Erik Moe Art & Design

I have many frustrations about the film scene here in what is still America’s fifth largest city. For the second year in a row the city’s big Fourth of July tourism push is presenting a series of outdoor screenings. That part is a fine and laudable goal. I love outdoor screenings. They are a great way of building community and reclaiming open spaces that are sometimes scary after dark.

My compliant is with the quality of the screenings. See if you can spot the problem in the picture (inset, taken from the Welcome America site). The screen is a truck with two video panels on its side. The image source is not even film. It’s a DVD that was probably rented at a local Blockbuster (hopefully they at least secured the rights for public exhibition). The two screens on the truck leave a wide black seam down the middle of the frame. Fun… You know, in France there were riots over bad projection at the cinemas…. And, if the DVD/truck combo weren’t bad enough, the company operating the truck apparently thinks it better to use all of the real estate on the “screen” instead of presenting the film at the proper aspect ratio. This means that all the characters look like Ernie from Seseme Street (squat midgets with wide heads).

Even if you aren’t a film junkie like me, you are probably thinking “that sounds really unwatchable.” You would be right. This is essentially the same thing as “exhibiting” a painting by presenting a crumpled up, sliced-in-half reproduction of the original. Admittedly, the works on display here aren’t the Mona Lisas of cinema (Rocky II, Phantom of the Opera, and National Treasure are on the bill), but is it really all that hard to do this one small thing right (especially on Welcome America’s bloated budget).

Isn’t Philly supposed to be all gung-ho about the economic benefits of building a film scene here? Wouldn’t it be smart to have the biggest, most expensive annual tourism event clued-in about a basic respect for public exhibition?

Maybe someday the non-existant department of film and new media at the PMA or the ICA will host decent outdoor film events. For now, The Secret Cinema is doing its best. Tonight at dusk is their last scheduled summer screening outside at 40th and Walnut. A Laurel and Hardy film is on the bill. It’s better than nothing, right?

STANDINGS:
W L PCT GB Streak
Phila. Phanatics: 2 2 .500 - Lost 1
Phila. Frustration: 2 2 .500 - Won 1


‘Me And You And Everyone We Know’ directed by Miranda July, 2005. Rating 9 out of 10.

Miranda July’s debut film Me And You And Everyone We Know is making its way to a theater near you. I’ve been a big fan of July’s work since seeing her at the Walker Art Center several years ago and hearing her on some fun releases from K Records back in the late-1990’s. I made a point of seeing the film when it screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival back in April and meant to write a few words about it back then but that never happened.

The remarkable thing about “Me and You” is that it does a good job of bringing the questioning and wondering sensibilities of performance art to a narrative film. When I first saw the film, I was contrasting it with the works of Todd Solondz, who deals with similarly isolated characters in a similarly quirky way. Unlike Solondz’ though, July leaves you with a hopeful feeling. “Me And You” does have some troublesome content (like the naive youngster who connects in a kinky online chatroom), but instead of tragedy July finds comedy in the strange and varied sides of loneliness that she depicts. Just as in her performance/video work, she finds a way of instilling a kind of momentary magic in the everyday.

Related: Miranda July’s “Me And You” Blog (do watch the videos in this post about Philly for a taste of July’s aesthetic.
See Also: Learning to Love You More

‘The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill’ directed by Judy Irving, 2003. Rating: 9 out of 10.

This documentary chronicles a San Francisco flock of cherry-headed conures and the ex-musician who came to be their closest friend and advocate. The ex-musician is Mark Bittner, and his transformation from unemployed San Francisco post-beatnik to dedicated steward of the parrots is a remarkable story. His struggle to find a sustainable niche for himself in urban America nicely parallels the story of the non-native conures (they are almost certainly all refugees of the illegal trafficking of South American birds to pet shops). Each of the dozen or so birds we get to know in the film has more personality than most of the characters in a typical hollywood film. Director Judy Irving has done a remarkable job of finding and shooting footage to accompany each of their stories. More than a nature documentary, ‘Wild Parrots’ touches on issues of urban displacement (human and animal), and the gulf between modern life and the physical, natural world we overlook.

Related: San Francisco Movies

During the hype of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park Gates project, I was reading quite a bit about the Maysles Brothers’ series of documentaries about previous landscape transformations by the pair. Over the past couple of weeks, I finally had a chance to see them and I can’t recommend them highly enough. David and Albert Maysles developed a very close friendship with Christo and Jeanne-Claude over the course of their many collaborations. Their love for their subject comes through in the films – even when their subjects are bickering and yelling at each other, worn down by the logistics and lack of sleep demanded by massive installation projects.

The first film in the series documents the Valley Curtain installation in Colorado. Christo and Jean-Claude are very young and there are a number of amusing/endearing moments between them and the rugged cowboy construction workers of Colorado in the 1970’s. When a chain-smoking Jeanne-Claude laying in the grass lifts her head to yell “Does anybody know what is going on now?” we start to wonder what her role is in these collaborations (later films clarify her role well). This first film is not as well-rounded because the Maysles’ were not brought in until the final week of the project. The film does not even mention the failed first attempt at installing Valley Curtain some years prior.

Later films Running Fence, Islands, Christo in Paris, and Umbrellas have more well-rounded plotlines and offer more insights on the art duo. Christo in Paris has the most biographical content (the duo rifle through boxes of old photos and reminisce about the fascinating courtship between the Romanian refugee artist and the wealthy daughter of a French General). The projects in these films are more accessible than Valley Curtain as well. Both because they were installed in more populous areas and because they were all installed not by construction workers but by armies of local artworkers hired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The long process of gaining approval formally (from government committees) and informally (from neighbors and landholders) is what most of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s time goes into during these projects, and the Maysles’ films provide this essential documentation alongside gorgeous views of these temporary works.

Related: Albert Maysles’ concise advice for documentary filmmakers | In-depth summary and trailer for The Gates (mayslesfilms.com) | The Gates at imdb | My take on The Gates.

Film Fest season is my favorite time of year. For two amazing weeks, we cinema-starved Philadelphians have access to way more international and indie film than we can possibly see. Because last year I only really saw things at the Philadelphia Film Festival that later had longer runs at mainstream theaters, this year my strategy is to only see things that might be unlikely to screen outside of the fest. This means that I’m gritting my teeth and passing up the latest by Todd Solondz, Francois Ozon, Steve Buscemi, and Isabelle Huppert in favor of some more obscure selections. Among the picks that I already have tickets for are:

• Me and You and Everyone We Know, the debut film by performance artist Miranda July.
• Survive Style 5+, a surreal Japanese comedic action film from the ever-popular Danger After Dark sub-festival
• This Charming Girl, a debut film from Korean director Lee Yoon-ki

I’ve also plugged some of the more interesting films that might work with my schedule into iCal and published the listings here. Send me a message if you see something you’d like to go see with me.

Update: The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival is also going on now. There is usually quite a bit of overlap between the two fests. Minny readers - please let me know what you are seeing!

Recently watched Le Trou (1960) and Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954), both by Jacques Becker. Each was memorable, but Le Trou is the more memorable one by far. Sure, the prison that it’s set in is rather quaint and silly with its freindly Frenchmen stockpiling cakes and sausages. Their comradarie and civility makes the Hogan’s Heroes prison camp look tough. The set-up can almost be cast aside just to justify the insanely long takes of hammers banging away at concrete, files hacking away on metal bars, and metal being thrust at stone. I didn’t time any of these shots, but some of them must have been eight minutes long of straight-up work. The clanging and banging went on so much longer than any narrative filmmaker would let it today — which is a shame. Watching concrete break apart through brute force and repeated blows is actually fairly compelling. After the first minute or so you get beyond the narrative questions (like “why don’t the guards hear this?”) and get into a sort of zenlike state as the solid stone of the cell floor crumbles. At that point you can start questioning the physical world entirely and those walls that make up your cell, man… It actually is rather reminicent of Rififi, Jules Dassin’s legendary 1955 heist flick in which there is an extremely long, almost silent segment that takes us through all the tense details of a jewel robbery.

Touchez Pas au Grisbi itself falls into my much loved heist flick subgenre. Though technically, this is more of a sequel to a heist flick, since the gangster (Jean Gabin) already has the loot from his ‘one last job that will let me and my beautiful girl (Jeanne Moreau, in this case) retire from this vicious life of crime.’ Here the weary mobster is torn between loyalty and social security as a rival gangster makes threats to Gabin’s long-time partner-in-crime.

This weekend, I finally had a chance to see Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, winner of all kinds of acclaim when it came out in 2002. That it takes three years for amazing films like this to screen in the country’s fifth largest city is one of my most frequent Philly frustrations. Film at International House and The Fabric Workshop are definitely two of the most forward-thinking arts programs in the city, and they deserve credit for their current collaboration, Experiments With Truth, which finally brought Atanarjuat to town.

The film is gorgeous from start to finish, alternating between blue and white arctic landscapes and orange-black, fire-lit interior and night scenes. The plot line is essentially a classical heroic epic with brothers, lovers, rivals, elders, love, violence, murder, rape, cheating, good and evil, etc. The richness of the tale illustrates just how far mainstream cinema has gotten from the basics of storytelling. You don’t need me to tell you that most of the films screening at your mutliplex are all visual candy with nothing human to hang on to. There are few contrivances in Atanarjurat, unless you consider violence, static cameras, removed locales and props to be contrivances. Much of the action is everyday and mundane (at least for the Inuit). Tearing apart and eating meat is a recurring image - which serves both as an illustration of the difficulty of survival and a nice mirror for the human-on-human brutality in the film. And finally, I’ll put the chase scene across ice floes up against that car chase on San Francisco hills in Steve McQueen’s Bullitt as one of the greatest of all time.

Related: Libby Rosof was there, too

I watched Marina de Van’s In My Skin (2002) this evening. I can’t say that I recommend it to all audiences, but it was certainly one of the most intense films I’ve seen. The story follows Esther (played by writer/director de Van) as she becomes obsessed with cutting / self mutilation after a fall leaves her leg seriously gashed. Already distant, she becomes more removed from her friends, boyfriend, and coworkers as cutting becomes her only emotional release and coping mechanism for her stresses. The topic has been touched on by several remarkable films in recent years (Secretary, Thirteen, and The Piano Teacher come to mind), and it is definitely an incomprehensibly scary situation to be confronted with. While Secretary and Thirteen both presented the phenomena in the context of a coming of age story, In My Skin borrows from suspense and horror. Though Esther is the central character, she doesn’t say much. We learn about her by watching and hearing the struggles of her boyfriend and others around her. A couple of scenes were really impossible to watch (I was glad that I wasn’t in a movie theater but instead could get up and distract myself with dish washing). The Joan-of-Arc-like shots of emotional anguish on Marina de Van’s face intercut with those gruesome images is remarkable — and it is that intense emotional identification that didn’t come through in those more, um… uplifting(?) films. The Alice in Wonderland feel of the business dinner also will be hard to forget…

I hadn’t known Marina de Van’s name before watching this film, but as she wrote, directed, and starred in this film, she is one to watch. A quick search shows that she worked with Francois Ozon on See the Sea, which I also recommend… The DVD includes two of her short films. Both were interesting, but I was most amused by a line in the second film, Psy-Ops, which depicts a very unusual therapist and his patient. At one point the patient confides “I’m afraid my anus will crack and I’ll make star-shaped excrements. It’s part of my fear of America.” Now there’s a cultural critique…

Once again, I’m compiling a master best films of the year list from published top ten lists and the lists friends send me. I’m starting with three lists in this month’s Artforum. Every year the disparity between the list of films critics make and the list of films that have actually screened in Philadelphia gets wider. The list is really a list of Best Films You Might Have A Chance To See In Early 2005 And Otherwise Will Have To Cross Your Fingers That They Will Make It To DVD. 2005 is looking to be a good year, judging from the names already in the list: Kiarostami’s Five, Ming-Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, Ozon’s 5 x 2, Godard’s Notre Musique, and Antonioni’s Michelangelo Eye to Eye. Of course, Almodovar’s newest still hasn’t opened in Philly either. Artforum being Artforum, several experimental films are now on my master list. They probably won’t find a lot of votes from other sources, but I’m crossing my fingers that some of these will find their way to one of the increasingly common experimental & short film compilations on DVD. Particularly intriguing is Bruce Conner’s Luke, “A reworking of super-8 footage the filmmaker shot in 1967, Conner’s study of a day on the set of Cool Hand Luke shows cast and crew both in front of and behind the camera.”

Having just watched Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry(10), I am officially declaring it the movie I would like to have with me on a desert island (I’ll sidestep the question of how to view films on a desert island for now). The film follows a man who is contemplating suicide. He wants someone to come to him in the morning and either bury him if he is dead or rescue him if he does not go through with it overnight. It sounds depressing, I know. Just
watch it. The action is sparse. The characters few. It is pure contemplation. If you are averse to slow moving foreign films with little dialogue, or aren’t sure why you like them, don’t miss the bonus interview on the DVD. Kiarostami says that he often falls asleep during some of his favorite movies. While intense Hollywood-style action films keep you intensely stimulated from start to finish, they tend to disappear from your memory before the credits reach the soundtrack rights. On the other hand, films that move slowly and give you a simple plot and an environment to focus on leave plenty of room for imagination and (for the sleepy) dreaming. Films like Taste of Cherry haunt you for weeks afterword. My other
favorite director of recent years, Taiwan’s Ming-liang Tsai , does the same thing for me.