The 22nd annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, continues Friday through Sunday, March 21 through 23. Screenings are at WIDC Theater, 941 W. Lawrence; LaSalle Theatre, LaSalle Bank, 4901 W. Irving Park; School of the Art Institute Auditorium, Columbus Drive at Jackson; and Hayes Investment Center, 4859 S. Wabash. Tickets are $8, $6 for students, seniors with a valid ID, and members of Women in the Director’s Chair. Festival passes are also available; for more information call 773-907-0610. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.
Drag Racing
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This valuable program of experimental films about New York City–many of them vintage–was compiled by Ariella Ben-Dov for the San Francisco-based MadCat Women’s Film Festival. Skyscraper (1959) by pioneer documentarian Shirley Clarke exuberantly chronicles the demolition of old buildings and the erection of a skyscraper; the sound track juxtaposes the voices of architects and construction workers with jazz and beat poetry. In the Street by photographer Helen Levitt (1952) is an evocative silent montage of street scenes on the Upper East Side circa the late 40s. Marie Menken’s Go Go Go (1964) combines found footage with scenes shot from a moving car to create an impressionistic stop-motion look at New York landmarks. Also on the program: Johanna Hibbard’s Vanilla Egg Cream (1999), Abigail Child’s Some Exterior Presence (1977), and two versions of Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round, set to different musical scores. 70 min. (TS) (WIDC Theater, 7:00)
A program of 12 lesbian-themed shorts. Dayna McLeod’s animated Master Libation (2002)–in which a woman searches her house for a mislaid dildo–borrows its backgrounds from a 50s interior design book and imbues the bourgeois decor with a provocative sexual charge. The similarly bright colors of Elisabeth Subrin’s Well, Well, Well (2002), a music video for the feminist band Le Tigre, help make it that rarest of things: a rock video that actually heightens the experience of the song. Cheryl Furjanic wittily decodes body language in a lesbian bar in Bar Talk (2002). Carolyn Caizzi and Laura Rodriguez’s Camouflage Pink is a high school drama with a good feel for the uncertainties of teen sexuality: arguing that hetero institutions are bad, a militant lesbian discourages her friend from attending the prom with a boy, but then decides to go herself when asked out by a girl. With eight other videos. 103 min. (FC) (LaSalle Theatre, 9:00)
Founding member Jennet Thomas curated this program of seven videos by women from London’s Exploding Cinema Collective. The plot of Kobayashi Kazushi’s Pellet–in which a woman plans to dispose of her boyfriend’s corpse by feeding it to his pet owl–conforms to the group’s penchant for “extreme” content, but this time the grotesquerie is formally redeemed by elegant swooping camera movements and slow zooms. Thomas’s The Local Sky Enlarger (2002) concerns the appearance of a “scab in the sky” that causes giant objects to fall to earth, events obscurely related to the divine impregnation of a man who gives birth to a lizardlike creature. Sharony! (2000), also by Thomas, works hard at weirdness–two girls dig up a pulsating egg in their garden, which hatches into a plastic doll–but aside from a few pornographic flourishes the video plays like a paean to the love of girls for their dolls. 87 min. (FC) (WIDC Theater, 2:00)
To Be Happy for Such a Short Time
An assortment of recent shorts whose goofiness and low-rent production values meet the selective criteria of the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Amy Hicks’s Hatching Beauty is a bewildering melange of found footage, live-action clips, and optical effects that ostensibly has something to say about the hazards of biotechnology. The Reach of an Arm by Nancy Andrews employs puppets, found footage, and intertitles to tell the story of a misshapen couple heading west by wagon train, in a manner reminiscent of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer. Three video journal entries by the irrepressible Ximena Cuevas–Natural Instincts, Staying Alive, and Alma Gemela–are sublimely ridiculous takes on beauty ideals, the Frankenstein myth, and schizoid behavior. Also on the program: works by Jennet Thomas, Julia Sarcone-Roach, Meredith Root, and Abigail Child. (TS) (WIDC Theater, 8:00)
