Presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, this six-day festival of experimental film and video runs Tuesday, March 4, through Sunday, March 9. Screenings this week are at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Washington, and admission is free; for more information call 312-744-6630. Programs marked with an * are highly recommended. The schedule for March 4 through 6 follows; a full festival schedule through March 9 is available on-line at www.chicagoreader.com.
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In the strongest of these 14 videos, Ricardo Nicolayevsky’s The Big Whack (2002), rapid cutting produces a shearing effect: each image seems to tear at the surface of the last. Close-ups of human faces are juxtaposed with circus footage, and the apparent murder of a woman lends an apocalyptic tone to the images of an exhibitionist mass culture. Ximena Cuevas, the Mexican video artist who curated the program, demonstrates her interest in surreal and humorous media commentary with Lorenza Manriquez’s Vitesse Revolvers, in which a woman’s deadly encounter with two slimy toughs becomes a cheery gun commercial, and There Is No Remedy, a charming reflection on childhood fancy in which a little girl rescues a cooked fish off a dinner plate, drops it into an aquarium, but discovers that her incantations won’t bring it back to life. And in Carolina Esparragoza’s The Martian That I Saw a split screen contrasts UFO footage with a crude flying-saucer cartoon, making the latter seem almost plausible. 49 min. (FC) (Chicago Cultural Center, 6:30)
Ladies and Boys and Touching
Random Acts of Fitness
- Mismanaging My Image
