The 14th annual Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, presented by Chicago Filmmakers, runs Friday through Sunday, November 15 through 17, at Columbia College Ferguson Theater, 600 S. Michigan, and Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark. Tickets are $7; for more information call 773-293-1447.
Program 2
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For better and for worse, the nine films and videos I previewed from this program of twelve, most of them in black and white, qualify as “studies,” though an earlier and artier generation of visual artists might have called them “etudes.” With the exception of Gregg Biermann’s video The Waters of Casablanca–which creates a visual and aural collage out of a famous dialogue exchange from Casablanca, heard at various speeds and seen mainly in a speedy jumble of abstract clusters–they work with things like ocean waves, trees, vegetation, still bodies of water, and moving trains. My favorite in the bunch, Gunvor Nelson’s Swedish video Tree-line (1999), produces a highly original kind of audiovisual music out of trains passing a particular tree. Guy Sherwin’s English film Da Capo: Variations on a Train With Anna (2000) juxtaposes multiple versions of a single shot with various performances of the same Bach piece, while Vincent Grenier’s video Material Incidents (2001) does interesting things with water and the color yellow. Also on the program: work by Madison Brookshire, Mahine Rouhi, Minyong Jang, Robert Mead, Julie Murray, Michael Robinson, and Peter Rose. 88 min. (JR) (Columbia College, 9:00)
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