Powderhorn Park Art Fair 1992

In 1991, a group of Powderhorn Park Neighborhood artists and volunteers organized the first ever Powderhorn Park Art Fair in the big bowl of Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis. The event was a success and they decided to repeat it for a second year. Now, almost 30 years later, it continues.

The first year of the fair, I filmed and edited a 30 minute documentary video about the fair which played on public access TV in Minneapolis. So I decided to film at the second fair.

I shot two hours of video of that fair and maybe I wasn't able to spend as much time at the fair, or maybe I was too busy with other things, but that two hours of video stayed on a tape and I never looked at it or edited it after I shot it. That tape remained unviewed and unedited until last spring, when I digitized it so I could edit it on the computer. I edited the video down to a little over 20 minutes and here is what I made of it.

It was filmed on Hi-8 tape with my Sony TR81. The video was all on one two hour tape, which was close to film. If I were going to edit it in 1992, I would have had to transfer it to SVHS and edit it on an SVHS edit system at MTN, the public access center where I was volunteering, and where by 1993 I would join the staff.

Today I was able to edit it with Adobe Premiere on my computer in my home office. As I write this, John Karrigan, the volunteer delivering flowers at 1:55, has died over the past weekend. His funeral is this coming Saturday. I'm sure a number of people in this video aren't around any more.

CAVE 3 Day 3

CAVE 3's third and final day was yesterday. Kevin Obsatz, our second set of MC eyes, started off the 3 pm program of experimental documentaries saying that the festival itself was experimental, and that some of the work we would see was newly finished, or still in draft form, or might never be finished.

Jonathan Rattner of Nashville put together the program of short experimental documentaries that, like traditional documentaries, walked us to places we might never visit without film, but did so without the confident strut of traditional documentary. Instead, the makers made films that weren't sure if they should be looking or listening or not, and whether and what they should be presenting to the likes of us, people who might not even have any business walking in those other peoples' shoes.

The show began with Robin Starbucks' "The Stag's Mirror," and with Starbuck present as well to introduce the film, which combined super 8 film she shot in Chiapas with the text of an allegory native to the people she was filming. She regularly disturbed her sober observational images with animation that recalled the weave pattern of improperly interlaced video and fragments of images we would see later in the film, and sometimes blotting out the text of the native story by re-writing it upon itself.

Other films in the program used alienating strategies like frames and interruption to complicate their stories of home and looking. Lisa Danker's "Foreclosed Home Movie" used a linoleum print of a welcoming front door to tell a story of real estate boom and bust in Miami. Sometimes we saw just parts of the print skipping by, stamped directly on 16mm film. At the end we saw repeated printings with less and less ink to say goodbye to the house after foreclosure.

Ratter's own "Southern Refuge," which he said he was re-cutting that very morning, looks inside or around the corner of or doesn't quite look into the work of a Nashville resettlement agency for recent immigrants, refugees working to start a new life in Nashville USA. As they tell Rattner and us about the horrible experiences that led them to the US to try a new life, Rattner withholds focus, just barely showing us one person's broken hand, and just barely shows us others through fogged 16mm end rolls. But he also surrenders his camera to the children at the agency, as they mob him and us in extreme close-up, pressing themselves tight to pose and smile and dance their identity with it.

CAVE 3 ended with a 7pm show of work by Sky Hopinka, currently of Cambridge, MA. Hopinka's films took us into and out of the body of this continent, beginning and ending with the two parts of his "Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer," which approaches the land from the sea and then takes us back to the sea at the end. This first and last film takes us on a journey through Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, a five hundred year old fort built by the Spanish invaders that looks like an instrument of torture when seen from above. Hopinka shares with us the stories and faint pencil drawings of the fort's indigenous prisoners before releasing us back to the horizon line of ocean.

Hopinka's films are all about the horizon. The horizon line, often horizontal but also sometimes vertical, leads us through the texts and places he takes us to. At times he doubles the horizon, with land above and below and sky between, a powerful sandwich of creation that also might feel like the end of time.

In "Jaaji Aprox," Hopinka tries to find and remember and learn and understand a father who might be his father or one of the fathers, but someone distant but also full of light and history. After the film played, Hopinka read in the dark theater an alienated academic essay he wrote to explain the film and then footnoted that with deeply personal recollections of the people and places that those images and sounds came from. Illuminated only by the penlight he used to read, the only real light besides the Exit signs, he held us spellbound as he spoke the supreme DVD commentary track.

Leaving us drowning in the ocean off the coast of Florida, Hopinka waved goodbye and CAVE 3 was completed.

CAVE 3 Day 2

Day two of the third year of CAVE (the Festival of Cinematic and Audio Visual Experimentation) featured the work of two visiting artists at Bryant Lake Bowl brought to us by Cellular Cinema.

The first show was composed of short videos by Anaïs Duplan of Iowa City, Iowa. Duplan introduced himself as someone who came to video through poetry, and the director's credit used in most of Duplan's films was, "A Poem by..." Duplan's spoken poetry was never narrated, but presented as text on-screen. Instead of carefully placing text at the bottom of the screen so as not to challenge the image as is traditional, Duplan boldly smacked text dead center, blocking the image with a black box, challenging the pictures with words.

The combination of text and image in Duplan's work sometimes teetered on the brink of narrative, but never went over to that side completely. Duplan's first film, "Hickory Hill," at times threatened to turn into a spooky forest movie, but instead followed its subjects through the woods with no clear mission. At times Duplan's camera followed its subjects so closely that it almost got tangled in their clothing. "Cocaine Barbara" parallel cut between a murky grocery store and a light filled bedroom and "The Lovers are the Audience Who Watch" put its text in all corners of the screen to challenge found images that made me think about family trauma, truth, and the curse of having to look at that screen right in front of you.

In the second program, Carl Elsaesser of New York City, Maine and elsewhere, set up his computer on the stage and invited us into a tour of his work and concerns. He was a genial and open host, holding a candle in one hand and walking through the theater, standing in the projector light to declare his connection with the images, hunting through his hard drive to find the right file to play to us. I had seen some of Elsaesser's work before at Cellular Cinema and have to admit that I left feeling a little baffled; his unpretentious and playful exposition at CAVE 3 provided deep insight for me into his concerns and methods.

Central to Elsaesser is the notion of Ambience, all the things that go on in the background that we don't ever really notice. He strives to make films about Ambience, and also which are ambient themselves, which means that to him the idea that his film might play in the background and only occasionally be noticed by its audience is fine with him. His ambient subjects included mapping the portions of Maine zoned for strip malls, and exploring methods of file management used by artists.

His "Exercises in Resistance" are one hour gestures meant to be a middle finger to the Current Occupant. In one, he sits beneath a public restroom hot air hand dryer, reaching up to turn it back on every time it goes off. In another, a camera outside his house watches him dance deliriously to unheard music while framed by doorways and windows and the sound of crickets.

In "Exercises in Looking," he frames both himself and what he is looking at side by side, also for an hour. He showed a portion of one where he looks at his lover, covered completely by a blanket and motionless, in bed. He frames the shots to defy standard eye-line match, so Elsaesser appears to be looking at something off-screen, something that isn't the body in bed. The connection and disconnection in those side by side images of looking and object play havoc with our expectations and create both peace and unease. Elsaesser's emphasis on Ambience dares us to look away, or look at the thing that we are trained not to look at, and that forces us to look a little more inside than we might want.

And with that, Elsaesser turned off his shadows and put away his computer to clear the stage for the third and final day of CAVE 3.

CAVE 3 Day 1

CAVE, the Festival of Cinematic and Audio Visual Experimentation, began the first of three nights of its third year with films curated by Molly Garrett and Caitlin Horsmon of Plug Projects in Kansas City, Missouri at 7 pm and films from local filmmakers at 9:30.

The opening program, named, "Not Found," featured work from a number of artists appropriating, recreating and commenting on images and sounds discovered and rediscovered in various archives.

Sanaz Sohrabi's "Auxillary Mirrors" starts with representations and recollections of a soccer head bump before it enters a world of mirrors utilized by photographers in the past as well as Sohrabi to twist and turn and deepen the mystery of the moment a single image is taken. Afrikaus Okokon's "Nsibid Loops" erupts into a grid of repeating hand drawn metamorphic symbols that frame found images. In "Nike AFI (from white to red)" Jose Guadalupe Garza recreates the one shot tomato juice and hunting knife massacre of a pure white tennis shoe that Garza found on YouTube and then never found again. Garza's own foot and hand act out visually the strange actions without the thoughts in the head that the original video's creator had.

With "Answer Print," Monica Saviron of Madrid Spain cuts found faded 16mm film in 26 frame lengths, which insures that the sound that you are hearing at any moment went with the image you just saw, creating a thump and click track of splices and sprocket holes and sounds that sometimes match the action and sometimes make you want to recreate in your own head what you just saw a second ago.

The other films in the showcase also used found sounds and images to collage culture, YouTube performance, mirrors and mainstream media to consider identity and who controls representation.

All the films in the program seemed to be responding to the essay in the glossy CAVE program,  "Incomplete Notes on the Character of the New Cinema," by Travis Wilkerson, in which he writes, "The new cinema recognizes that any apprehension of the present is predicated upon an understanding of the past. Likewise, a new future can only be imagined after an understanding of the present is attained."

The present was well-represented in the 9:30 Local Program, where the 16mm projector and video projector played a kind of Dueling Banjos back and forth. 16mm played the first notes, Eddie Weinstine's nightime city symphony "At Night Parts I-III," where pearls of city light on black multiplied with superimposition as vertical movement was paired with horizontal stillness only to be flipped and angled by the end.

Video plunked the next strings with Maret Polzine's "Object Permanence," in which abstracted and very real human eyes interact with a nature brain of fossil and technology before returning to roots in wavy water. And also on video, Peixuan's Ouyang's "They'll be gone, just in time" also spoke about objects and brain, examining a well-used library book by Plato and its journey from many hands and brains to bedding for turkeys.

Video took a break and film reignited for Sarah Hubner-Burns' "River Loop 1," a single shot of a staircase to the sky walked up and down by ghosts looking for themselves, or for a reason to go up and down. Then film switched off and video came back for Kelley Meister's "Now I Am Become Death," a hand-drawn animated silent essay on the eternal dangers of nuclear waste that shudders at the horror with every transforming ink line.

Film shot back with Sam Hoolihan's "Class Portraits 2016-2018," silent screen tests with commentary first scratched and painted upon the film and then with double exposed nature that eventually obscures the faces and takes over everything.

All the lights went out for John Marks' Room Tone, an evocative audio-only piece that made me remember all the times I searched everywhere I could think of to find something that I couldn't find.

The film projector had the last word with Trevor Adams' "We Hang Christmas Lights," with a soundtrack by Marks. Adams says goodbye to 2018 with a corn maze (maize?) of a dream brain home movie haunted by multiple exposures, scratching and painting on film, puns and revelations in words and speed ups. A dental operation on a freeway and a Fair with fifty Ferris wheels are some of the Christmas lights that I am still seeing as if this moment were still last year.

Also featured as the video projector lamp warm up acts were my three short pieces titled, "Hats of the New American Cinema."

With hand-scratched end titles and the film on the reel rewinding, the first night of CAVE 3 came to an end.