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.

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.

CAVE 2 Day 2

The second day of the second annual CAVE (Festival of Cinematic Audio and Video Experimentation) included lots of moments when the theater of the Bryant Lake Bowl was just full of people talking to each other. Festival director Kevin Obsatz explained that he programmed shorter blocks of films to open up those opportunities for discussion.

Saturday afternoon's screening of Arab-American experimental film was co-presented by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and MIZNA, which puts on the Arab Film Festival. Co-curators Michelle Baroody and Andrea Shaker explained that they selected work for the screening that went beyond the stereotypes and dominant narratives.

The program began with Shaker's On Silence, which included a live performance element. Shaker stood on stage to the right of the screen to read a poetic narration while looking out a video window onto an endless expanse of water, sometimes the view blurred by waving bare branches and curtains, sometimes the view was so clear you could see that there was no distant horizon. She spoke about the luxury of stillness, the luxury of forgetting, and created a meditation both personal and universal on displacement that connected herself and us to the stories of refugees of Syria.

Shaker's use of news footage, both frozen still and rendered without sound, was echoed in other films in the program, many of which appropriated media images and sounds to pin and enlighten them. Ariana Hamidi's The Covenant Adam intercut home movie-like images of young people with TV images of a cartoon incredible Hulk to show how superhero images condition young people to problem-solve with violence. Usama Alshaibi's The Muslim Meme countered rabid anti-Muslim AM hate radio audio quotes with quiet subtitles that detail that pain that comes from being the human-being target of such vicious propaganda.

Following an afternoon break, CAVE resumed with two evening screenings featuring visiting artists. First up was Christopher Harris of Florida, who was also on hand to conduct an in-camera editing  workshop as part of the festival. His films featured lush 16mm images pristinely transferred to video. His 16mm frames were bursting with edge fogging, the sun flying through the edges of his films to re-assert itself, particularly in a dual screen rendering of a roadside passion play where the sun coming through the film edges was like a divine presence trying to strangle the Hollywood phoniness of evangelical Christian crucifixion re-enactors. The sun itself, and the transience of our whole universe, was at the heart of his film Sunshine State (Extended Forecast) which paired primary color images of beach ball planets floating in a swimming pool and suns drawn of sidewalk chalk with an audio track of scientific predictions of the sputtering out of our sun, and the end of the potential for life on earth.

The reflection or absorption of light on faces was referenced in Reckless Eyeballing, which set up a conversation between the lynch-victim Gus from D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation with Pam Grier, star of Blacksploitation films in the 70's. Both The Birth of a Nation and Grier could have flashed on the screen of The Criterion Theater in St. Louis, whose deterioration Harris documents in detail in still/here, an excerpt of which closed the screening. The long-closed building's brick walls were burst open to let in the sun to the Criterion's dusty tumbled seats, both suggesting the liveliness and community that once happened here with the devastation and emptiness that is its dereliction.

The final screening featured work of Jesse McLean of Milwaukee, who introduced her films by saying that she is a collagist, both in that she appropriates images and sounds, but also in that she collages ideas. Her films look at how media gets to the middle of our brain, from the mediated spaces of big box stores and surface parking lots, which may be our actual homes, to the sparkling international postcards we get in our email boxes via spam.

Her film See A Dog, Hear A Dog, was all about intelligence, and its YouTube images of a dog playing the piano and singing, and its dog facial expressions acted out by humans, really pointed out that it isn't really intelligence and emotion that distinguish humans from other animals, it might just be that our difference is that we have the media, and that doesn't really make us better.

Although we humans had media, we also had each other at CAVE. And after the very human Q and A with Jesse McLean ended, the unmediated humans in the Bryant Lake Bowl Theater formed a collective voice to sing Happy Birthday to Kevin Obsatz as a chocolate cake topped with slightly skewed burning candles was carried to him. But we also could also have been singing a happy birthday for CAVE, which lives and will live another year. Obsatz announced that there will be a CAVE 3 in 2019.

CAVE 2 Day 1

CAVE (the Festival of Cinematic Audio Visual Experimentation) is now officially annual, and once again taking us to a place of light and sound on some of the coldest winter days. You enter CAVE 2 at the Bryant Lake Bowl past all the crashing of bowling balls on pins around the corner of the kitchen and that strange box office inserted in a cubby that could have once held a phone booth and grab the luscious printed program in black and blue with a brown paper insert of Andy Sturdevant words about other equally cold nights when people gathered to watch movies together in town and found warmth and inspiration, wonder and community.

The 7 pm Friday show featured local work, mostly videos that featured images and sounds of nature, of water and waves and physically improbable human shadows in Julie Kouneski's Shapeshifter, of the interplay of water and rock with fingers and insects as landscape in Jonathan Kaiser's Canyons, with water and ice holding and releasing in Jason Cole's Same Bare Place and Kate Casanova's Slow Black Glow. Trevor Adams' Rumors of Train Barn broke the nature line with his images of night and people-rich places filled with ghosts etched and painted over and behind the lights and shadows of somewhere somewhat familiar but also maybe not. There were also a couple short videos by me.

For the 9 pm slot, both the cinema and the audience expanded, with people sitting on the walls and standing by the door and John Marks starting things out with his great wall of 16mm projectors to show Spirit Leveling, a four movement sonata for trees, water, water lilies, sun and sound. The sound was created on the spot with his analogue synthesizer, which he operated while turning projectors on and off. At one point the side by side sun was two eyes reflected in water looking back at us. The piece ended with one joyous sun reflection circling and sketching delirious commas on gently lapping water.

HIJACK (Kirsten Van Loon and Arwen Wilder) performed Volleyball, Basketball, Hanky, a dance that doubled down on Janis Ian's "At Seventeen," channeling teenage awkwardness into movement of body with repeated shadows on the screen and a dance-partner TV set with a clip of the volleyball/basketball they didn't get called to play. Kleenix turned into the pom poms of beauty queens but also reminded me of the snow and cold outside, and the cold inside that sometimes comes from seeing yourself through the eyes of others rather than just thinking about how great you really are.

The last piece, Kinski Wanted Herzog to Direct but He Turned It Down by Guillaume Vallee and Hazy Montague Mystique of Montreal, combined a film clip of Klaus Kinski that was transferred to videotape, distressed, and then transferred back to film and expanded and repeated with live video feedback to give us a multiplying brightly hued approximation of Kinski's grinning theatrical madness, or impatience and recalcitrance in general. Film scratches and dust conspired with the teeth of TV static to take us further and further down into a place of extreme color and lunar brain echoes. Mystique's synthesized sounds reprocessed voices and other kinds of unidentifiable blips and beeps and hums that kept on rising and up falling to match the feedback of the images. It was both cave painting primal and futuristic techno, eye opening and closed-eye rattling.

And then it was time to get out of there quickly to catch our bus. There are still two more days of CAVE! CAVE is presented by Cellular Cinema, which is a monthly series of screenings at the Bryant Lake Bowl.