Presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, this festival of experimental film and video continues Friday through Sunday, March 7 through 9. Screenings are at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; Heaven Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee, second floor; and the Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. Screenings are free at the Cultural Center, $5 per day for Heaven Gallery and the Empty Bottle. For more information call 312-744-6630. Programs marked with an * are highly recommended.
Corporeal Punishment: The Body of Evidence Lies Naked and Bruised
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Abina Manning, an ex-Londoner who lives in Chicago, curated this program of seven videos, some of which seem haunted by 9/11. In Paul Chan’s Re: The Operation images of tire tracks in the desert and cartoons of Republican politicians are accompanied by a voice reading letters to and from soldiers. Its structure is too loose to permit a coherent statement, but John Smith’s Frozen War (2002) is much better. Shot early in the morning, just after the U.S. and Britain started bombing Afghanistan, it’s narrated by Smith, who describes how he worried about a blown-up transmitter when he found only a static face on TV. The slow pace and rambling form become apt correlatives for Smith’s own confusion. Steve Reinke’s The Chocolate Factory (2002) focuses on a serial killer based on Jeffrey Dahmer, slowly panning up and down line drawings of Dahmer’s victims as the killer describes his crimes in voice-over. The way his narration often goes off the rails (“I put in snails to suck up the evil”) is suitably creepy, though too much pop music softens the overall impact. 85 min. (FC) (Chicago Cultural Center, 8:30)
Short films and videos from L’Alternativa
Works based on found footage often lapse into cliched humor–like the rapid intercutting of zoo animals and a wedding in Wago Kredier’s To Hug You and Squeeze You (2001). But the other four works on this program, curated by Canadian Alex MacKenzie, use found-footage montage to create an engaging sense of fragmentation, their juxtapositions straddling the border between sense and nonsense. The strongest, Brittany Gravely’s Introduction to Living in a Closed System (2001), is a labyrinth of images, diagrams, and intertitles that contrasts “closed systems”–cable cars, monorails, geodesic domes–with views of nature, critiquing technology (the title “Transportation” is followed by images of a tiny dog scurrying around). Imitations of Life (2001) surveys disaster imagery from Hollywood movies while titles articulate “our desire to destroy everything.” Director Mike Hoolboom includes both the microscopic (cells) and the macroscopic (galaxies), the disparity between them generating a sense of free-floating displacement. Also showing: John Davis’s Candide (2001) and Brian Warsing and Jason Asbell’s A Film for Schools (2002). 69 min. (FC) (Heaven Gallery, 7:00)
Andrea Grover, director of the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, curated this program of nine works. In Water Rerouting Initiatives (2001) video maker Adam Frelin outdoes graffiti artists with his Rube Goldberg-like constructions in which “the natural course of public water is willfully redirected.” In one instance he posts a sign declaring a rest room out of order and then elaborately tapes over sinks and urinals; in another he builds a channel that routes water from an overflowing motel sink into the toilet. His amusing contraptions direct our attention toward plumbing we normally take for granted. Guerilla Public Service (2002) depicts the Los Angeles freeway system through maps and photos, as video maker Richard Ankrom drives around in a truck labeled “Aesthetic De Construction” installing homemade interstate signs. But Fraser Stables’s irritating opera singer in Double Garage Scene and his story of faked suicide in Terminal Portrait aren’t developed enough to be funny or to rise to the level of dada. 48 min. (FC) (Empty Bottle, 3:00)
