Cine-File Blog

INTERVIEW WITH LAUREL NAKADATE
by Cine-File contributor Kalvin Henely

(Stay the Same Never Change)

Laurel Nakadate is a photographer/video artist. Her short videos are interesting cherry-bombs about the male-gaze, voyeurism, power dynamics between genders, and loneliness and heartbreak. STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE is her first film. She presented it on Monday at the Chicago Underground Film Festival after presenting her new film, THE WOLF KNIFE, at the Los Angeles Film Festival earlier in the month.

KH: How did you start on making STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE?

LN: I was given a grant from a place in Kansas City called Grand Arts, and they asked me if I wanted to do a project in Kansas City, so that’s how it all started.

KH: Coming from a background in photography and fine art, how did you find the experience of making your first movie?

LN: It’s a completely different process working with a script, working on a set – working with a script or working with a large cast is really just an experience…not like the previous way of working for me…my earlier work was about going out into the world with one person and making it up as we go along whereas when I scripted the movie I had a strict set of story lines that I wanted to hit [...]. It’s a different sort of problem when you set out to tell a very specific story.

KH: Do you think that making the movie allowed you to explore themes or ideas in a way that you didn’t find possible before?

LN: I think movies, because they’re longer and there’s more time involved, I think there’s the possibility of saying things in a different sort of way than you can say them when you make short videos. The thing about a photograph is that it’s a perfect world in an 8×10 frame or 4×5 or whatever you’re shooting in, but the thing about a film is that it’s time based – it goes on and it goes on and it goes on and so. It’s a different set of tools that you’ve given, they’re completely different things…that’s hard to really compare them. They’re both perfect in their own way. I’m a believer that a photograph can say everything and it’s not necessary to even defend the photograph really because it’s just the perfect medium, but there’s something really lovely about time based work like film and certainly feature length film because you can describe an entire world in an hour and a half that can follow people and haunt people – that’s a really great thing.

KH: Why do you like to show STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE to audiences in the Midwest?

LN: Yeah, for me it’s about accessibility. I love being able to get the work in front of people who don’t necessarily live in New York or LA or places where it’s easier to see art, and I love that because it’s a film it can travel and it can go to places that maybe I can’t go to because of where I live or time or whatever and so there’s something great about having created something that can go out into the world and go out to places where people might not normally get to see art.

KH: Also, you grew up in the Midwest, in Iowa. So, you grew up in the Midwest, you made a movie about the Midwest, you’re showing it to the Midwest. Do you get something out of this?

LN: Yeah, it’s interesting because most Midwesterners who’ve seen it have really identified with some of the characters in the film. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me after and say, “that was so much the sort of anxiety and feeling I had as a teenager growing up in the middle of nowhere.” That’s the greatest compliment for me because I created these characters and these stories around the idea that it is really uncomfortable and claustrophobic to be a teenager in the middle of nowhere, but there’s also great possibility and beauty in it. So, for me it’s a great compliment when people come up to me and say that they really identified with the story or that it was a feeling that they had had when they were a kid.

KH: Was this the first screening of the film in Chicago?

LN: It was, yeah, it was the Chicago premiere. It was really great. I’m really glad I finally got to show it in Chicago. It’s been one of those cities I’ve been waiting for.

KH: How was the reception?

LN: It was really great. We had a small crowd. It was a Monday night screening which is always kinda rough to get a really big audience out. We got a really nice core group of people who seemed to really enjoy it and every single person in the audience asked a question afterwards, it was a really long Q&A. It was really strange actually, we’re like “not that many people showed up…Monday night…rough ticket situation…,” but everyone who came stayed and asked questions and talked to us afterwards and was fully invested in the challenge of being there. I left feeling like it was an incredible screening and the theater was so beautiful, the Gene Siskel Film Center.

KH. I wanted to ask you about your choice to use music in your movie. It doesn’t seem like you use music much in your short videos besides, of course, your use of Brittany Spears [Nakadate did a series of videos where she danced to "Oops" by Brittany Spears while sharing the room with male strangers in their homes].

LN: I’ve used little bursts of music here and there and for me it was always about how I really loved pop music and so in the video art I would use pop music to speak about an emotional landscape or a shared connection or a cultural happening. That was sort of the way I used pop music in those very sort of emotional heartbreak ways, but I knew for the film I wanted the music to almost be an extra character and to really define the aural landscape of the film in a way that I was hoping to then cinematically define the visual landscape and have those two things work together. Owen [the singer songwriter behind Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, who did the soundtrack] worked really really hard to form that world and I think he succeeds and I was really fortunate that he was willing to work so hard on the soundtrack. In THE WOLF KNIFE [Nakadate's new film] there’s only like 4 songs so it’s really spare but in STAY THE SAME it’s really extensive.

(Stay the Same Never Change)

KH: What do you think his music brought to the film?

LN: I think what’s so great about his music is that it really speaks about a sort of lonely heartbreak but also real optimism underneath all that sadness. We spoke a lot about what the theme song would sound like and I said I wanted it to sound really glittery and sparkly and sad like a prom in 1950s. The theme song is this little heart breaker and it just made it very clear to me that he is a genius when he sent that to me. We spent a lot of time sending files back and forth on iChat so he would compose stuff and iChat me things and I’d listen to it and iChat back. It’s funny because we ended up cutting the film and creating the soundtrack via a means that teenage girls would do it. It’s like this weird teenage girl movie and we’re sitting here and rocking the film via iChat.

KH: What kind of camera did you use?

LN: Canon XH A1, a digital video HD camera. It was kind of a brand new camera, looks like video but that made me happy. The Canon that I used for STAY THE SAME I didn’t get to keep, it was the non-profit’s camera [Grand Arts], but I used a similar camera to shoot THE WOLF KNIFE.

KH: What about for your videos?

LN: I’ve just been using a little consumer grade Sony, a PC1000 or something like that, but I think I’m gonna move to 5D. I think when I get back to NYC I’m gonna start shooting with something like that because I’m a still photographer, it makes total sense to be shooting with an SLR.

KH: As a photographer you had you’re influences, but when you decided to make films were there any directors or movies that influenced you?

LN: I’ve always loved Ozu. I think there’s something really beautiful about watching people move about the world and letting the world be slow when it needs to be slow. The act of observation is something that I’ve fallen in love with through photography and I think that Ozu’s films just speak so much about letting the world break your heart in a really patient way. I fell in love with photography when I saw the work of Diane Arbus and Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander and photographers who travel about the world looking at the world and trusting that it will be amazing and it might destroy them but it will be an amazing thing along the way and along that path maybe heartbreak and destruction. So, that’s my biggest influence is really photography and documentary photographers, but certainly Ozu when it comes to directors. If I could sit down and watch Ozu I could pretty much survive any post-root-canal-recovery possible. That’s definitely where I’d go for my comfort recovery movie-wise…certainly a major inspiration at all turns.

KH: Our contributor Ben Sachs reviewed your movie on our site. I wanted to ask you about the comparison he made between you and Rineke Dijkstra.

LN: If anyone compares her work to mine then I am deeply humbled. Her work is just incredible, it’s so much about just observing a person at a stage of their life when perhaps they just don’t want to look at themselves and perhaps the world ignores them and I think what’s so brilliant about that work is that it’s so simple but it haunts you.

The 17th Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival

CUFF is presented by IFP/Chicago and takes place at the Gene Siskel Film Center from Thursday, June 24 to Thursday, July 1. Below is a sampling of the programs from our contributors. The full schedule is at www.cuff.org.

Kevin Jerome Everson’s ERIE (New American)
Sunday, 1pm
Let’s just get this out of the way: ERIE is an awesome film. Kevin Everson’s fourth feature is his best since his first film, the remarkable SPICEBUSH (2005). Intentionally or not, Everson has taken up the mantle of Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP: perhaps no two filmmakers have turned as sensitive and human an eye to the lives of working-class African Americans as they have. Where Burnett had Watts in Los Angeles for SHEEP, Everson frequently returns to his home state of Ohio, and other rustbelt environs, for his features (he currently lives and teaches in Virginia). He focuses on the disenfranchised (particularly those who are casualties of the decline of the industrial base in the US) and blue-collar workers, people whose vision of the American Dream is an honest one, a fair one. Everson’s films often shade whether we are seeing documentary or narrative or something in-between. In ERIE, the series of long-take vignettes continues this elusiveness. It’s unclear how much of what we’re shown is staged or arranged. It plays like documentary, but the moments are too perfect to simply be happened upon. It doesn’t really matter, though. What we see are the people. Black people. Living lives or just being. Privileged and dignified by Everson’s camera. Real people, whether they are scripted or not. No artificial dramatics; no drugs; no bangers; no “victims.” Just people. High school students rehearsing two vastly different musical numbers simultaneously. A man struggling to unlock his car with a coat hanger. A young girl staring at a candle, silently, fidgeting slightly. For sixteen minutes. Who else allows a young African American girl so much uninterrupted screen time? Who else gives us so much time to really see a young African American girl? Amen. Showing with Braden King’s short HOME MOVIE. (2009, 81 min, HDCam) — Patrick Friel

Chuck Workman’s VISIONARIES: JONAS MEKAS AND THE (MOSTLY) AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE (New Documentary)
Friday, 8:15pm and Thursday, 6pm
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Life Is Unpredictable: Films by Jonas Mekas (Experimental Revival)
Saturday, 4:45pm
No other figure has played such a central role in the development of the American avant-garde cinema as Jonas Mekas. He came to the US after the end of WWII (he and his brother Adolfas were in a displaced persons camp for a time) and, in a few brief years, began making his mark on the cultural life of New York and beyond. A Lithuanian (he’s a celebrated poet in his native language) who never lost his accent, Mekas began filming his new environs in 1950, founded the influential journal Film Culture in 1955 and began writing an equally influential film column for the Village Voice in 1958. Mekas’ interests early on were European art cinema and American classics (the pre-auteur theory ones). Famously, he lambasted the avant-garde films of the time as crude, narrow, technically uninspired, and, most regrettably, a “conspiracy of homosexuality.” He quickly changed his opinions, though, and became (and remains) one of the most vocal and passionate champions of experimental film. Along side his writing, publishing, and cheerleading, Mekas was also an early exhibitor (Film-Makers’ Cinematheque; Anthology Film Archives) and distributor (Film-Makers’ Cooperative) of avant-garde film. And, from the early 50s on, an engaged and remarkable filmmaker in his own right. We’ve not previewed Chuck Workman’s new documentary on Mekas and the Avant-Garde but, even if it’s just a light gloss on the field and its major figures, we’ll count it as valuable if it creates a bit of interest and seeking out of experimental cinema by those who don’t know it. Workman himself has made documentaries on Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Playboy. He’s best known for his 1986 short film PRECIOUS IMAGES and, for many years now, as the compiler of the montage sequences for the Academy Awards. Chuck Workman and local film and art writer and artist Fred Camper will have a discussion after the Friday screening. NOTE: Jonas Mekas was originally scheduled to be in person for this screening and for the screening of his short films, but has had to cancel his appearance. (2010, 90 min, DigiBeta) — Patrick Friel
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Jonas Mekas began shooting film in 1950, but his earliest completed work is the 1961 feature GUNS OF THE TREES. Over the years, he was an active film diarist, compiling the footage into a highly-regarded group of films, including WALDEN (1964-69), REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA (1971-72), and LOST, LOST, LOST (1949-75). [One of these later diary compilation films, THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1993), will be showing at Doc Films on July 8.] This program features a generous selection of Mekas’ short films and videos spanning more than forty years. The two I’ve seen are both instructive looks at two aspects of Mekas’ life. WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN (1949/2002) features some of Mekas’ earliest footage, shot just the year after arriving in the US. This material was edited in 2002 and the fifteen-minute short is a delicate and beautiful portrait of the poor Lithuanian community in Brooklyn. It’s a bittersweet film, chronicling the difficult circumstances of his fellow Williamsburg residents, but also reflecting the freedom and remove from the still harsh post-war Europe he had found here. NOTES ON THE CIRCUS (1966) is one of Mekas’ best-known films and one of his most kinetic. It is a vibrant example of his famous pixilation, or single framing, style of shooting, in which he would only film in quick, brief bursts. There is an energy and disorienting sense of movement in the film, a perfect visual corollary to the kind of excitement and awe a child might feel at visiting a circus the first time. Also showing are: A LETTER TO PENNY ARCADE (2001), AWARD PRESENTATION TO ANDY WARHOL (1964), STREET SONGS (1983), TIME & FORTUNE VIETNAM NEWSREEL(1968), CUP/SAUCER/TWO DANCERS/RADIO(1983), and CASSIS (1966). In lieu of Mekas’ canceled appearance, the program will be introduced by local film and art writer and artist Fred Camper. (1964-2002, approx. 96 min total, 16mm and video) — Patrick Friel

Ashby, Kolak and Prokopas’ SCRAPPERS (New Documentary)
Sunday, 4:45pm and Thursday, 8pm
SCRAPPERS is a standard bearer for the Chicago Underground Film Fest, both as the only feature film in the festival about Chicago, and as the definitive record of a vast underground culture. Who drives those spray-painted trucks with high walls full of battered appliances, and what happens to the things they collect? The first feature-length documentary by Brian Ashby, Ben Kolak, and Courtney Prokopas, SCRAPPERS travels with two hardworking men and their families through three years of life at the margins of fickle industry. The patient and curious camera reveals a Chicago of informal economies, not just the ins and outs of collecting scrap metal, but bargains with neighbors through car windows and child-care arrangements made when everybody works and no one has money. Like their subjects, the filmmakers are quick on their toes and have their eyes wide open to the luck of circumstance; their captured goods range from the tenderly human to the violently mechanized. We notice every cat that wanders through the frame and peek into every pot cooking on a stove. The familiar aspect of Chicago’s alleyways is rendered uncanny with gliding, truck’s-eye-view camera work. Long wordless sequences of cars being compressed and copper being turned from cables to dust are buoyed by Chicago percussionist Frank Rosaly’s optimistic workday funk score (performed on found metal objects). With the exception of a handful of well-placed inter-titles, SCRAPPERS lets the subjects and images do all the telling of both the personal stories about making ends meet and the big political story about a crashing economy and the crashing price of metals. They are the same and different stories at once; the connections are deep and plain. Documentaries rarely balance deep involvement with such a light touch. The result is essential. Ben Kolak, Brian Ashby, and Courtney Prokopas in person at the Sunday screening. (2009, 90 min, HDCAM) — Josephine Ferorelli

Matt Porterfield’s PUTTY HILL (New American)
Sunday – 7pm
With its northeastern setting, lower-middle-class milieu, and melodramatic elements, Matthew Porterfield’s second feature has much in common with the work of Maine-based independent Todd Verow (SHUCKING THE CURVE, A SUDDEN LOSS OF GRAVITY). But where Verow’s proud amateurishness suggests an effort to dramatize ineloquent characters on their own terms, Porterfield brings an aestheticized distance to PUTTY HILL. He frequently breaks the action to interview characters as if for a TV news broadcast; at other moments (generally more effective), he frames them architectonically against their environment as though he were an ethnographer of Baltimore. Organizing this loose collection of scenes is a young man’s death by heroin overdose, which brings his dissolute family back to the dead-end town where he died. The subjects include ex-convicts, skateboarders, and (perhaps inevitably) Teenage Girls Precociously Interested in Drinking and Sex, none of whom seem especially excited about being alive. PUTTY HILL isn’t a provocation like Larry Clark and Ed Lachman’s KEN PARK nor a poetic meditation on former working-class America like David Gordon Green’s ALL THE REAL GIRLS, though the film’s exhibition-hall-style photography often evokes both of them. The film is fascinating primarily for its ambivalence; the finest scenes eschew plot and even dialogue entirely for curious observation. The climax is a series of karaoke performances by the (perhaps inevitably) non-professional actors at the boy’s funeral, which include Top 40 hits like “Wild Horses” and “I Will Always Love You.” Better yet is an earlier scene in a makeshift tattoo parlor, where the seedy, concentrated action is improbably scored to R. Kelly’s 2009 remix of “Birthday Sex.” Matt Porterfield in person. (2010, 87 min, DigiBeta) — Ben Sachs

Laurel Nakadate’s STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE (New American)
Monday, 8pm
A film of calculated naïveté and undirected anger, STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE plays like an art-punk cassette found in a used car. (Appropriately, the score is by lo-fi songwriter Owen Ashworth, a.k.a. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.) It’s a collection of vignettes, shuffled casually, about teenage girls killing time in the outskirts of Kansas City. Most of them laze in their imaginations, practicing conversations with boys or trying on old Halloween costumes; some appear in scenes of dreary exploitation, presumably out of boredom. Director Laurel Nakadate isn’t interested in childhood’s end so much as its death knell: Her tableaux are driven by entropy rather than any kind of dramatic momentum, which will likely drive some viewers crazy. But in skirting boredom, Nakadate sometimes evokes the self-annihilating stare of photographers like Rineke Dijkstra, artists drawn to tawdry subject matter as a means of contemplating amorality. Less effective are Nakadate’s “revelations” of Middle American ignorance (a young mother praying her baby won’t “grow up to be retarded,” a pre-teen asking Oprah Winfrey in a letter to adopt her like “all those children in Africa”, etc.), which are less grating for their condescension than for their lack of imagination. Still, STAY THE SAME contains enough restless experimentation to merit its place in an underground film festival. It’s the sort of film that conveys the discovery of filmmaking through sheer activity, the manipulation of personal talismans into themes. Laurel Nakadate in person. (2009, 93 min, HDCAM) — Ben Sachs

Matt McCormick’s SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS (New American)
Saturday, 7pm
Matt McCormick, whose freewheeling Portland, Oregon “Peripheral Produce” events in the early part of the last decade were the highlight of that town’s independent film scene, has always made short films that—from the brutally maudlin found-film collage SINCERELY, JOE P. BEAR (2000) to the disingenuous and comic crypto-documentary THE SUBCONSCIOUS ART OF GRAFFITI REMOVAL (2002)—promote a kind of numbed sentimentality and urbanist meta-nostalgia sensible primarily to a childless slacker bohemia. After a shift into more experimental shorts with fascinating and emphatic attention to sound design, his first feature, SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS, is a contemplative HD narrative with a casual, indie-rock superstar cast (Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, James Mercer of The Shins) whose characters inhabit some of the many spaces of downward mobility (animal shelter worker, temp staffer, thrift store employee) particular to the region; the film also includes a transcendent soundtrack by the accordingly melancholy ambient-music prodigy Matthew Cooper (a.k.a. Eluvium). Showing with Lisa Barcy’s short animation ANONANIMAL. Matt McCormick in person. (2010, 93 min, DigiBeta) — Michael Castelle

Shorts Programs One — Six
Showtimes noted below
In addition to the features and docs above (and the others not covered), CUFF has six programs of shorts which, based on the selected ones we’ve seen, are all well worth checking out. Shorts Program One (Friday, 9:15pm) includes video maker Jesse McLean’s gently disturbing look at contemporary culture and behavior, THE BURNING BLUE, Alexander Stewart’s simple but elegant geometric computer animation ICELAND SPAR, and German film and video maker Thorsten Fleisch’s glossy abstracted blur of color, DROMOSPHERE. Few people can tweak obscure (and not so obscure) pop culture detritus like video artist Kent Lambert, and he finds both camp value and underlying truths about ourselves in his chosen material for FANTASY SUITE (Shorts Program Two, Saturday, 1:15pm). A number of the works in Shorts Program Three (Saturday, 9:30pm) push to extremes for humorous effect (sometimes troublingly so). Steve Reinke and Jessie Mott’s animated EVERYBODY features a cast of cryptic, verbally abusive, and anatomically-obsessed animals. Lori Felker spoofs TV gardening shows with a host who becomes increasingly personal in her narration in THIS IS MY SHOW. Pippa Possible and Crispin Rosenkranz pair cooing nonsense-talk with crotch shots in the weirdly funny two-minute PLEASANT SPECIAL FRIENDS NICE. In Shorts Program Four (Sunday, 1:15pm) Marianna Milhorat’s L’INTERNATIONALE combines images of isolation, remove, and social estrangement with stunning cinematography and Kathryn Ramey utilizes a range of film techniques and styles to consider the life of Nineteenth Century American imperialist William Walker in YANQUI WALKER AND THE OPTICAL REVOLUTION. Shorts Program Five (Sunday, 3pm) includes Chi Jang Yin’s beautiful LIGHTHOUSE, which observes workers in a Chinese factory town. Landscape features prominently in three works in Shorts Program Six (Sunday, 6pm). Robert Todd continues his mastery of 16mm cinematography in the lush and stunning GOLDEN HOUR. Jack Cronin uses grainy black and white Super-8 film to create a haunting texture of a place in SLEEPING BEAR. Michael Robinson’s IF THERE BE THORNS draws upon the verdant tropics and the heated texts of William S. Burroughs, V.C. Andrews, and Stevie Nicks for this quasi-narrative fever dream. — Patrick Friel

The 22nd Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival
The Nightingale and Chicago Filmmakers — Check website for complete schedule
The Onion City festival began on Thursday and continues through Sunday, June 20, with an additional eight programs at the Nightingale (Friday) and Chicago Filmmakers (Saturday and Sunday). The festival, which is run by Chicago Filmmakers, includes films, videos, digital works, and two projector performances from over a dozen different countries.
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Group Show One (Friday, 7pm, The Nightingale): The truth is a funny thing. It not exactly an absolute, and it’s a little more than a matter of opinion. Sometimes when you want to figure out how historical events created the truth of today you have to fabricate a myth. And sometimes that myth is closer to the truth than history. The two documentaries included in this show are attempts to mix disparate facts in order to illuminate a truth that was never mentioned at the moment reality existed. Duncan Campbell’s MAKE IT NEW JOHN (2009, UK) retells the story of automotive wunderkind John DeLorean and the car that would be his downfall. Using a vast array of found footage, Campbell fills us in on the childhood and career of DeLorean, how he suddenly leaves his job as a top executive at GM, and founds a new kind of car company. But as the story of the DeLorean Motor Company unfolds, interviews that seem too perfect to have taken place are inserted into the film. Campbell asks us to choose whether the original footage or the recreation does a better job of representing history. Kathryn Ramey is also concerned with how History represents the events of the past, but takes a less direct approach. In YANQUI WALKER AND THE OPTICAL REVOLUTION (2009, USA) she also uses both stock and original footage, but presents them as different renderings of the truth. Reading more like an essay than Campbell’s film, she uses hand processed Super 8 footage, time-lapse photography, and tourist footage of contemporary Nicaragua. Attempting to draw connections between America’s contemporary economic dominance of Central America and William Walker’s 1856 invasion (and subsequent presidency) of Nicaragua, she reads from historical documents and teaches us about this rogue conqueror from the not-so-distant past. And ultimately, her technical interventions in image creation are just as truthy as the facts. (Jason Halprin)

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Group Show Two (Friday, 9pm, The Nightingale) is teeming with bright and beautiful video work. Mark Street’s COLLISION OF PARTS (2010, US) is exactly what the title promises—it’s a sharply edited and confidently messy mix of documents and abstractions featuring the natural, urban, political, and personal. There’s a plunge into the virtual with Emily Carmichael’s touchingly funny retro-video-game-based LEDO AND IX GO TO TOWN (2010, US) and Jeanne Liotta’s karaoke video filmed “live” in Second Life, SWEET DREAMS (2009, US). The absurd and aggressive Barry Doupé seriously intensifies those elements in WHOSE TOES (2009, Canada). Gregg Biermann’s TRAFFIC PATTERNS (2009, US) is a spinning, twirling, gorgeous riff on previously mined mirrored imagery. Van McElwee pixilates and smears to marvelous effect in NAVIGATORS (MELTING CHRONONS) (2009, US). (Josh Mabe)

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Abstraction abounds in Group Show Three (Saturday, 4pm, Chicago Filmmakers). Mary Helena Clark gives us beautiful blues and aquatic abstractions in the ethereally shimmering SOUND OVER WATER (2009, US). Robert Todd shows the textures of light leaving the day in LULLABY (2009, US), and mixes flattened planes of light with crisp nature in SEEKING SUNLIGHT (2010, US). Robbie Land’s FALL CREEK ROAD (2009, US) explodes with fiery, intensely colored optical printing. Ross Nugent produces startling color effects from an overlaid triple projection in SPILLWAY STUDY/CARPE DIEZ (2009, 8 mins., 3 x 16mm projector performance, US). One of the most interesting things to keep an eye out for during this festival is the unintentional budding connection between a group of video artists in Chicago and Istanbul. In this program, you can see those parallels in the always-amazing work of local Jake Barningham and the Turk Eytan Ipeker. Check out the work of Yoel Meranda (in Group Show Four) and Kyle Canterbury (in Group Show Five) to see for yourself. Also in the program: work by Seoungho Cho, Barry Gerson, and Richard Tuohy. (Josh Mabe)

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If Group Show Four (Saturday, 7pm, Chicago Filmmakers) is packed it’s due to the screening of a new work by the still reining overlord of American experimental film and video, Kenneth Anger! According to the artist ICH WILL! (2008, US) is “a poetic, ironic reverie on the Hitler Youth.” Yoel Meranda, a video artist who makes subtle tiny abstractions, has four new works in this program. Pablo Marin’s Super-8 UNTITLED TRILOGY (2008-09, Argentina) give us pounding depth effects in the first section, a more poetic second section, and a humorously trifurcated third. Ichiro Sueoka simply and touchingly presents flaking, time-bleached, decaying images of a parade in MARCHING ON (2009, Japan). Also in this program: work by Simon Payne, Thorsten Fleisch, and Emily Wardill. (Josh Mabe)

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Group Show Five (Saturday, 9.15pm, Chicago Filmmakers) is probably the strongest program of the festival. Local Kyle Canterbury is growing by leaps and bounds as of late. He’s showing three new pieces that reveal a vision that is becoming extraordinarily connected to the rhythms and construction of his subjects. Barry Doupé returns with an oddly beautiful consideration of animated flowers in THALE (2009, Canada). Stephanie Barber’s TO THE HORSE DREAM OF ARMS (2010, US) is a brief, intense study of a piece of found footage featuring a boy being flashed by a reflection of light. Two pieces from master animator Lewis Klahr’s recent pop music project “Prolix Satori” are showing: NIMBUS SMILE (2009, US) features a cheerless, city dwelling woman facing disaffection to the Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes, while WEDNESDAY MORNING TWO A.M. (2009, US) strikes a more perilous and sorrowful tone. The latter title is flat-out brilliant. Also in this program: work by Vincent Grenier, Ben Rivers, Fern Silva, Marina Gioti, Simon Payne, and T. Marie. (Josh Mabe)

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Group Show Six (Sunday, 4pm, Chicago Filmmakers) is presented in memory of JoAnn Elam, Chick Strand, and Callie Angell—three remarkable women who have died in the past year. The work being shown in tribute include: CARTOON LE MOUSSE (1979, US) from San Francisco legend Chick Strand; the feminist classic LIE BACK AND ENJOY IT (1982, US) from local filmmaker JoAnn Elam; and two of Andy Warhol’s films for Warhol scholar Callie Angell, including the amazing SHOULDER (1964, US). The pensive and deeply felt DARK RIVER (2009, US) by local Chi Jang Yin features women recalling the art made in their youth. The startlingly intense Super-8 film DAYLIGHT + THE SUN (2009, US) by local Karen Johannesen gives us light that is abrasively and almost unnaturally forceful. The inspired SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW (2009, US) by local Jesse McLean shows us an extraordinary moment when “reality” is shattered by reality. Also in this program: work by Deborah Stratman, Alexi Manis, Adele Friedman, and Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka). (Josh Mabe)

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Globe-hopping Group Show Seven (Sunday, 6.30pm, Chicago Filmmakers) features a number of fantastic film works. NON-ARYAN (2009, US), by Abraham Ravett, achieves something astounding by revealing the very physical texture of memory. The stark THE SOUL OF THINGS (2010, US) by Dominic Angerame seeks to disclose the history hidden in places. WASH + SHAVE (2010, US) by Jonathan Schwartz presents the titular events with an amazingly straightforward lyricism. Also in this program: work by Erin Espelie, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Shambhavi Kaul, and Kamal Aljafari. (Josh Mabe)

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Group Show Eight (Sunday, 8:45pm, Chicago Filmmakers) includes an international selection of new video work—INDIA SHOUTING MATCH (2010, UK) by George Barber,BRUNE RENAULT (2010, France) andSAYRE AND MARCUS (2010, France) by Neil Beloufa,4′ 22″ (2009, UK) by William Raban,TODAY! (CHASE SCENES 63A, 63B) (2010, US) by Jessie Stead, and THIS IS VERY GOOD (2009, Austria/Czech Republic) by Jakub Vrba—and anUNTITLED LIVE PROJECTOR PERFORMANCE (2010, approx. 15 mins., 3 x 16mm projector performance, with fans) by Chicagoan Joe Grimm.

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More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org/onion_fest.
Note: The Onion City festival is programmed by C-F editor Patrick Friel.