from these two ends. All the other things started to coalesce
like dust and gas around those poles, to use another cosmic model! Other things
were drawn in like gravity, like the stories of the inventors’ lives, and
of course the narrative–ha!–about empire, democracy and media outlaws,
which is an ongoing theme of mine. So all those Craig Baldwin themes started
to get drawn in. There’s also these little episodes or vignettes where
we talk a little about history, or a little about psionics, or a little bit
about the use of radiant energy weapons; we talk a little bit about Teller,
we talk a little bit about Reich and so on. One idea will lead into another
in a sort of free-association way, which is not necessarily good for me because
it means more work cutting the thing together and definitely more work for the
audience to keep track of it all. But it’s supposed to be a natural expression
of the artist vision, which is confused or whatever or schizophrenic.

Well, the titles aren’t
there yet. There are a lot of intertitles. The idea is that the movie’s
structured as a pirate tv transmission, so periodically every eight or nine
minutes or so a title card will come in on a B-roll and burn in and add this
historical footnote…

Yeah, yeah, that’s
always one of the levels that’s operating.

They were from the Exploratorium,
a great resource here in San Francisco. They were cleaning house and getting
rid of a lot of prints, and they came right into my hands. When I came into
a whole bunch of them with titles like Miracle Materials, Digging
Down Under, Science of Money, Medicine in Space, Radar
Defense Technologies, X-Rays and so on–I saw that they represented
a whole complete total range of mid-century science. I felt there was a kind
of isomorphism between what was happening in the 50s and the 90s because it’s
both postwar, and post-Cold War. It’s the same situation of being after
a war and being flush with the arrogance of ruling the world. All the money
has gone into the research and development of this kind of technology. It’s
one with the whole ideology, the culture of worship–especially here in
Silicon Valley–of the newest kinda gadget that’s probably useless
for the most part and doesn’t improve the quality of life. I mean, it’s
just making a smaller class of people richer and richer.

You can see all this happening
right in these old films. Yeager was in there, the Right Stuff dude,
Nimitz and bankers and the RCA vice president. There’s a complete parade
of every fucking fat capitalist–right in front of kids! In front of schoolkids!
It looks ludicrous in the 50s, so I just used that as a mirror to critique the
90s. It’s just unabashed, unashamed propaganda–all I need to do is
turn it over and it’ll just shoot itself in the foot. I call it a jujitsu
move, to use the weight of this absurd, preposterous blind belief in technology
being the big fix and you turn it around and critique without being so explicit
about it, though I am at points.

Well, it’s not just
a Luddite film, it’s not anti-technology and it’s not antiscience.
The whole point is this ambivalence to science, the peril and the promise. Maybe
I’m just new age or California or something, but there’s also this
sincere belief in the wonder of the universe, and I tried to write that in to
the person of my main character, the woman who wants to get out of this anthropomorphic
mortal coil and merge with the energy systems. But to get back to the 19th century
and Tesla and all that… That’s the thing, there is this marriage of science
and poetry that we see in that period. I wanted to look at the other side of
science, to turn away from the utilitarian use and the overriding the instrumentality
of exploitative science. I wanted to turn from the ideas of "I can use
it to make money" or "I can use this to destroy other populations
of people," but rather, "This could free us! This could liberate us!
My mind is expanding!"

Well, there truly is a subculture
here, and I’m not saying there isn’t one in New York, but people are
interested in making movies for a lot of other reasons than money: personal
expression, and putting forward an alternative vision as opposed to conforming
with the mainstream vision or television or anything like that. So there is
that iconoclastic or nonconformist kind of thing here. The film’s set in
the Southwest, and I’ve set my films there before. And from San Francisco
there’s definitely the collage idea. You’ve got Funk Art, which is
a major tradition here preceding me, not just in cinema but in sculpture and
visual arts. There’s so many collage artists you could cite, it’s
not like I’m a direct inheritor of one artist like Jess Collins or filmmakers
like Bruce Connor and Robert Nelson. It’s more a kind of zeitgeist thing,
a sense of–in the air–of humor, sexuality, playfulness. It’s
more playful out here, it’s a very diverse scene. I mean New York’s
diverse, too, but here it’s more mixed up, and with the artists here there’s
much less of a sense of professionalism and more about creating our own culture,
not conforming to commerce. So out here it’s not like you make a movie
and get paid to do it. The money’s not at the front end and not at the
tail end. All the movies are made out of a pure love and poverty kind of thing.
Another reason that the movies are made out of collage, not just this playfulness
of form, but also it’s a cinema of pragmatism. It’s just the only
way to do it when that’s all you’ve got. It’s more like a cargo
cult kinda thing. I feel like one of those New Guinea aboriginal people who,
you know, things fall down from the sky and you make a propeller into a religious
shrine. So all these products fall from the sky from New York and L.A. and we
make our little shrines and we dance in circles around them! (laughs)

We’re trying to have
it both ways, to make our little bricolage shrine out of shiny objects that
we project meaning onto, and to make a movie the way we can with what we got
around us. I don’t know if that’s true for other people from the West
Coast, but I’m also about this refusal to work by the rules of, uh, orthodox
reason (laughter) and rationality maybe.

Yeah, my next project–jumping
off the bridge, dude! I’m in really bad shape now. I’m not braggin’
about it, but I’m a mess. I should go to the hospital. I’m tellin’
you, I’m raked over the coals. Physically, emotionally, psychologically
and financially. Y’know, I made some movies in the past, I might make some
in the future, but I just can’t believe how these people all go, "Well,
my next project is blah blah blah." What luxury, or I don’t know what
the word is…how preoccupied they could be. This is a total lifestyle for me,
it’s not easy to just clock it in and leave the studio at 6. This is working
all night, every night. I mean at this point I’m just sick of it.

So all those people that
think filmmaking is a lark or whatever, they’re liars. It’s hard work.
I don’t know how I possibly fell down the trap of trying to make something
so long, but I must be full of myself or can’t shut up or it has something
to do with the language drive, but it’s a pregnant subject area, that’s
for sure.

Poet and dramatist Shuji
Terayama helped open the first Rotterdam Film Festival in 1971 with his notoriously
controversial film Emperor Tomato Ketchup. This stunning, atmospheric
fantasy of a children’s revolution has been rarely seen in the U.S., no
doubt due less for its sharp political critique than for its long scenes of
languorous pseudosex between naked boys and young women.

A self-proclaimed "gentlemanly
anarchist" who "uses the art of cinema as his battering ram,"
26-year-old filmmaker Kenji Onishi has continued this confrontational tradition
in the 90s. A central figure on the Tokyo experimental scene and already a veteran
of the international festival circuit, Onishi has made more than 100 films since
1990, ranging from Super-8 studies of light to full-length features filled with
drugs and violence.

In addition to promoting
his own films, Onishi operates Cinema Train, a company that distributes films
by young Japanese filmmakers and screens underground and avant-garde work from
overseas. His filmmaking output spans many genres, and he has become known for
a distinctive personal style that melds structural concerns with overtly sensationalist
subject matter.

Despite his scandal-mongering
rhetoric and extreme subject matter, his approach has more in common with the
arty abstract narratives of Hollis Frampton or Stan Brakhage than with the attitudinal
Cinema of Transgression or mainstream-friendly post-Tarantino artsploitation.
Like the bulk of Japanese independent cinema, Onishi’s films have screened
rarely in the U.S. But thanks to some under-the-radar booking by downtown avant-garde
exhibition duo Brian Frye and Bradley Eros, Onishi’s 1995 feature documentary
A Burning Star will make its stateside debut this weekend for a single
screening.

Produced in the Japanese
tradition of the avant-garde "personal film" (a first-person diary
film dealing with inner emotions), A Burning Star documents the day of
Onishi’s father’s funeral and cremation, from dawn to dusk. Hardly
a straightforward narrative, the film opens with 20 minutes of early morning
sunlight patterns seeping through curtains and shots of black-bottomed clouds
scuttling across a deep-blue sky, set to a soundtrack of shuffling feet and
anonymous household preparations. The shots have a slow but discernible pace,
just brief enough for the limits of the attention span, but long enough to lull
the viewer into a unique, documentary ambience crafted from neatly hewn slices
of disassociated sensoria.

The soothing setup gives
way to more disturbing events, told through wordless lo-fi impressions. At the
funeral, Onishi sidles up to his father’s casket when no one else is around,
lifts the cover and films his father’s face. The gesture feels compulsive
and desperate, as if Onishi wishes to record every contour and blemish. But
the act that follows is even more startling: Onishi sneaks into a preparation
room where his dead father lies on a floor mat, carefully arranged in ceremonial
robes. He slowly undresses the corpse, fixing for a while on his father’s
genitalia. For several long shots, careful compositions of inky black pubic
hair fill the frame. As fans of oddly pixelated Japanese porno can attest, photographing
pubic hair is an ultimate taboo in Japan, making this intrusion confrontational
in the extreme.

Later, as the body is cremated,
Onishi noses his camera up to the windows of the furnace. These are some of
the most morbidly beautiful moments in the film, creating otherwordly images
reminiscent of the gaseous surface of a hot star, with flames licking over quasi-organic
landscapes that look increasingly less like a skull, a ribcage or a hip bone.
The film ends with long shots of Onishi meandering in the parking lot, and footage
of birds flying over water, creating an overall mood of insuperable, melancholy
distance from his father and the world.

Bookended by contemplative
scenes of calm detachment, the film’s shocking moments feel strangely natural,
as the viewer is lulled into quiet reverie by Onishi’s love for the textures
of Super-8, the properties of shifting daylight and the compositions of human
silhouettes against the blue sky. Potentially overpowering emotions are stripped
down and distilled through sensory immersion into a gossamer-thin, subdued essence.
Despite its deep personal engagement, A Burning Star presents Onishi’s
artistic drive as essentially asocial and pathological. He uses his filmmaking
not as a way of connecting with his world, but of shutting it out through esthetic
distance.

In addition to the single
screening of A Burning Star, a related program of short experimental
works from Japan screens at Collective Unconscious the following Monday. The
program includes Onishi’s shortened, defanged 20-minute version of A
Burning Star, probably created for easier programming in festivals, in terms
of both subject matter and length. The truncated result is a careful but ultimately
dull formal study of light and composition that jettisons not only the astounding
controversy of the feature-length version, but also its innovative narrative
structure. Other shorts in the program are, for the most part, equally or more
tedious, with the exception of Mikio Yamazaki’s Drifting, an optically
printed formal fantasy in which footage of a young man walking around narrow
streets seems to float off the screen like waves of water, set to an hypnotically
minimalist musical score, and Kazuhiro Shirao’s Industry and the Sex
Doll, a series of city scenes altered into jewel-like compositions via an
enigmatic video-to-film technique.