SFIFF54: 'Silent Souls'

Silent Souls: Cinema might be the best medium yet for conveying the symbolic nature of cultural forms, and Siberian director Aleksei Fedorchenko's lovely adaptation of Aist Sergeyev's 'The Buntings' is a case in point.  The Merjan (Russian/Finnish) burial at the center of this lyrical film doubles as ritual for the vanishing culture itself, but it is not a complex or sophisticated film - its virtues lie in its simplicity, its physicality, its poetry, its tenderness, and its quiet beauty.  Some of its scenes and images - the drowned typewriter, the ribbon ceremony, the incredible choral scene, the naive poems - are pure illuminations, limpid and inspired.

SFIFF54: 'The Deep End'

The 10 shorts in this compilation are all, in one way or another, meditations on the rural or urban environment, and with the exception of Hell Roaring Creek (more about this film in a minute) they all say as much about the means of observation as about the object observed.  A variety of complex effects amplify the subjective tone of the work so that the act of seeing/feeling what is seen/cognizing/interpreting is consistently foregrounded and, as we know generally, there are as many ways of seeing the world as there people to see it.  Some pieces, like Louise Bourque's overtly expressionist 10-minute a little prayer (H.E.L.P) were very powerful - its distressed images of a bound, gagged, and inverted Houdini, accompanied by layers of frightening aural effects, were actively nightmarish; others, like T. Marie's 6-minute Slave Ship, a silent, painterly manipulation of Turner's 1840 masterpiece (dedicated to recently-departed poet Leslie Scalapino) were haunting and beautiful.  The visual fantasia of Katherin McInnis' 2-minute last resort, a collage of layered close-up stills shot inside an abandoned and decaying hotel pool was utterly exquisite, saturating the eye in image after image of proliferating colors and forms; and Vincent Grenier's 9-minute Burning Bush was a positively hallucinogenic digital trip organized around one or two static takes of euonymus leaves on a garden wall. 

But most remarkable to my mind was Lucien Castaign-Taylor's transparently shot, unmanipulated pastoral Hell Roaring Creek, which records in two or three long takes the passage of a flock of sheep across a creek at dawn.  The simplicity of this film is absolute; it is perfect.  Its pristine, untouched images have the distilled quality of something essential, and together with its lush sounds (of water on rocks and the calling of lambs) it adds up to an experience both ravishing and complete.  The longest piece at 20 minutes, it comes last on the program and balances the other more process-oriented and expressionist segments perfectly - an inspired bit of curating, I think, from Kathy Geritz and Vanessa O'Neill.  Their sensitive work on this project is a credit to them as well as to the artists they have chosen to present.

SFIFF54: 'World on a Wire'

World on a Wire:  As if over 3 hours of futuristic 70's German TV is not remarkable enough, throw Fassbinder in the mix and you are granted a sort of unorthodox version of bliss.  For all his New Wave affiliations (cf. Alphaville) this legendary enfant terrible is really in a class of his own.  World on a Wire is packed with his signature tropes and themes, from the slightly hallucinogenic outre aesthetic and carnivalesque characters to the withering critique of capitalism, power and convention.  Bizarre, complex, delightful - and important, in film-historical terms.

SFIFF54: 'Miss Representation'

Miss Representation: As director Jennifer Siebel Newsom was quick to point out, her documentary is a 'call to action' for those of us who want to be liberated from the gender constrictions that suffocate our lives.  Crammed with archive clips, images and interviews, it is a fast, convincing, powerful and sometimes shocking (for those not over-familiar with routine TV talk show content) look at the degrading treatment of the female in contemporary media, its all-pervasive influence and its connection to capitalism and power.

SFIFF54: 'End of Animal'

End of Animal:  This thoroughly weird and original first feature from Korean director Jo Sung Hee takes a pregnant girl, her cabdriver and a third, uncanny stranger deep into a kind of sudden purgatory or lateral zone and leaves them there.  Because the film maintains its allegiance to life's ordinary surfaces, its dead cellphones and stalled cars, torn maps and broken heels, we identify easily and so are all the more disturbed by what unravels on the human plane.  Its weirdness speaks, that is, to some unspecified fear we all share, something immediate and unconscious.  But the film is not without its humor or irony either.  A truly surprising, unsettling, and odd experience.  Don't miss it.

SFIFF54: 'The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975'

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975:  This stunning documentary is about as close to perfect as a film can get.  Assembled from a cache of original footage found in Swedish TV archives, it presents the Black Power movement as it should be seen, transparently, without establishment 'enhancements.'  Gracious, perfectly-pitched to the intellectual caliber of its material, it explores events, issues, and personalities in considerable depth.  And what personalities!  See it for the interview with Angela Davis alone. Or the early speeches of Stokely Carmichael.  Because characters like theirs are given so much unmediated airtime, their charisma touches what is already an exquisitely beautiful, brilliantly organized and powerful film with something approaching genius.

SFIFF54: 'The Redemption of General Butt Naked'

The Redemption of General Butt Naked: A jaw-dropping study in megalomania. This savage Liberian warlord whose victims number in the tens of thousands is fooling no-one with his contrite Christian pastor act. Or is he? Many heart-breaking scenes of survivors succumbing to his rhetorical powers, such as they are. This is where the film gets a bit sickening.  Arendt's banality of evil comes to mind.

SFIFF54: 'Page One'

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times: The collapse of advertising revenue, exploding competition, the 'End Times' debacle, Judith Miller, David Carr, Wikileaks, Twitter ... it's all in this bright, relevant, fast-moving, and at times very funny documentary about the recent travails of the NYTimes. The film's pro-Times ("good journalism/the public trust") sentiments are clear, and there isn't enough coverage of the alternative view, but it's still an unprecedented inside look at one of our most beloved institutions as it confronts the specter of its own extinction.

SFIFF54: 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams'

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: This enchanting study of the 32,000 year-old cave paintings at Chauvet Pont d'Arc is the apotheosis of Herzog's perennial landscape-as-mindscape theme, exploring the interiority of the earth itself, with much attendant hypothesizing.  Beautiful (in 3D!) and powerful in a cumulative sort of way, with superbly evocative music.  The usual sprinkling of flute-playing, bone-sniffing oddballs who usually enable Herzog's strategy of ironic defense can't deflect us any more from recognizing his personal fixation on the mystical and sublime.

-5 (Negative Five): a poem by Chelsey Minnis

-5 for debating
-5 for misuse of the tractor
-5 for altering the chore list
-5 for pinecone throwing
-5 for misplacing shoes and other personal property...
-5 for delaying, kicking dirt, separating, tossing thermos off lookout rest-point, non-listening...
-5 for cracking twigs
-5 for excessive yawning
-5 for loud whistling, touching people's hats without permission, putting Jared's comb into the fire, misuse of the grill tongs, burning, failing to comply with cleanliness of common area, spilling trash...
-5 for improper conduct while fishing...
-5 for euphoria, obstruction of doorways, fire hazard...
-5 for "misplacing" trail map
-5 for scattering birds, meaningless interjections during staff meeting, lingering and/or petting the guide dogs...
-5 for delayed objections
-5 for exaggerated enthusiasm about trail walk
-5 for tracking mud, solitariness, obsession with fishing lures, reluctance, inability to initiate social interaction, furtiveness, secrecy, paleness...
-5 for loud humming during rest hour, loud buzzing or humming sound, destructive theorizing, misuse of and/or staring out of windows...
-5 for refusal to read information packets, emotional recklessness, bad sportsmanship, lateness...
-5 for improper storage of personal food, repudiation, defacement, refusal to return group mascot, lack of effort at horseshoes, hoarding the first aid kit, contradictions, negligence, spitting...
-5 for misuse of the fly swatter...


from 'Bad Bad' 2007

Box of pastels

Quote: Carlo Emilio Gadda

" ... to know is to insert something into what is real, and thus to distort reality"

Excerpt from a prose poem by Ron Silliman

Revolving door.

Revolving door. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

Revolving door. Fountains of the financial district. Houseboats beached at the point of low tide, only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, camels pulling wagons of bear cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

Revolving door. First flies of summer. Fountains of the financial district spout. She was a unit in a bum space, she was a damaged child. Dark brown houseboats beached at the point of low tide - men atop their cabin roofs, idle, play a Dobro, a jaw's harp, a 12-string guitar - only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. I want the grey-blue grain of western summer. A cardboard box of wool sweaters on top of the book-case to indicate Home. A sequence of objects, silhouettes, which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.


from 'Ketjak'

Quote: Marianne Moore

'The cure for loneliness is solitude.'