CAVE 4

Often I'll go to a screening of short films after the sun has set and the sheer number and variety of them, and the fact that after sunset I always seem to be fighting sleep, will completely defy my memory. What did I see and hear, and how do I made sense of it now as that experience is fading into the distance? I like to take notes, but the notes I take in the dark are almost always unreadable when the lights have turned on. But those notes sometimes do help me pull out some moments and impressions, some bits of the experience, that I can attempt to put into readable words after the fact, when the sun is rising.

The fourth CAVE Festival of Cinematic, Audio and Visual Experimentation began at Bryant Lake Bowl on the last day of January 2020. The first program featured Nazli Dinçel of Milwaukee, both films that she made and films she selected that others had made. The program started with her film, "Untitled," which was about film exhibition, a view from the booth with headset jocks running the show insulting the program being presented and everyone around them. It's a trip into the mind of someone hostile to experimental films who is actually the one showing those movies to an audience. 

She partly throws us off by putting her subtitles on the top of the frame rather than the bottom.

The other films of hers also used subtitles, but never leaving them in a sub-postion. Often they are directly on the center, and made by scratching the emulsion off the film or even typing on the film with a typewriter. Sometimes the words on screen don't match the words we hear, but by the time we even realize that, the words and sounds of them are gone and we're left questioning both our eyes and ears. Her last film, "Instructions on How to Make a Film," shows us how to make a movie by growing a garden.

Her camera is often pointed straight down at the ground, or into a mirror that may or may not pull away to show what actually is in front of us. Her program was called "Do Not Look At The Picture," which is the hardest thing to do in a dark room where they only thing you can see is the bright image on the screen. But it was exactly what her movies were saying to us, as well as the others she chose to show.

Joyce Wieland's "Solidarity" showed us a Canadian cookie company strike through the shoes of the strikers. Greta Snyder's "Futility" presented the story of an abortion with happy archive images of people working. And George Landow's "New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops," probably cannot even be explained, but has some of the greatest baffled eyebrow acting to ever grace the screen.

The second program Friday night was all local shorts and there were so many of them, my notes are such indecipherable scratch, I lost the little piece of paper that listed the program, and it was late for me - because of all that I am left to scramble for what was even there, which was backwards muscles on a beach, Goldilocks danced by a forest, a Lynchian dream of orange wigs, Richard Nixon lying opera, the delicious embarrassment of seeing one of my own movies on that screen, a fireworks of young faces, a life told by a circle, a wrestling match between water and forest, and blue bodies splashing black ink out of yellow water while fashion meets the wizard of oz meets prayers of snow angels, and so much more.

On Saturday, I was one of the people who took a cyanotype filmmaking workshop with Margaret Rorison, whose work would be featured in the Saturday night program. Sam Hoolihan and John Marks were also there to guide us. We dipped short strips of film into a chemical that left an iron-based emulsion on the film. We then placed flat or flatish objects on the film such as lace, dryer lint, other pieces of film, plants, clay, pressed it under glass, and then exposed the strips of film to UV light for more than a half hour. The slow exposure time meant that we could place our objects on the film under low light without exposing it.

After the UV exposure, we developed the image in water and then spliced all our short strips together to project a work of white ghosts on blue.

Rorison's program that evening did not feature any cyanotypes, but like the small objects pressed on the film and then blow up to the screen, her films got close, close to the worn brick, manholes, shiny concrete and falling walls of Baltimore, close to her grandmother's hands and face, close to the walls and shadows of Los Angeles. Even her shots of vineyard rows, jets in the sky, and windmills felt intimate.

She also showed us a film made by the radiation released by the Fukishima Nuclear disaster and a family tree made with a real tree, films by Tomonari Nishikawa and Brue Baillie.

She said she likes to walk with her camera and observe. The next day, at the Walker Art Center, she showed us her mother's hands in a piece that she optically printed. She said it was all about her love of the process.

Love of the work and the struggle to make it was the subject of the Sunday panel, which included Rorison, Dinçel, local filmmaker Richard Wiebe, and University of Iowa students Trevon Coleman and Michael Wawzenek, all of whom showed a film, a part of a film, or a work in progress and then talked about they struggle to make work while trying to work to make a living. It was an intimate conversation in the rows of the Walker's Mediatheque while a line of chairs, a microphone and table sat empty in the front as if they were the real audience.

And then, after some food and drinks at the attached cafe, everyone went their ways to keep on doing and exploring in all their faraway places however they might manage to do it.