For many years, the middle months of winter, January and
February, meant experimental films to me. That's because the Walker Art Center
always seemed to show programs of experimental films during those months, and I
would go as much as I could to the Walker Theater and sit with some people and
also many empty seats to expand my mind and also hear in person from many of
the makers who had come from far away to share with us the zero degrees
outside.
That all seemed to disappear at some point - one recent year
I realized that I wasn't going to experimental films in the year's first
months, but it seems like that tradition may have returned with something
called the CAVE Festival, which Festival guy Kevin Obsatz kept referring to as
the "first annual."
Is it Plato's Cave, where we can't see the real world but
only shadows cast by fire on the wall, or is it the cave we all want to climb
into when we really think about who is going to be our next president? No, CAVE
stands for Cinematic, Audio, Video Experimentation. There were three very cold nights
in three very warm places with visitors from even colder and much warmer places
to present films projected on film and video, some with sound and some without.
Limited evening bus service and nights so cold that I didn't
want to stand outside too long waiting for transfers meant that I missed some
of the films when I had to exit in the darkness, images still flickering, to
catch a bus. But I saw and heard far more than I can digest and process, and
many of the images are still torturing and delighting me. It was three nights
of layers and nylon coat scrapings and snow pack scrunching and industrial
rat-a-tatting and microphones rubbed upon flesh.
The first night featured films from Winnipeg and the Twin
Cities. Visitor Aaron Zeghers said hello from his belly with a "Hello, How
Are You" Daniel Johnston t-shirt that took us completely into the world of
his northern city, that and a program that included an absurd and hilarious
documentary about what happens when beer bottles strike famous heads in
Winnipeg, to his own piece of snowy crystal cinema, "Everything
Turns..." featuring super 8 film of geography and geometry and numbers and
then bursting into a projection through a crystal that turned the Bryant Lake
Bowl Theater into a cathedral of colored light.
I had to leave midway through the local films to catch my
bus, but I was so honored to have my own little video about an operation I had
as part of it.
The second night filled to more than capacity the Mediatheque
room of the Walker Art Center, which probably had the most high tech projection
facilities but also the most technical issues. But I will never forgot the third
shot of Nashville's Jonathan Rattner's film "The Interior," an
extended image that put me as completely as I could ever imagine into the mind
of a dog. Rattner's films, made during a four week stay in a remote part of Alaska,
documented the life of dog mushers and their dogs.
After a couple images that both oriented and disoriented us
to where we were, we kept on the expressive face of one dog as others began to
howl in the snow. We were so close and intimate to this dog in image that I
began to think, do I howl yet? And then, when it was time to howl, I howled
too, or at least the dog that I was seeing so closely howled. With the movement
of that dog's face and eyes and fur I was sharing some kind of thought with it.
This wasn't the kind of anthropomorphizing you do in a fairy
tale or Disney film, it was a direct connection with a being very different
from you, but still an intimacy of dinner and morning and night and speed and
snores and the moon.
We shared a more remote intimacy with the humans in the
film. It may even have been as cold in Minneapolis as it was in the places of
these films, but this wasn't a cold of skyscrapers and bus stops, it was a cold
of headlamps and constant overcoats and snow. Life was completely covered in
ice and white, and had retreated completely into steam and breath.
The second program of the second night, curated by Hannah
Piper Burns of Portland, I also only saw part of, but I remember a young woman
defiantly defining herself against the monochrome men and the polychrome media that
engulf her, a flea and servant allegory around a smoky fire, the hats and glasses
of internet psychics.
The third night was at The White Page Gallery, in two
storefront spaces. The white interior walls were a perfect setting for the
winter films of Robert Todd of Boston. While we seek out eyes and smiles and
facial clues from the dogs and people we see on screen, he denies us these to
give us the most intimate, mundane and eternal details of the physical things
around him. His film "Threshold," which he described as a piece about
not wanting to walk out his door, begins and ends on Greek columns but mostly
revels in water drops on a window that explode into a machine gun of splintered
and sliced images that combine the negative with the positive.
The third night's second program, presented by Ariel Teal
representing the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, presented us sunny
images of swingset leg-shaving, Griffith's elephants blasted by Mountain Dew,
and that bright summer sun burning through paper messages to us.
In the Gallery next door to the screenings was Colby
Richardson's Inner Vision, an exhibit that sent a video feedback TV signal to
three other TV screens in the room. Because the signal was actually broadcast
from the room and traveled to the other TV's through their antennas and not
through a cable, the images on those other TV sets changed as you walked
between them and you interrupted the broadcast signal. By walking around these
TVs playing, appropriately, TV snow, I could affect the image, I could create
the technical difficulties that broke it all up and made it strange or
interesting, I could dance my quick exit between the antennas before I rushed
out into the dark and extreme cold to catch my bus.
Thanks to the Cellular Cinema crew, I have many many images and sounds that have broadened my own horizons, that can brew inside me and inspire me to brave some new trails of my own to illumine the rest of these cold dark days.
