Strength in Numbers
1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
Resumo37th Ann Arbor Film Festival Ann Arbor, Michigan March 16-21, 1999 For 37 years now, Ann Arbor has consistently and unabashedly advocated all that is 16mm and not of the mainstream. This year was no exception, although it may be time call into question why experimental stylistic canons that were ground-breaking in 1965 can still be considered so 30 years later. Ann Arbor's commitment experimental film is admirable (especially the jury prescreening the prints in their entirety), but one wonders how appropriate this exclusivity remains. The 16mm bias becomes difficult reconcile when so much of contemporary work utilizes electronic imagery. One was struck by the number of festival films that partially, if not entirely, originated on video and were later merely transferred film: Come Unto Me: The Faces of Tyree Guyton (Detroit Filmmakers Coalition Award), Cheap Blonde (Honorable Mention), Where Lies the Homo? (Best Gay/Lesbian Film) and The Shanghaied Text (Best of Festival), name just a few. More and more frequently, 16mm becomes an exclusory exhibition standard. What, after all, makes a film a film? if it is simply the final celluloid on which the piece resides, issues of accessibility are raised. It comes down who can afford transfer video film, and who cannot. If Ann Arbor intends continue accepting works that incorporate video, regardless of extent, they need reevaluate their standards of selection and question what intrinsic value celluloid brings bear before running the risk of becoming cloistered, committed a medium that has changed without them. The festival included many strong works, often crossing genre boundaries and redefining conventionalized forms, revealing a medium still in flux, mutating encompass contemporary social agendas and aesthetic investigations. Egypt (1997) by Kathrin Resetarits is a beautifully structured, enigmatic portrayal of deafness. In rhythmically concentrated visual stanzas, it reveals a life in silence where explosions become gestures and movements words. Cheap Blonde (1998) by Janet Merewether cleverly deconstructs the single sentence A famous filmmaker said, 'Cinema is a history of men filming women' by randomly reordering the words into a series of increasingly suggestive sentences uttered by a computer-generated voice. Starting with a fetishized video image of a blond woman lounging in a simulated landscape, the camera edges closer, revealing the rasterized construction of her face, pointing the intrinsically contrived nature of every filmed event. In Mind's Eye (1998) by Gregory Godhard the viewer is recklessly drawn through an infinite Borghesian labyrinth of landscape geometry. Single-frame pixelation creates magically rotating, collapsing and expanding spaces in a sort of Last Year at Marienbad (1961, by Alain Resnais) gone haywire. Rebecca Baron's film OK Bye Bye (1998) is a meditative probing of the history of forgetting. Spurred by finding a small scrap of super-8 footage on the street in Los Angeles that portrays a gesturing Cambodian man, Baron embarks upon reflexively spiraling research into the Khmer Rouge and the archived photographs of the Tuol Sleng death camp. Employing the process of investigation as a road toward comprehension, she discovers that understanding is a dialogue between present and past where to cease writing is the ultimate form of concession. Where Lies the Homo? (1998) by Jean-Francois Monette masterfully orchestrates divergent film and video clips within a diaristic monologue structure dissect stereotypical representations of queerness as engendered by our collective media heritage. Excerpts from Walt Disney animation, radical homoerotica by Jean Genet and William Friedkin, 1950s television sitcoms, violent news footage and grainy home movies each define queer insomuch as they have defined Monette, who in turn uses the film contextualize his own history and gradually wrench free of the cultural tropes that beget identity. …
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