Tag Archives: Experimental

Capsules

CAPSULE: A NOISY DELIVERY (2013)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: GX Jupitter-Larsen

FEATURING: Jessica King, Dave Phillips

PLOT: A woman goes to the post office to mail a package, but the clerk is unresponsive.

Still from A Noisy Delivery

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Weird? Yes. Unfortunately, that’s all that can be said in this failed experiment’s favor.

COMMENTS: Your movie is in trouble when after watching it for five minutes, the reviewer’s primary thought is “how in the world am I going to review this honestly without sounding insulting?” Although A Noisy Delivery is not a bad movie, in the sense that I don’t believe it actively sets out to hurt the viewer, I can’t imagine anyone I know who would want to watch it. I even have to stretch my powers of imagination to come up with a hypothetical viewer who might enjoy it. Essentially, the movie is a series of very long takes of people sitting around, not moving, usually with no expression. Occasionally the onscreen actors check their watches (never a good sign). The next-to-last shot is about eight minutes long and completely static; long-take specialist would have walked out on it. Very rarely, the characters will speak: one gives a discourse on ZIP codes, one speaks in untranslated German, and a third is vaguely threatening, in a disturbed-loner-ranting-about-government-implanted-computer-chips sort of way (in between obscenities he drops lines like “the truth comes out as the truth, but, you never know”). Much of the infrequent dialogue is directed at the postal clerk who sits behind bars and blinks, I think, once. Forty-five minutes into the movie a woman silently eats a piece of notebook paper in real time, tearing off strips and chewing it to a pulp, which is a welcome change of pace from nothing at all happening. I suppose the main appeal is meant to be the industrial noise soundtrack; it’s an hour of someone randomly plunking away on a toy piano, mixed with a coarse background drone (the “noisy” part of A Noisy Delivery). Maybe noise music aficionados will dig it, but the score is even more minimalist than the visuals, which at least change every couples of minutes. The soundscape never varies much or shows musical development except for adjustments to the volume levels between the piano and the industrial hum. It’s definitely an acquired taste. A Noisy Delivery looks like a labor of love that got a little carried away and bloated: the entire package could have easily been compressed into fifteen minutes. Chances of any readers out there actually seeing this are, of course, very slim; but you should realize that this kind of thing is out there, playing at small experimental film festivals and screening in arty bars in college towns.

Speaking of college towns, A Noisy Delivery is screening tomorrow (Wednesday, June 12, 2013) at House of Caca in Austin, Texas, (some time between 6 and 10 P.M.) along with noise acts and art displays. The IMDB lists A Noisy Delivery as GX Jupitter-Larsen’s first movie, but his Wikipedia article lists two prior shorts: one called “Black Banner” and a lesbian vampire movie set at a garlic farm entitled “Holes in the Neck.”

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the producer for review.

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: SAVAGE WITCHES (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Daniel Fawcett, Clara Pais

FEATURING: Christina Wood, Victoria Smith

Still from Savage Witches (2012)

PLOT: Two teenage girls, Gretchen and Margarita (Wood & Smith), want nothing more than to play games, dress themselves up and have all kinds of adventures, but they constantly find themselves in conflict with the world around them. So they set out to transform it and break free…

COMMENTS:  With a title like that and two teenage girls in the main roles, you might be expecting another grindhouse gem to assert itself onto the film scene. Not in this universe, however—in fact, Savage Witches is best served by throwing out all expectations and just going with the flow of images and sounds in this “motion picture exploration,” as it bills itself.  Savage Witches hearkens back to earlier days of experimental film—the makers cite the works of the Kuchar brothers and  as influences, and the film itself is a direct homage to the Czech film classic Daisies by , which also is about the adventures of two young women who decide to break out of their roles and have adventures by ‘being bad.’

Where Daisies was seen as an overt attack on society by the ‘bad’ behavior of its lead characters, Savage Witches is far less political, but it is still an aesthetic attack on the audience’s expectations of film as entertainment. There are no character arcs and not much in terms of action driving the plot forward. In fact, there’s only the barest hint of any sort of plot… instead, the action is mainly abstract, with the film changing from live action, to photo collage, to storyboards, to Super-8 as Gretchen & Margarita explore their freedom; although the real liberty is the freedom of cinema from the strictures that we commonly bring to it.

04_burning_0791_smallThe film begins with a myriad of colors across the screen, and a voice inviting the audience to join in on an exploration—a dream—through which the voice informs the audience, “we can go anywhere, see anything”. The colors coalesce into two faces, Gretchen and Margarita, and from here on they function as guides/proxies for the audience, as they move forward into adventure: an adventure of form and format, rather than any sort of plot or story that has to be followed in the service of ‘business’ or whatever. That is the only ‘savagery’ exhibited by these pair of “savage witches”: the refusal to conform to the typical structure of what we expect when we sit down to watch a film. It is perhaps for this reason that the “savage witches” are burned at the end (besides the fact it provides an exciting ending), and our last glimpse of them is of them resting in state, but even then, they continue to flout our expectations… in contrast to the heroines of Daisies, who are definitely punished at the end for their bad behavior. Of course the attack that the protagonists of the Czech film lead against their society is far more pointed and nastier than Savage Witches. Also, the girls of Witches are not as sexualized as the women in Daisies, who use their erotic appeal as a battle tactic.

For a 70 minute experimental feature film, Savage Witches is highly entertaining, which may come as a surprise to audiences in the U.S., whose exposure to experimental film is usually in short form and viewed as something to be endured, like a visit to the dentist. It doesn’t really qualify as weird, except perhaps to someone who has never viewed any sort of film that didn’t have a linear narrative, but that probably qualifies it as a good gateway for people to get into experimental films – its ‘weird’ factor isn’t quite high enough to alienate the General Viewer, but it’s just strange enough to be engaging to fans of weird film.  It’s also helped by the music of Fiona Bevan and sound design of Simon Keep, and the engaging performances of Christina Wood and Victoria Smith as the lead characters.

Savage Witches should continue to screen in film festivals in 2013, and DVDs should be available directly from the filmmakers from their website within a month or so. UPDATE 7/5/2013: Limited edition DVD’s now available through this link.

Savage Witches Facebook

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.

Capsules

CAPSULE: FREE RADICALS: A HISTORY OF EXPERIMENTAL FILM (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Pip Chodorov

FEATURING: Stan Brakhage, Hans Richter, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Robert Breer, Stan Vanderbeek

PLOT: A survey of 90 years of abstract experimental film, from its Dadaist origins to its NYC heyday, with rare interviews and plentiful examples, including a few full-length shorts.

Still from Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2012)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Some of the filmmakers profiled here might have a shot at getting a flick or two onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies; this relatively un-weird overview of their lives and works, however, has no chance.

COMMENTS: Covering eighty years of film experiments in eighty minutes of film is a daunting task. Free Radicals can’t provide more than a sample platter of this enormous and ill-defined field, but the spread brings us some exotic flavors and tasty bits worth chewing on. The historical appetizer is Hans Richter’s 1921 “Rhythmus” series, movies which are nothing more than drawings of white rectangles on a black field that advance and recede; they aren’t startling in themselves, but they draw attention to the nature of film as rhythm, the articulation of time through manipulation of light. Later courses include the entire 4-minute hand-scratched Len Lye film that gives the doc its name, “Recreation,” Robert Breer’s “completely nonsensical” experiment in projecting 24-objects-per-second, and Stan Vanderbeek’s comic animated collages (a big influence on ). Lye’s 1936 color film “Rainbow Dance” is like visual candy; nutrition comes from the interviewees, who muse about art, art history, and the roles of World War I and Fascism in shaping the avant-garde. The final interviews of Richter and Stan Brakhage (who describes his life’s work as trying to reproduce the images that flash through his hypnagogic vision as he falls asleep) are rare treats for refined palettes. Although it seems like a low blow to criticize a heartfelt documentary praising artists who sweat blood to create works that almost no one ever sees, Free Radicals does have its issues. It’s a personal view of the subject rather than an objective overview. The doc begins with footage of the Chodorovs’ home movies: Super 8 footage of a normal looking kid climbing a tree and hugging his mom, except that the celluloid is folded and discolored in random patterns (a result, we are told, of a happy accident—the dog peed on the film). That personal history informs the rest of Free Radicals, and Chodorov’s preferences prevail: at times, he seems to be mainly interviewing his buddies (or his dad’s buddies), sometimes literally over a beer. This subjective approach is honest and helps convey the director’s passion for experimental films, but it also inevitably distorts the field. Chodorov favors the abstract, visual arts, scratch-on-the-film school of experimental filmmaking, and glosses over narrative or conceptual experiments.   is glimpsed floating through Meshes of the Afternoon for about a minute, but there’s no real discussion of her importance; the uninitiated might leave Free Radicals thinking a relative unknown like Peter Kubelka was just as influential. Major figures like Jack Smith and  are merely name checked, while other icons are snubbed entirely (did sleep with Pip’s girlfriend or something?) To get the most out of it, go into Free Radicals as if you were watching Pip Chodorov screen some of his favorite films from his personal collection, not as a lecture designed to give you a working knowledge of the history of experimental film. If you have the slightest hunger for new sights, you should find something satisfying in this potluck picnic of images.

Pip Chodorov has been making films since he was a child, encouraged by his father, frequent Free Radicals interviewee Stephan Chodorov. Besides making films himself, Stephan worked extensively in television and hosted a series on experimental film. Pip founded a video label to showcase experimental films and has organized film festivals at art galleries, including at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“You may wonder, as I did, why there are no subtitles for French filmmaker Maurice Lemaître, but it’s interesting just letting the French wash over you, wondering what it means — an experience not unlike that of watching an experimental film.”–Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times (contemporaneous)