The 16th annual Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival continues through Sunday, September 26, at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark, and Cinema Borealis, 1550 N. Milwaukee. For more information call 773-293-1447 or visit www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
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Five of the remaining six programs are strong enough to recommend. Most don’t have an overriding theme, though several of the best videos in Program Three (Friday, 9 PM, Chicago Filmmakers, 120 min.) make ordinary subjects seem compellingly strange. Ian Bourn offers some very British wit on the sound track of Black White & Green (2003), while extreme close-ups turn pies into monumental, even frightening, landscapes. An untitled piece by Luis Recoder distends a familiar experimental film image–sunlight on water–taking it to a meditative extreme. Home movies have rarely been used as evocatively as in Abigail Child’s Cake and Steak; she uses editing and split screens to make the images by turns sensuously lush and frenetically repetitive.
The two all-celluloid programs offer several excellent works. The best pieces in Program Six (Sunday, 6 PM, Cinema Borealis, 98 min.) are the oddest, including Adele Friedman’s Robert’s Place, a sensual portrait of a man seen mostly through his apartment and his art collection, and Robert Mead’s Floating Heavily, which depicts a dog in snow partly from the dog’s perspective. In Deliquium, Julie Murray continues to explore her fascination with animals, using fish and insect close-ups that are almost surreal.
