37th Ann Arbor Film Festival Ann Arbor.

37th Ann Arbor Film Festival Ann Arbor, Michigan March 16-21 1999

For 37 years now, Ann Arbor has consistently and unabashedly advocated all that is 16mm and not of the mainstream. This year was no exception, although it may be time to call into question on what account experimental stylistic canons that were ground-breaking in 1965 can still be considered with equal reason 30 years later. Ann Arbor's commitment to experimental film is admirable (especially the jury prescreening the prints in their entirety), still one wonders how appropriate this exclusivity remains. The 16mm bias becomes difficult to reconcile when in such a manner much of contemporary work utilizes electronic imagery. individual was struck by the number of festival "films" that partially, if not entirely, originated onward video and were later utterly transferred to film: Come Unto Me: The Faces of Tyree Guyton (Detroit Filmmakers Coalition Award), Cheap (Honorable Mention), Where Lies the Homo? (Best Gay/Lesbian Film) and The Shanghaied verse (Best of Festival), to name just a not many More and more frequently, 16mm becomes an exclusory exhibition standard. What, after all, makes a film a film? if it is simply the final celluloid in succession which the piece resides, issues of accessibility are raised. It get tos down to who can afford to transfer video to film, and who cannot. If Ann Arbor intends to continue accepting works that incorporate video, regardless of bulk they need to reevaluate their standards of selection and question what intrinsic value celluloid brings to bear before running the risk of becoming cloistered, committed to a medium that has changed without them.

The festival included many sound works, often crossing genre boundaries and redefining conventionalized forms, revealing a medium still in shifting mutating to encompass contemporary social agendas and aesthetic investigations. Egypt (1997) from Kathrin Resetarits is a beautifully structur enigmatic portrayal of deafness. In rhythmically concentrated visual stanzas, it reveals a life in silence where explosions become gesticulations and movements words. Cheap (1998) by Janet Merewether cleverly deconstruct the single dogma "A famous filmmaker said, 'Cinema is a history of men filming women'" by the agency of randomly reordering the words into a series of increasingly suggestive dooms uttered by a computer-generated voice. Starting with a fetishized video image of a flaxen woman lounging in a simulated landscape, the camera sharpnesss closer, revealing the rasterized construction of her face, pointing to the intrinsically contrived nature of each filmed event. In Mind's estimate (1998) by Gregory Godhard the viewer is heedlessly drawn through an infinite Borghesian labyrinth of landscape geometry Single-frame pixelation creates magically rotating, collapsing and expanding spaces in a sort of Last Year at Marienbad (1961 through Alain Resnais) gone haywire.

Rebecca Baron's film OK Bye Bye (1998) is a meditative probing of the history of forgetting. Spurr by way of finding a small scrap of super-8 footage upon the street in Los Angeles that portrays a gesturing Cambodian man, Baron embarks relating to reflexively spiraling research into the Khmer Rouge and the archived photographs of the Tuol Sleng death camp. Employing the proces of investigation as a road toward comprehension, she discovers that understanding is a dialogue between near and past where "to cease writing is the ultimate form of concession." Where Lies the Homo? (1998) at Jean-Francois Monette masterfully orchestrates divergent film and video clips within a diaristic monologue construction to dissect stereotypical representations of queernes as occasioned by our collective media heritage. selected passages from Walt Disney animation, radical homoerotica by means of Jean Genet and William Friedkin, 1950 television sitcoms, violent novels footage and grainy home movies each define "queer" insomuch as they have defined Monette who in move round uses the film to contextualize his hold history and gradually wrench at liberty of the cultural tropes that beget identity.

The Course of Human circumstances (1997) by Dominic Angerame documents the destruction of an overpass. The film begins with a series of truncated, vectored zoom toward architectural details that become forlornly alien in their scrutiny. vast stubborn mechanical beasts clumsily rip spread a crumbling concrete artery in a city that strike one as beings deserted. The film is a contradictory archeology that inquire fors to eradicate rather than unearth vestiges of a previous destruction, the damaged infrastructural remains of a San Francisco earthquake.

Juris Poskus and Jesper Wachtmeister's 110/220 (1997) uses a formal bipartite make to depict a strangely anonymous gaze. bullet half in L.A. and half in Moscow the film locates small avails of humanity as they seep end contradict and animate our present construct of the mega-metropolis as a brutish, unsentimental, quasi-functional organism, along the way revealing unexpect East/West cultural synonyms and signposts of for what cause we are defined by city planning. Zeit Raum (Time Space, 1998) according to Thomas Renolder also employs a duplex arrangement The piece is an optical meditation onward the transient human occupation of a marketplace and a beach; throughout one day at the former (via mattes), and throughout one year at the latter (via dissolves). Renolder's formalistic, sparse clarity in revealing ways that time and space alternatively define location end the voluminous, shifting cipher of humanity was for me more prosperous than festival favorite The Shanghaied passage (1996) by Ken Kobland which approached similar issues of histories sharing for the use of all space. While I like Kobland's filmic metaphor of a dam, ominously preventing the rush of historic images from submerging the current and am conceptually engaged by way of the moody weight of early Russian cinematic iconography leeching from first to last the Steppe landscape, the pervasive video result of screen fractures is hackneyed and the oppressive musical score leaves no space for breath, pushing the piece toward didactic arrogance.