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Camera Obscurities: New York Film Festival
Part One
Well, you can take the girl out of Pennsylvania, but: When Ari assigned me to cover the New York Film Festival, I was operating under the naïve, fallacious assumption that this annual event was an outlandish combination of mink stoles, red carpets, spotlights, and big-name tickets somehow as ripe for the plucking as pineapples on Maui. All this to publicly and sincerely apologize for the lack of Wes Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Marjane Satrapi in these forthcoming pages. (For personal reasons, I’m really kicking myself over Marjane Satrapi. For those of you unfamiliar with her work, Marjane Satrapi is the author of Persepolis and Persepolis II, which are graphic memoirs—that’s “graphic” as in “comics,” a la Art Spiegelmann, in case you were confused—about her early teenage years in Iran under the Ayatollah and her subsequent exile to Vienna when the climate in Tehran became too dangerous. The film version, which combines the two books, is narrated by Catherine Deneuve and her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, so damned if that isn’t added reason to bang my head against a wall and moan from my kidneys.)
But enough. This is not an elegy for films I wish I had seen, and it does a great disservice to the more obscure, but nonetheless intriguing, often exquisite, and immensely satisfying films I did see. And as an NYFF virgin, it was a pleasant and gratifying surprise to see the large crowds of regular folk in jeans and dirty sneakers packing into the Walter Reade Theatre and the filmmakers themselves getting down with us proles in the Q & A and even after. And since I’ve gone on so long about what did, didn’t, and should have happened at Lincoln Center earlier this month, I’ll start off with a review of two, yes, intriguing and ultimately satisfying short films.
Ken Jacobs & Rick Reed: Dreams that Money Can’t Buy|Capitalism: Child Labor
A live Nervous Magic Lantern performance, U.S., 2007|Ken Jacobs, U.S., 2006; 14m
Why are there no big-ticket, blockbuster short films? Seriously, is there any real need for two hours and change of flaccid dialogue, CGI car crashes, and/or simpering retrograde women and their asshole boyfriends, the likes of whom I’d have to smack upside the head immediately upon making their dubious acquaintances? Given the gnat’s breadth attention span of me and my generation, you’d think these Hollywood directors would embrace the economy of form—not to mention the economy of budget—of short films. I’ll bet you could trim a good hour and fifteen minutes out of any big-screen action/horror/rom-com Bacchanal and slap the forty-five minutes of good parts together into a juicy, satiating little meal that would still allow you and your companions time for beer, even if the film starts at midnight and you live in deepest, darkest Brooklyn, and no one would be the wiser. And don’t think folks wouldn’t be willing to shell out the $11.50 for nosebleed seats. Not in this country, and especially not in this town, where people routinely pay upwards of $15 to eat a chocolate-covered jalapeno, a la the MasterCard ads. Sure, it’s a vegetable covered in chocolate, but hot damn! That’s one vegetable that will embed itself in your mitochondria, don’t you think?
If Ken Jacobs and Rick Reed’s NYFF contribution Dreams that Money Can’t Buy| Capitalism: Child Labor isn’t precisely the aforementioned spicy-sweet gourmet indulgence, it’s still more than fitting to say that these two shorts will not wash over your person without spilling a drop. Capitalism: Child Labor (shown first, billed second) is an anti-Koyanisqaatsi, a montage of forbidding, disjointed images compiled from a single early 20th century photograph, underscored with Rick Reed’s jittery, repetitive score. While it’s clear that this fourteen-minute “stereograph celebrating production of thread,” per its creator, is an indictment of our past and present evils around the misuse of children (one, in this sequence, barefoot) and their hand in creating our shirts, pants, and $175 Nikes, it delivers no overt message and offers no solutions. This is neither North Country nor An Inconvenient Truth; the hollow-eyed, grim-faced children evoke distress and horror, but the equally dour mustachioed foreman isn’t about to rescue them from their fate. If, as Jacobs suggests in his blurb, the “war” these young men will eventually wage is that of labor organizing and 1930’s cafeteria Communism—this latter more likely at the hands of their offspring—it is small consolation, given this country’s dismal history around union labor and the sanctity of the almighty dollar. Of course, nowadays we outsource, so…
More covertly political is the forty-five minute Dreams that Money Can’t Buy, a film that dispenses with such trivia as plot, character, and modern cinematographic technology in favor of a wildly imagistic, shape-shifting optical illusion trip that, yeah, will blow you mind, as our ancestors used to say. A recording of a live performance using Jacobs’s self-invented Nervous Magic Lantern, a hand-manipulated projector concentrating and focusing light through a lens, accompanied by a spinning shutter (the filmmaker himself explicitly warns those with epilepsy or other seizure disorders to leave the theater posthaste), we’re treated to a panoply of throbbing, disparate images that at times suggest the interior of a tomato, at others a highly microscopic view of a white blood cell, and at still others various unidentifiable citrus fruits. Indeed, much of the film’s appeal comes from guessing if we’re seeing a lime, or a brain, or bone marrow; when Jacobs zooms in for a close-up, you’ll at once swear that…thing in front of you is an old lady with a slit throat and snigger at the doofiness of your stoned, Magic Eye dorm room days. Of course, the conceit of Dreams is that none of the images you “see” are actually there, and if you’re of the this-is-bullshit-any-asshole-with-a-camera school, as I am not, I cannot honestly guarantee this film will make a convert out of you. Perhaps you should heed the words of blogger Drew Gardner, who likened an earlier Jacobs effort, Celestial Subway Line 3, to “a Butthole Surfers concert [he] saw in a small building on the campus of Bard College in 1987 where there were two separate epileptic seizures from the strobes.” However, Gardner doesn’t appear to be of the any-asshole school; he concludes his review with the observation, “Maybe if we worked out our nightmares more in virtual realms we would export them less to other countries.” Which is, I think, the ultimate intent and purpose of Dreams—to generate our own catharses instead of, per Jacobs, allowing “the problems of exceptionally beautiful people” to speak for us.
So, these films aren’t chocolate-covered jalapenos. But a spoonful or two of premium gelato spiked with some herbal enhancement will serve me just fine, thanks.
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