This year it was especially difficult to create our movie schedule for the film festival weekend. The line-up includes so many great movies, documentaries and foreign entries…it is impossible to watch everything on a single weekend. But we managed to put together a selection of 14 screenings I’m going to write about again like every year.
By the way, we are celebrating our 5th red carpet membership anniversary supporting the film festival as Friends of the Festival! Amazing how quickly all these years passed. I still remember our exciting first festival in 2002 before we became members as if it took place just a few months ago.
MICA Brown Center
This year’s festival opened at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Brown Center with an introduction by festival director Jed Dietz, followed by a selection of eight short films to celebrate the art of filmmaking in its purest form. Bobcat Goldthwait was the host tonight and launched the presentation with his own Goldthwait Home Movies in which the “cast” of an old home movie reunites to record an audio commentary for the 40th anniversary DVD. I enjoyed this little funny film.
Jed Dietz & Bobcat Goldthwait
Next was The Bellows March by Eric Dyer. He uses the old pre-cinema zoetrope technique he first explored in 2006 with Copenhagen Cycles. This time he added a third dimension to his zoetropes by using digitally printed three-dimensional sculptures.
3-dimensional metallic concertina-soldiers march, dance, and burrow; rain falls on the fallen ones, who are reborn as colorful plants blooming in mock-timelapse. They dance in grassy fields, intertwining with each other in a colorful kaleidoscope of motion, until joining in ordered rows and devolving into their militaristic marching form.
I liked the aesthetics, rhythm and visual effects, the patterns, images, and especially its technical background. While watching this film I thought to myself “This is very unique, there probably is no other way to produce this look.” Having said that, there was something missing for me however. I had a similar experience when I saw Copenhagen Cycles before. I fully recognize and appreciate its artistry, but I’m missing emotionality in its mechanics. I can picture it being used as a music video, or in a context with another elements adding emotionality to the ever-progressing and pulsating images. But as a short film alone, it didn’t manage to grab me as much as it could have.
Somewhat inspired by Eric Dyer’s film was Michael Langan who created “a moving portrait of the bustle and permanence of a city” with Dahlia [IMDB] by taking several photographs of an object or similar objects in focus with a changing background scene. He took, for example, pictures of different parking meters in different locations with the same viewing angle and used them as animation frames. This reminded me very much of the video animation Noah Kalina with the pictures he took of himself every day for six years. I liked this film and thought the music worked really well to the images. It added to the film what The Bellows March was missing for me.
Andy Cahill, Jed Dietz, (Pat Clark?), Jay Zimmerman, Matt Cornwell, Jim Jacob (please correct me if I got anybody wrong.)
Jay Zimmerman’s Done In One [IMDB] was a funny and genius little short film taken in in a single shot without any editing. Very clever, I loved it!
Andy Cahill created with Trepan Hole [IMDB] an animation of “squiggling, spastic, rail-thin creatures with clay souls and throbbing heads bounce off each other for six minutes.” It amused me to some degree, but I found myself scratching my head for most of the six minutes. :-D
Mildred Richards by Marc Kess (“KESS!”) looked and sounded fascinatingly 1940s in every aspect. The sound actually recorded in the 1940 for a radio play. The film was newly created to match the old recording. I thought the Radio Film Picture was very well made. The new visuals looked very convincing and authentic, and you couldn’t really tell what has been done, except occasionally the lips didn’t sync 100%. I thought the story was fun, too.
Julia Kim Smith’s Grand Teton [IMDB] was my least favorite film this evening, quite a disappointment to be honest. It was a video portrait of a first generation Korean-American family who comes together for a group photo at the same spot after 35 years. The pictures showed a range of mixed impressions from silliness, happiness, gratitude, perhaps melancholy and sadness as well, but they were overshadowed by a distracting, ugly, overpowering and awfully disturbing soundtrack. Did she try to illustrate the degree of identity loss people experience in the attempt to assimilate? In that case this film would have been disturbing but successful. But I’m not sure if that really was intended.
The opening night concluded with About Film Festivals by Jim Jacob. That was very funny, I loved it! Let’s let him speak for himself:
And fun was had by all! Now off to a full weekend of more back to back films…woot! :-)
Sorry if my film Grand Teton was not your cup of tea. It’s my family, being real, and was created as a video installation for a gallery. About the sound: I replaced it with “America the Beautiful” so people would focus on the relationship between my mother, my sister, and myself….I also loved Jim Jacob’s short.
Good luck with your design business. I got my MFA in design and worked for years for WETA and for a firm in Baltimore before “crossing over” to the dark side of art.
Hello Julia,
Thank you for your comment! I really appreciate you took the time to read my post.
Except for the music I did like your video and found it interesting how everybody reacted to each other, the place and the camera. I was especially fascinated by your mother, who reminded me a little of my own grandmother.
It was only the music that ruined it for me. Unfortunately, I found myself more distracted than focused on the relationship. It’s possible that I wasn’t able to relate to the music, or that I tried to find my personal experiences reflected in your video, considering the familiarity of the situation. Whenever I return to meet my family after several years and visit the places I grew up in I find myself overwhelmed with a lot of memories and mixed emotions. But in those moments I have quite a different soundtrack in my head.
Thank you again!
Kind regards,
Gerrit
I chose “America the Beautiful” because it’s so universal that it almost becomes background music….Okay,and as a daughter of immigrants, I have a thing for patriotic songs.
Tangentially, I lived in your neck of the woods, I believe, Hoogkerk, Netherlands and Mainz, Germany, for stints as a kid and was blown away by the state of design in both countries. Great design!