I went to this with a friend. Another person, a friend and family member, was there too. We didn't sit all together. This is a review, maybe. In the beginning my friend and I talked quietly, then we saw my family member. The event started with the curator introducing all of the filmmakers (10 total films). The filmmakers said their names and then said something about their films. One of the filmmakers, Ben Russell, didn't participate in that. The filmmakers seemed funny, or stupid. I felt that some of the things they said were abstract and then other things they said were specific, too specific to mention for my purposes.
Uhm, so yeah, the first two were short, sort of banal and ‘empty’ pieces. They seemed to work with the textures of things like walls and paint, horizons, desert grounds, piles of dirt, shadows, HD medium, 16mm (scratchy) medium, ‘jump cuts’, fading cuts, and quick edits to contrasting shots.
The third film, "What Part of the Earth We Inhabit", depicted natural life. There were birds, reptiles, rocks, lichen, plants, the ocean, some seals, I think, a pile of komodo dragons, I think, waves, a waterfall, an island. Approximately two minutes before the finish the framing started including man-made structures, like cement walls, some people in modern clothing. The framing sometimes went from the shots used earlier to wider angle shots, including the people. I think there was a giant snapping turtle that looked 'creepy' and 'cute' which also seemed ‘central’ to the piece.
A film called "Night Side" had a house in it and a street maybe. I felt relieved to be viewing things from inside a house - a small reflection of a ceiling light that wobbled from wind pushing the window or glass door it was in. It seemed like this one had a lot of 'nature' in it too. It seems like there was something that made me feel 'happy' or comforted me, I don't remember, sort of like when I try to think of middle school or a vacation before I turned twenty.
The next movie was "dwarfs the sea". This movie felt like a relief from the other movie because there was dialogue. A computer generated voice described the lives of men depicted in photos that a not-seen hand dropped 'one at a time' on top of each other. Each description didn’t seem to have the same length or topic. The observations seemed detached because of the monotone, robotic sound and also because of the concrete actions described. Sometimes feelings, situations and abstract environments were described. I felt cognizant of the pictures the not-seen person put down and the sometimes neglect of the narrative to say things directly related to the picture. It seemed like the voice at the end talked more about just being at sea, and loneliness, and loneliness in life as a whole, and not the men anymore, but just people. The men all looked Latin American and poor - one or two white men, the captain was white. The computer generated voice said the captain was a 'bad lover to his wife'.
The next movie was "Journals and Remarks". It had this 'horrible' blinking technique, where each shot was like one second of something in the Galapagos (this is the one seemed to be set in the same place as "What Part of the Earth We Inhabit") and then a second of black frame and another second of something different on the nature, a second of black and then a shot of a page of Darwin’s Origin of Species scrolling. Some of this film felt to me like what I desire least from my image of the avant-garde classification. As the film went on there were no more frames of black interspersed into the pulsating edit style. I felt better. I felt less anxious once this film was over.
"A Letter to Uncle Boonmee" seemed good in the beginning. I was happy to hear a voice again. I was happy to see a person's face too. The film seemed to have some sort of commentary on a war atrocity. I felt excited because there was a dog. At one point the voice which is reciting a letter to an uncle, mentioning the place we were seeing on the screen and plans to shoot a film in that place. At one point as the camera moved / panned aimlessly around and within a complex of bungalows built in a Thailand jungle, it went out the window a little and the voice said something like 'was this the view you had, uncle'. The sound of the jungle and the moving branches of the jungle seemed calm / relaxing / stimulating / peaceful. Other memorable moments from this film: the Thai man staring, him lying on the floor with the fan on him, the dark figure lying under the mosquito net, the soldiers pick axing and shoveling the dirt, the pan of the jungle with the small dark figure walking in it, the hard wood flooring of the bungalows, the dog eating the thing the Thai man tosses, a giant orb with two dents (like nostrils) emitting smoke from the blind side in the distance.
"Trypps #6 (Malobi)" was 'kooky' as the person I went with said after it was over. What seemed like native villagers participated in a ritual dance / celebration while wearing what seemed to be ‘conventional’ american halloween masks, and not native type clothing / costumes. Some of it seemed eerie and affecting because of the lack of talking and the expression on the masks. Some of it seemed boring, as the costumed people walked through the village you expected them to enter a large celebration circle with a fire. There was the sounds of drumming, laughter, cheering, and random explosions in the background. In the final seconds you see one of the costumers put on a over sized dildo and another costumer strokes it / pretends to have sex with it.
There was a short 'break' before the last film, "I Know Where I Am Going" by Ben Rivers. The short break happened because the projectionist need to adjust the lens on the projector because Ben Rivers' film was shot on 16mm wide (maybe filmed on something that looks like what is pictured to the right, from retrothing[dot]com).
While they were adjusting the lens the screen was white and then a ghost white framing went over the screen and onto the black borders of the screen. My friend next to me said, "This film is so avant-garde". The first few minutes of the film the focus seemed off. There was an anxious feeling in the crowd, I think people felt indecisive about whether it was supposed to be soft focused. After a few minutes it didn't matter, to me anyway. The film showed a lot of nature. I think it was England or Scotland. The nature looked nice. There was audio the whole time and that made me feel good. I don't remember what it was of, but I think it was gathered at the shooting locations. Then the audio was of a person's voice and the voice said things about the world and humans, I think. The things seemed profound and calming and abstract. It said things like people do this and this is happening in the world. The film showed a road, moving, as if 'first-person' on the hood of a car. The film looked 'beautiful', to me, and calming and 'relaxing'. I remember snow covered mountains, a misty, darkly lit road. Then film showed a forest, a person cutting trees from a forest, and the person using a horse or something to tow the trees. The person kept saying 'back' 'back' as if talking to the horse. When the film showed the trees falling a felt a desire for the tree to crash into the earth, but most times the trees just fell and then gradually stopped a few feet above the ground. The film showed a man in a beekeepers suit standing inside a ruined foundation, accessing bee boxes. The man gesticulates in between his activities with the bee boxes. There is audio playing of a voice talking about 'humanity', I think, and 'what humans have done so far', I think. It seems like the beekeeper is saying the things. The beekeeper raises his arms and it 'matches up' with the voice 'perfectly' and it seems really funny and 'profound'. Then the film focuses on a man who lives amongst junk. The audio is 'disjointed' while the film focuses on this man. A voice in the audio says things about the planets and the human 'experience'. The voice says something like 'people should calm down and live more simply and not try so hard' or something and that felt calming. The film had basically three or four parts. Three or four (not sure if the beekeeper and the wood cutter were the same) different people, focused on in a quasi-documentary film style, with natural sound from the location and disjointed audio, in addition, overlaid, which was usually voice and in the last there was music. Between each section there were the ‘driving’ shots moving over a road. The final 'section' showed snow dusted mountains and a road and then a forest covered in 2 or 3 feet of snow. It showed a man walking in the snow. There were big ‘cakes’ of snow on the trees. I liked seeing that much snow. It showed a man living in a shack buried in the snow. He was shown outside using a digital camera, cooking inside, and just moving around inside his place. When he was shown outside audio of him playing a string instrument and singing was overlaid. There were shots of some junked and smashed cars. There were shots of nature. It was a half hour, roughly – the longest of all the movies in that session. I watched an interview with Ben Rivers on youtube. He talked about his films being fiction and non-fiction and there being a blur in the reality of that. It seems both noteworthy and underwhelming.Outside the theater my friend and the person from my family talked about the films. We talked about a person vomiting during The Antichrist, a film by Lars Von Trier. The person in my family said William Defoe said Von Trier experienced 'a great amount' of grief and depression when he made the film or leading up to making it. My friend said that seemed really artistic. I saw a filmmaker from session 2 crying. My friend saw a fat man spill bourbon on his tie after passing through two glass doorways. I ate some polish food with my friend. I went home and don’t remember what I did the rest of the day in my apartment by myself.
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