Gravity Giveaway

Well looky here! The namesake of this here blog has been released (in some form) on DVD/Blu Ray by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)! The compilation includes footage from a staged week long residency/performance of live, improvised soundtracks to the film (with the brilliant, keen eye of Jem Cohen as part of the doc crew) interspersed with footage from the theatrical version of the film all bundled up in a nice little hardcover book case with production stills, film stills and even the complete (powerful, moving) script. A screening of the DVD will take place at EMPAC on September 27th, as will a q&a with the director, to celebrate this release. In my own celebration, I will be giving away a copy of this labor of love! A winner will be chosen randomly on Friday the 13th of September, to enter e-mail me: donnak3 [at] gmail [dot]com !

On Looking at Animals and the One Minute Film Festival

The One Minute Film Festival is no longer with us. For those unfamiliar the title is pretty self explanatory: a group of people made one minute short films and got together annually in a barn in upstate New York from 2003-2012 to screen them, commune & potluck. It was always an exciting project- the potential limitless, the projects fresh...but it was also a schizophrenic project that could easily give the feeling of a dog sitting on the tv remote, switching images, sounds & meanings into a blur instead of individual intention. The only commonality was length (the final installation of the fest attempted an exquisite corpse format with each filmmaker sending a snippet to another in attempts to create some semblance of connectivity or maybe to push the feel into utter chaos, which resulted in, mildly frustrating nonsense...) and the important part of the fest seemed to be the community it fostered: indie directors & artists coming together with their work & a covered dish. Now on view at Mass MoCA is a compilation of the One Minute Film Fest, an odd choice given the fact that I think the viewing experience was the most important level of the fest as opposed to the work itself...but it's cultural importance (a pre-youtube/post digital access time capsule) it embodies is something that I guess does belong in a museum, even if the most memorable films weren't too far from a sneezing panda....



The physical installation of the One Minute Film Fest exhibit was stellar: multiple carpeted rooms in a darkened, elevated gallery, each room a looping a series of films from a particular year of the fest, the walls adorned with posters made by the directors that helped to ground the flash film experience some. The idea of witnessing a pre-ish internet short film digest makes this an important cultural experience, as does viewing the progression of (mostly) digital video formats and trending topics & themes- as the exhibit info point out the fest spanned both the Bush & Obama administrations- even though there seemed to be little content dealing with any sort of timely or heavy topics...in fact, the most successful films seemed to be the same type that flood the internet daily: animals. After being mesmerized by Roxy's Endless Summer (a dog on a float, in a pool, as a group of adults create a whirl pool around her) I wondered why animals are so appropriate for the micro-film genre?
In search for this answer I stumbled on John Berger's essay Why Look At Animals?, a text that muses on the evolution of man and man's relationship with our furry little friends: language stemming from metaphor (us & them, defining the "them" as different than man/animal)--> to a Greek tradition of anthropomorphism (embedding the animal with human characteristics)--> to animals reduced to mechanized, moving parts during the industrial revolution (again, aligning the conveyor belt man with animals) --> to the nature of pets (scapegoats or projections of lacking emotional human connection of modern man) --> zoos/a complete marginalization of existence that Berger blames, in a sense, on capitalism (we have destroyed all of animal's real environments, all of the real connection we shared with them obliterated, in the name of industry, jobs, and a culture that has no place for them...except maybe on the internet that is.)

In Berger's terms I think he would have seen animal clips on the internet as a sort of extension of the zoo, a digital cage and barrier between man & beast that is even less "real," even further removed in the name of our new type of technological/capitalistic invention. At first I thought that maybe, just maybe, there was a slight return to the warm glow of anthropomorphism but I think the new way we look at animals is actually far more sinister: the humanistic situations and emotions that viral animal videos project might just be a replacement for our own human connections (shudder).



People are more removed from one another than ever before, virtually living lives...is our preoccupation with cute animals online a way to feel? A way to inject an emotion into our pixel laddened digital existence? A different sort of porn to evoke a different set of lacking feelings? I think the answer (eerily) might be yes. We've gone beyond the simple marginalization of animals Berger saw and created them into a trigger for the most base of human responses (feeling). Animal vids are a synthesis of each stage that Berger suggests we created between the growth of man and their relation with animal- spawning a language creation of otherness (lolz cats can haz cheezeburger?), a projection of human like attributes onto the animals to feel closer to them, acting as pieces of the viral video producing machine, marginalized from any sense of reality on the interwebs...and hell, what is the current digital age but a mash up of everything all at once? All of Berger's stages of animal & man's relationship bursting at the frame of Grumpy Cat!



Now, how did I get here? O, yes...the One Minute Film Fest! The One Minute Film Fest acted as a kind of historical bridge between viral video and short film but, most importantly, it acted as a full blown experience of human connection through the screenings and audiences it brought together each year, a thing that film is meant to do and that, one might argue shark cats riding roombas on the internet are also doing in a completely new type of communal, commenting audience- the bridge here the Mass MoCA exhibit inviting audiences to ponder these films in a newer type of film setting known as the museum...We each view these films on our own devices and then take to the internet or (gasp!) sometimes real life (Cinefamily even recently hosted a Cute Animal Film Festival series & a lecture on The Feline Gaze: The Art of the Cat Film as part of their legendary Everything Is Festival pushing the boundaries of viral cat videos and communal viewing experience- o good god, is the feature length cute animal movie the future of cinema? ) and share the clips of animal cuteness or cunning or human quality to bring us emotionally closer together. We've gone ahead and marginalized animals, reduced them to an "other" of animals-in-video-form, as a way to fill the void of humanity that we all experience between the 1s & 0s of our everyday lives, to maybe make our own technology driven marginalization feel more cute & fuzzy...I wonder what the next step for our furry friends of micro-short cuteness?  I can't predict our relationship with animals but I truly hope it teeters on the conservation/less marginalization for all side (like this breathtaking piece ) moving backwards in Berger's time line- as opposed to hurtling forth into a dystopic future of feature films made by robots of extinct cute bunnies!

(Note: as for the One Minute FF exhibit these folks had a nice showing: Jorge Columbo with his painting of a film 43rd Floor, Tine Oksbjerg's stark reflections Look away- Love is nowhere (it has a dog!), and Megan Cumps' dreamy, magnetic Swamp (a frog is in this one!).

Two Women

ELENA, a film by Petra Costa - OFFICIAL TRAILER [HD] - English Subtitles from Petra Costa on Vimeo.

This post is about two young female directors and their feature film debuts, two near-autobiographical docs as different as two docs could be.  These two self styled films move beyond the accessibility of filmmaking in the digital revolution- a thing that is somewhat weakening the doc genre- each work possessing its own unique vision of storytelling, each director voicing their own aching journey through very different, but at the same time both poignantly personal, lives.

Elena is a journey of a young girl, actually two young girls, two young Brazilian sisters, the overlap between them, and the creative love that filled the spaces shared & unshared. The elder sister, Elena, an aspiring actress and accomplished modern dancer becomes cracked open by a deep depression that results in her loss, sending her younger sister, Petra (the film's director) navigating through the wide outpouring of creativity that existed between the two; home movies, letters, tape recordings, a deep media diary of their friendship. Petra's exploration sets sail unlike any other "seeking" doc I've seen before combining a complicated collage of sights and sounds, imagery of a literary caliber, near experimental/surrealist interludes of beauty, all piecing together a life through pre-internet home media, a time prior to the explosion of the digital self governed by skillful lifestyle editing. Apart from the actual editing wonder of this film, sleekly and effortlessly combining the varying images it culls from, the emotional wonder is just as compelling.

The chasms of depression are handled so well, the scratchy disconnect unable to truly be bridged by those existing outside of it, a darkness that the director shines a weak little flashlight into hoping for answers to the questions of why her sister disappeared and why she continues on despite their stark similarities. Petra's meager flashlight turns out to be something far greater though, it turns out to act like the moon, a distant light that dances through her camera lens that seems miniscule in the sky but is in fact an unfathomable force of nature. The richness in filmmaking demonstrated by Petra is incredible for such a young filmmaker and for such a weighted subject, a subject that could have easily sunk into despair but instead turns into a buoyant hope. A hope for love, a hope for family, and a hope for artistic preservation in an ever increasing impermanent world...and then there is the opposite of this movie: I Hate Myself :)

The director Julia Arnow doesn't really hate herself I think. I think she just doesn't love herself. Which is a big difference. Which is why her film,  I Hate Myself :), is so jarring as we watch her try to grasp for love, connection, and herself through her grainy digital camera. Arnow's film begins as an exploration into her first boyfriend, an abrasive self defined performance artist/poet who also happens to be an emotionally abusive leech/drunk and, possibly a racist (he's not really a racist, I think he's more ignorant which can be equally as awful a crime). His derelict tendencies are a constant throughout the film but the film is actually all about Arnow, the reflections of herself bounced off of those she is in contact with (her aforementioned boyfriend, her loud supportive-yet-wary parents, her nude film editor, her friend's disembodied voices on the phone). These reflections are then removed, reflected, and looked at once again as Arnow captures them behind the camera. One harsh, memorable moment was watching a headphone and camera clad Arnow listening to her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend from a distance, the ex commenting on  Arnow's looks, a callous, hurtful experience decidedly slapped into the film. This scene presents a loathing self image manufactured by someone else, captured by Arnow and then re-appropriated into Arnow's own self portrait, giving her image strength by facing the harsh reality- the opposite of the curated perfection of our facebook selves.

Arnow's film brings to mind this Miranda July sculpture I love of a carved pedastel in which people can stand on engraved with the following "This is my little girl. She is brave and clever and funny. She will have none of the problems that I have. Her heart will never be broken. She will never be humiliated. Self doubt will not devour her dreams." The reality of this sentiment is encapsulated in Arnow's film: existing in a post-feminist time and place that pretends to be welcoming to female existence but, in fact, continues to be just as emotionally difficult and traumatic, a truth that Arnow challenges through both sides of her very own lens. Arnow is a young female director shining a light on her shortcomings but also on those of others, and she is somehow able to work through her halting environment- internal and external- to create a strong, harsh, hideous image of both herself and of the meddling, confusing, cold (digital?) environment that has created her.


Both of these films are collages of the worlds these women are engulfed in. Petra molds a dreamlike search for her sister using the media around her to create a fluttering poem of grainy 80s home movies mixed with a crisp dreamlike digital symbolism. Arnow sees people as the medium, catching their intricacies, expertly cutting together her footage of them in their drab, native habitats with a confrontational camera that catches the dark grossness of human emotion, or lack thereof, and the dim recesses of neurotic NYC malaise. Experiencing these films made for a deep contemplation on the lives of these women and, in turn, my own self-image creation... It is important to recognize how differently we each see the world and it is equally important how we choose to manifest ourselves in it. Every life is meaningful and stunning, we all have heartache and we all see the moon, how will we choose to tell our versions of these things to others and how will we choose to listen to the stories of others?

Summer Slowblog

Ah yes, the summer slowblog...being that I have been doing rigorous physical therapy to relearn how to walk (my withered leg an interesting accessory to my summer wardrobe), was told this week that my bone has not healed even though it should have, and I have been out of work due to all of this I have been trying to hustle to make ends meet lately resulting in the bare bones blogging of late, a thing I hope to fix in the approaching months! 

Here is a teaser of upcoming blog posts along with a picture of a welded mastadon I just came across at a random crossroad- isn't she a beauty! Blog topics: Documentaries Should Tell a Story (DUH!) & the Golden Age of Docs, the premier of I Hate Myself :) (an eerie autobiography of a self loathing female director), Contemporary Art: No More Concept, Much More Culture, The Taxidermy of Small Town Museums, Collecting Art and Watching Films (how the eff do people display video art and is video art over?). I'm also hoping that I get to see a few films that are doing the rounds for reviewing, any suggestions? I want to see Blackfish (Sea World, could it be Satan?), Blue Jasmine (a new Woody Allen that looks to keep in line with his Greek Tragedy style), the new Nicholas Winding Refn, and I am hoping to find a way to catch some old fashioned summahtime horror in V/H/S 2 (a film whose first edition I couldn't rave enough about). O, and lastly, a few films I have written about in the past seem to be making the theater rounds: Cutie and the Boxer seems to be slowly leaking into theaters and Our Nixon is playing on CNN with tons of press to boot!  Okay, now back to trying to support myself through atrophied leg muscles and also cagey financial planning! Summer break, summer break forever ya'll!