Strength in numbers - 37th Ann Arbor Film Festival

Afterimage, May-June, 1999 by Deborah Stratman

37th 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 to 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 to 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 to 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 to 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), to 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 to who can afford to transfer video to film, and who cannot. If Ann Arbor intends to continue accepting works that incorporate video, regardless of extent, they need to reevaluate their standards of selection and question what intrinsic value celluloid brings to bear before running the risk of becoming cloistered, committed to 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 to 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 to 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 to 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 to contextualize his own history and gradually wrench free of the cultural tropes that beget identity.

The Course of Human Events (1997) by Dominic Angerame documents the destruction of an overpass. The film begins with a series of truncated, vectored zooms toward architectural details that become forlornly alien in their scrutiny. Huge, stubborn mechanical beasts clumsily rip open a crumbling concrete artery in a city that seems deserted. The film is a contradictory archeology that seeks to eradicate rather than unearth vestiges of a previous destruction, the damaged infrastructural remains of a San Francisco earthquake.

Juris Poskus and Jesper Wachtmeister's 110/220 (1997) uses a formal bipartite structure to depict a strangely anonymous gaze. Shot half in L.A. and half in Moscow, the film locates small moments of humanity as they seep through, contradict and animate our modern construct of the mega-metropolis as a brutish, unsentimental, quasi-functional organism, along the way revealing unexpected East/West cultural synonyms and signposts of how we are defined by city planning. Zeit Raum (Time Space, 1998) by Thomas Renolder also employs a duplex structure. The piece is an optical meditation on the transient human occupation of a marketplace and a beach; over one day at the former (via mattes), and over one year at the latter (via dissolves). Renolder's formalistic, sparse clarity in revealing ways that time and space alternatively define location through the voluminous, shifting cipher of humanity was for me more successful than festival favorite The Shanghaied Text (1996) by Ken Kobland which approached similar issues of histories sharing common space. While I like Kobland's filmic metaphor of a dam, ominously preventing the flood of historic images from submerging the present, and am conceptually engaged by the moody weight of early Russian cinematic iconography leeching throughout the Steppe landscape, the pervasive video effect of screen fractures is hackneyed and the oppressive musical score leaves no room for breath, pushing the piece toward didactic arrogance.