The 17th Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival
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