I only managed to catch a handful of features during my time in Austin for the SXSW Film Festival, so I can’t claim to offer anything close to full “fest coverage” (though how possible that is for all but the most manageable festivals is an open question). But I did watch two worthy movies that you’ll hopefully get the opportunity to see in the coming months.

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths had its premiere at Sundance, but this low-key, rigorously traditional doc was generally overshadowed in coverage of the lineup by its flashier competition, somewhat understandable (if certainly not just) given that the contemporary measuring stick for a doc’s theatrical readiness is so closely linked to its topicality. Brown’s second feature (after the Townes Van Zandt doc Be Here to Love Me), a movie about the continuing segregation of Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, falls far from the immediate headlines of the day, but the miracle of Myths is how Brown spins the local minutiae of party preparation for the 2006 festivities, filled with unknown players, into a complex meditation on our country’s troubled racial history. Her cuts between the arrangements for the black and white festivities are well-placed and appropriately calculated for effect, but what stings are those shots in which a black figure (usually some kind of server) is highlighted against a host of white folks enjoying a posh event that African Americans can only participate in while via supporting roles.

Given that Myths is about race in the South, it’s also a movie about class, and Brown takes care to note the differing financial impacts of purchasing and creating parade finery and floats on the various families. But she carefully eschews easy moralizing—an Alabama native herself, Brown knows well that the relationships between Southern whites and blacks are much more complicated than most who don’t live there will ever understand. There’s a sense of tender, tentative, ever-encroaching rapprochement between the two communities—even though the divide between them is palpable, some kind of thaw surrounding the two ceremonies seems more than possible. Fittingly, Brown’s stirring climax finds the black Mardi Gras royalty attending the white king and queen’s coronation for the first time. As the two are announced, the all-white audience seems genuinely sincere in its vocal approbation. This court visit is repaid at an event the next night and Brown lingers on joyous shots of the two royal courts intermingling freely and openly. What’s fascinating is a little nugget of shared history Brown’s plucked from an interview and placed earlier in the film: the white queen’s grandfather, on a dare, illegally carried out the last slave run from Africa to the United States . The black queen’s ancestors were part of that cargo. Order of Myths is built around these subtle, gradual revelations, leaving the overall effect more of long, involved conversation than an attention-grabbing slap in the face. Dear documentary filmmakers: More of this, please.

On the narrative side, SXSW seems to be struggling somewhat uneasily with its own growth in relation to that of the filmmakers the festival has long championed. A home for the mumblecore movement that Sundance has largely ignored (save for the two Duplass brothers films), the festival continues to showcase work by Swanberg, Ross, Bujalski, Kat, Duplass, and the like (a friend commented that he felt the narrative features could be generally described as films made by young men wielding video cameras), but will those filmmakers step up from each work to the next to fit SXSW’s ever-growing stage? And if they won’t, who will be the next generation of talents to find a home there? 23-year-old filmmaker Joshua Safdie provides a ready answer. His slight and winning The Pleasure of Being Robbed, a not-really-mumblecore feature that still exists somewhere in that movement’s orbit of DIY, youth-centric filmmaking, was my favorite narrative of the fest.

For the first half, as Safdie follows his young protagonist Eleonore (Eleonore Hendricks) as she robs a variety of random folks (not at all maliciously—her theft drips of raccoon-ish curiosity), I was worried that Pleasure would be nothing more than yet another film constructed around a masculine eye following a pathological female and just waiting for the hammer to fall. Safdie’s protagonist is caught rummaging through a bag (instead of running from the police, she loudly proclaims, “I just wanted to see what’s in there" while continuing to dig), but instead of mug shots and punishment, the film cruises into fantastic whimsy—Safdie takes us on a trip to the zoo for a swim with a giant fake polar and all of a sudden we’re in what I hope is an homage to unexpected magic acts of Jacques Rivette. The Business of Being Robbed is certainly slim as a narrative (a lengthy trip to Boston in a borrowed car might occupy too much screen time), but its mood is so lovely that it might have actually benefited from stretching out to a gargantuan Rivette-ian length. Even as it stands, Pleasure is a nice little movie made by a seemingly unpretentious and talented young guy that doesn’t focus on the painful end of a relationship or the inarticulacy of space post-college, and for that I’m grateful I had the chance to sit with it for a little while.

With the presentation of Lee Kang-Sheng’s new film, Help Me Eros, and Tsai Ming-Liang’s installation, Is It a Dream? as part of the New Dragon Inns program (named for Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn), it’s hard not to talk about the two Taiwanese figures in the same breath. They have been long-time collaborators: on-screen at least, Lee has been the face of Tsai for fourteen years, but behind the scenes they work very much together, even when pursuing their own projects. Yet too often has Lee’s directorial work been criticized for being overshadowed by Tsai, and it’s often been unfairly judged in those terms. This is a shame, as it’s no small feat that Lee won Rotterdam’s competitive Tiger Award in 2004 with his debut feature, The Missing. Now, with Help Me Eros, Lee announces his talent as a visual stylist with undeniable originality.


Help Me Eros (Bangbang wo aishen, Lee Kang-Sheng, Taiwan)

Help Me Eros is like the roving dream of a fitful sleeper. Taking place almost entirely at night, it restlessly shifts from place to place, from the garish neon platforms of the Kaohsiung betelnut girls, and the austere white emptiness of Ah Jie’s apartment. Yet for anyone familiar with the visual landscape of Taiwan, many of the seemingly fantastical elements are in fact realistic portrayals of a fantastic place. Contemporary Taiwan is very much at the heart of Lee’s story, crass and materialistic, but also despairing in the wake of dramatic stock market losses. Ah Jie, a former trader, has been hit particularly hard. As he slowly sells off his belongings, he becomes increasingly unhinged, escaping into the haze of smoke and finding anonymous solace in the comforting voice of a suicide hotline worker. And throughout the film, we’re constantly reminded that he’s hardly alone in his suffering: television broadcasts of protests, suicides, and financial hardship frequently play in the background as his life gradually falls apart.

Playing the lead role, Lee is very much the same tragic, Keatonesque figure he has always played in the films of Tsai, who also executive produced and art directed the film. Lonely and languid, Lee shuffles pantless through his home, recites uplifting messages to the marijuana plants in his closet greenhouse, and misses most of the human connections he reaches for while ignoring those that are right in front of him.

On one level, the Eros here refers to the highly theatrical sex scenes, one of which involves a threesome blanketed by iconic designer labels like Fendi and Louis Vuitton. Yet some of the most striking images come from the unexpected horror of the banal, as when two chefs on a cooking show crack an egg only to have an unborn ostrich fall out onto a frying pan. Eros works against this: it’s the longing to touch and meaningfully connect with others in an increasingly fragmented and nonsensical world. This is best expressed in one of the film’s many musical interludes, when Ah Jie drifts off into a drug-induced fantasy about his suicide hotline caseworker, and smoke magically wafts through her phone and into her mouth. The moment recalls the smoke shared through the prison walls of Jean Genet’s seminal Chant d’amour: through the smoke, one’s presence is passed across the lines, a kiss against impossible odds. At its best, Help Me Eros is just like this—one deep breath, slowly exhaled.

Is It a Dream? (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)

Before Tsai made Goodbye Dragon Inn, there came recurring dreams of a movie palace recalled from his childhood in Malaysia, and it’s this theater that’s literally brought to us in the installation Is It a Dream?, originally presented at the Taiwan Pavilion at the most recent Venice Biennale. With the worn seats of the original theater transported to the gallery space and a short film projected in front, Tsai’s piece recreates the theater of his memories and dreams. The theater itself takes center stage in the film we watch: we never see the movie screen, but only the rapt expressions of the small family sitting in the otherwise empty theater. Their seats are our seats: as I watched the film, I could imagine them sitting in my place, feeling the same frayed armrest and hearing the loud creaks of the chair whenever the slightest movement was made. In this way the installation, however closely mapped to Tsai’s experience, works quietly on us, making apparent our own private rituals of moviegoing.

As with Goodbye Dragon Inn, the theater is almost completely empty, and in a few simple shots, Tsai manages to construct a family across generations, not only at the cinema, but also through it, in the collective pleasure of sharing a movie. The grandmother is at times pictured as a young woman nonchalantly offering a man a stick of pear wedges, and also a framed photograph leaned against a seat. As the family gradually fades away in their seats, their presence is like that of a haunting. In many ways, we too are its ghosts, unsure, as the song asks, if “this is a dream or reality.” And this is always the question where it concerns the cinema. In a way, it’s both: it’s the seats we sit in and the world we imagine, it’s the different lives we embody, on-screen and in the theater, the accumulated presence of all those who have come before us to experience the same rapture. For Tsai, the space of the theater is sacred, with offerings of fruit, the grandmother’s photograph (a common fixture on family shrines), and even a shrine-like stand housing the projector in the back of the gallery.

Later that day, I arrived just after the lights went down on Lee Kang-Sheng’s afternoon screening of Help Me Eros. As I scanned the packed theater looking for an available seat, someone turned around from the front row and graciously offered me one of the reserved chairs behind him. The person was none other than Tsai himself, seated beside Lee, both of them joyfully anticipating the start of the film. It was as if the experience of Is It a Dream? had followed me into waking life, and the title of the piece was now less a question than a certainty. As the opening titles came up, I considered how lucky and how strange it was that Tsai had once again invited me to sit down in a theater, and how, in the dark, we all fall into the same dream. —GENEVIEVE YUE

Standing at the front of the theater before the screening, they look nervous and don’t have much to say by way of an introduction. When the applause erupts they look slightly embarrassed because they haven’t yet earned the audience’s approval. For filmmakers premiering their first work, and especially for those who are making their first forays into feature-length fiction films, the debut screening can be especially nerve-wracking. But this is, as Peter Forgács puts it, "the risk of the filmmaker," turning a private and sometimes obsessive endeavor into public spectacle, and laying it before the mercy of an audience that’s probably seen it all. It’s a courageous move. We applaud the filmmaker for simply showing up, for taking the risk. And if we’re lucky, we’ll be treated to something we’ve never seen before.

Rail Road Crossing (Pas a nivell, Pere Vilà, Spain)

The risk taken by Pere Vilà is evident from the start: with a budget of 30,000 Euros, he dared to shoot Rail Road Crossing on 35 mm film, which, for him, was the only way it could be done. Working on a shoestring, his small crew and cast traveled throughout Catalan and made use of whatever was there: locations, extras, and occasional actors. In one scene, Marc, the young man who’s taken an unusual job shuttling tourists to and from the beach, picks up a Dutch couple who chat away merrily. Their conversation, a rare burst of dialogue in an otherwise reticent film, isn’t subtitled; it was only after the screening that Vilà learned what they were actually saying, thanks to the Rotterdam audience (amusingly, they weren’t talking about the film, but of the plans for their next winter holiday). That he could put so much faith in the unknown is rare and remarkable, and it speaks volumes about his calm, open approach to filmmaking.

Filmed in Vilà’s native Catalan and based largely on his own experiences, Rail Road Crossing loosely follows Marc the summer after he graduates. Not yet sure of what he wants to do, he takes a seaside job and moves in with his grandmother, the only person who seems to understand that he’s not quite ready to face the world. Rail Road Crossing’s pace is slow, with long, lingering shots that seem to absorb the heat of the Catalan summer. Like its protagonist, the film drifts on a giant inflatable mattress in the water and coasts on a bicycle headed downhill; it’s not in any hurry to get to where it’s going, wherever that is. When Marc’s asked about his future, he can only think as far as the next few hours—he’s going to town to get some photographs developed. Vilà’s realism has a light touch, a slightly absurdist quality that’s attentive to Marc’s missteps. One entire sequence is devoted to him as he eats a potato wedge that’s too hot, and though unnoticed by his family members, we see his grimace after each bite, his determination to make it through, and then the final, sad victory of the potato, still on the fork, being laid down on the plate. Perhaps the most wonderful image is that of Marc floating on the water, disconnected from everything and everyone, lazily snapping pictures of the jet-skiing tourists. For him, this summer may just last forever.

Much of Rail Road Crossing/ was shot in the home of Vilà’s grandmother. When she passed away last year, Vilà realized he knew little about her, who she was or what her life had been like. Yet if the scenes between Marc and his grandmother are any indication, it matters less to know about the person than to know the person, deeply and fully. In this way Rail Road Crossing is a dedication, not only to Vilà’s grandmother but also to the gradual transformations of adolescence.

Own Death (Peter Forgács, Hungary)

As the title might suggest, Peter Forgács’s Own Death is a risky proposition, a taut and uncompromising examination of a fairly uncomfortable and difficult subject. The text, adapted from the short story of celebrated Hungarian author Péter Nádas, delves deeper than most, constantly turning over the medical and metaphysical details of one man’s near-death experience. It’s dense and prismatic, and however slowly it’s read in voiceover, or whatever phrases are selected to appear onscreen, one viewing (and one reading, I would imagine) can hardly do it justice. If “the complexity of the text demanded a new language,” as Forgács remarked in the Q&A, the filmed stills and sequences, together with found home movie footage, make up its alphabet.

Forgács, a documentarian and media artist, is best known for his work with found materials. In Budapest, he founded the Private Film and Photo Archive Foundation, a collection of amateur footage culled from Central Europe during the Nazi era, and in over thirty films and videos he’s “reorchestrated” the home movie material to tell alternative versions of their often troubling history. Besides being a fiction film, Own Death marks something of a departure, leaving aside the larger questions of the past to focus intently on the personal. The voice guides everything—images, music, and pacing—and it’s a “narrow” path, as Forgács puts it, and the sinew of Nádas’s prose is especially lean. Yet the strongest elements in the film rely the least on the words: found footage remnants of a man leaping nude in a field, or a child swinging around in a towel offer a needed reprieve from the unrelenting text. In those moments, the narrator holds his breath and we are the ones who breathe, taking in images that can’t necessarily be accounted for, but are beautiful to behold. They widen the narrow path by granting us a sense of other people: their memories, their lives, their perseverance.
—GENEVIEVE YUE

For the first time in nearly twenty years, domestic films in Japan have outsold foreign imports at the box office. Adding to this the fact that Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest, Kobayashi Masahiro’s The Rebirth, and Takeshi Kitano’s Glory to the Filmmaker! all won major prizes at international film festivals in the past year, and it would seem that Japanese cinema is experiencing its own rebirth of sorts (though significant developments have long been underway). For all the renewed vitality, however, the three films are notably elegiac in tone or subject matter. In each there’s a sense of aftermath, but distance doesn’t necessarily bring clarity or well-being. As one character observes in The Mourning Forest, there’s a difference between being alive and feeling alive, and all three films hover on that borderline. Their characters live on after the fact, and each, in their own way, attempts to make sense of the wreckage.

The Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori, Naomi Kawase, Japan)
*Grand Prix winner at Cannes

The Rebirth (Ai no yokan, Kobayashi Masahiro, Japan)
*Golden Leopard winner at Locarno

The two most recent films of Naomi Kawase and Kobayashi Masahiro (one of the festival's Filmmakers in Focus), each relatively new filmmakers (both Kawase and Masahiro made their first features in 1996), both treat the death of family members through the encounter with strangers, or semi-strangers. In Kawase’s The Mourning Forest, the young Machiko (Machiko Ono) begins working at a retirement home after the death of her young son. There she treats Shigeki (Shigeki Uda), who apparently suffers from dementia, though, as he imagines and grasps for his deceased wife, his is more a condition of intense melancholy. Through their developing friendship—one of the most touching images is that of Shigeki and Machiko hiding from and chasing each other amid rows of scalloped hedges—they begin the work of mourning, retreating into the forest, but doing so together and through each other. Though beautifully shot with long, lingering vistas of the misty forest and closely tracked handheld camerawork, there’s still something too pristine and neat about Kawase’s film, and this is made clear through Masahiro’s example.

The Rebirth is a taut and conceptually rigorous film, built largely on the mundane and repetitive tasks of daily life, and with most of the dialogue dropping out entirely after the first ten minutes. The film demands a level of patience not usually required even in art-house cinema, and more than a few people walked out of the theater midway through. But like Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, its relentless drive to repetition and order sharpens our perceptual awareness that much more, so that when things quietly shift, they do so with a tremendous roar. Following the fatal stabbing of a teenage girl by her classmate, the single parents of each child both relocate to the Hokkaido countryside, where, coincidentally or not, their lives continually intersect. Noriko (Makiko Watanabe, who also played the luminous Wakake in The Mourning Forest), the mother of the perpetrator, is at a loss to explain her daughter’s actions, but is nevertheless wracked by guilt and grief. She works in the kitchen of the dormitory where the widower Junichi (played by Masahiro himself) resides, and he has left his job as a Tokyo journalist to shovel hot coals in a local factory.

Where The Mourning Forest gets metaphysically lost in the woods,The Rebirth is steadfastly rooted in the banal realities of ordinary life. Hokkaido, normally viewed as a warm tourist destination, is depicted as a wintery wasteland, devoid of people and warmth. Noriko literally keeps her head down, her long bangs obscuring her face, and when she walks, even indoors, it’s as if she’s always cold. And Junichi, slow and deliberate in all his movements, leaves his glasses on even as they fog over during his nightly bath: he’s unwilling to let down his guard, even for an instant. They struggle to connect but can hardly face each other; each leaves a gift of a cell phone to the other, but these mostly end up in the trash, unused. The Rebirth is full of false starts and failed missives, but for Noriko and Junichi, linked to the same, awful experience, being near each other may be enough.

Glory to the Filmmaker! (Kantoku banzai, Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
*Glory to the Filmmaker award at Venice

Like Takeshis before it, Kitano’s latest exploit is at times maddening and utterly indecipherable. And though it may be, as many critics have charged, naval-gazing at its worst, the self-reflexive magnifying glass here seems to have the effect of aiming concentrated light at the subject, gradually burning away the man at its center. For the first half at least, Glory to the Filmmaker! is a chronicle of failed film projects attempted by Kitano, wryly observed by a somewhat contemptuous narrator. Kitano and his companion, a life-size dummy version of himself (it looks like a three-dimensional Mii) try out different genres, from yakuza film, Ozu-style family drama, and tear-jerker melodrama, to period drama and swordfighting, and fails every time. Everything’s been done before, and moreover everything’s been done by Kitano before. As the film progresses, there’s a pronounced sense of acceleration, that the things done over the course of Kitano’s television and film careers are beginning to run together and collide. Each project is abandoned nearly as soon as it is begun—even the title of the film only gets as far as “GLOR” —and through it all Kitano, like his dummy, is expressionless, his face barely registering the change in sets and costume.

The second half of the film is ostensibly the sci-fi thriller, The Promised Day, yet that quickly becomes something else, a farce resembling ‘Beat’ Takeshi’s broad and often vulgar television slapstick, perhaps, though it might be more related to surrealism. Primary colors abound in grotesque saturation, as a mother schemes to marry off her daughter (who ventriloquizes a stuffed goosed under her arm) to a wealthy man. But this is only the thinnest of narratives: as Luis Buñuel said of Un Chien Andalou, the film wasn’t meant to make any sense, but to incite people to murder.

Glory to the Filmmaker! is less disorienting than Takeshis but more brutally nihilistic. It takes the two figures of Kitano, ‘Beat’ Takeshi the television comedian and actor and Takeshi Kitano the auteur, and adds to them the dummy, a distilled caricature of Kitano whose mute performance is uncannily similar to its model. With each failed project, the dummy is the one who bears the brunt of the consequence. Hung, drowned, and beaten, it’s killed every time something goes wrong, and though it always comes back shiny and resilient, Kitano’s metaphoric death each time suggests a bleak outlook for the filmmaker. Though the new Venice Film Festival award, named after the film, recognizes lifetime achievement, the film itself is hardly a celebration. It’s always been impossible to predict where Kitano’s going, but here it doesn’t seem he knows any better than the rest of us.
—Genevieve Yue

[Editors Note: This is the first in a series of dispatches from the 37th Rotterdam International Film Festival, written by Reverse Shot contributor Genevieve Yue. Click here to read Yue's 2007 Reverse Shot interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul.]

An irony of film festivals is that you travel to some place, often distant, only to travel once again through the films presented there. Much of the delight that comes from attending an international film festival such as Rotterdam, of course, lies in the determined range of films presented. Once again the festival presents a diversity of geography and style, established and particularly emerging talent. Yet Rutger Wolfson, Rotterdam’s new director, takes the question posed by last year’s edition—what is the relevance of a film festival in a digital age? —and responds with an emphasis on live programming and events, from the Pop Cinema sidebar, which promises ear-shattering noise accompaniment to the work of Cameron Jamie, to New Dragon Inns, an exhibition inspired by Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn that explores the intersections between film, art, and the movie theater.

For all the pleasures of being at a festival, lost in a flurry of distribution deals and serious cinephilia, once the house lights come down, everything changes. Before the glowing screen, it becomes vividly apparent that one of cinema’s enduring powers is to import a sense of there, not here. On my first day at the festival, I had traveled nearly halfway around the world, then in the theater was transported again. Two visions of rural life, Uruphong Raksasad’s short film The Rocket (2007) and Sandra Kogut’s Mutum (2007) presented distant places as intimate experiences, timeless wonders with sly hints of the present.

The Rocket (Uruphong Raksasad, Thailand)

One of two shorts presented by Uruphong Raksasad in a program of Thai artist films, The Rocket is ostensibly about the celebratory rocket launching festival put on by several villages outside of Chaing Rai, Thailand, yet the film, which is in competition for the VPRO Tiger Awards for Short Film, manages to do quite a bit more. After the makeshift rocket tower is erected, villagers send their rockets, with names like “waiting for your love,” “pity for faraway man,” and “tsunami” up into the sky. Nearly all of them have terrific trajectories (one explodes in the tower, though it’s all safely contained in a garbage barrel) and it’s almost like a form of prayer, with people’s wishes and desires being shot up into the air, and everyone wishing them a long voyage. For all the film’s gentle mirth, Raksasad’s skill is seamless to the point of being almost imperceptible. From close-ups on a young monk’s face to distant shots of white contrails streaming through the sky, or from the rapidly edited arrival scene, one flatbed truck carrying an entire band, to stark time lapse sequences before and after the event, Raksasad creates a sense of a community always full of surprises. And throughout, the tinny loudspeaker voice of the announcer is always heard, his enthusiasm unwavering and infectious. Afterward, when the villagers tackle each other gleefully in the rice paddies, you know that the soggy ride home was well worth it.

Mutum (Sandra Kogut, France/Brazil)

Of Mutum’s central figure, 10-year-old Thiago, one character remarks that “he knows many stories but doesn’t realize it yet.” And looking into the thoughtful green eyes of Thiego, described by his mother as a dreamer and to most, a quiet observer to the life around him, it’s apparent that those stories are rapidly forming all the time. Cinematographer Mauro Pinheiro Jr.’s camerawork is lush and responsive, always knowing when to stand back from the characters or to push in to their slightest expressions, and through the camera we see what Thiago sees: a soft netting of spiderwebs in the trees, a tattered paper note worn with sweat and secrecy, and his own forefinger lightly stroking the back of an ant.

With Kogut’s background in documentary, there is a strong sense that the action is being followed rather than directed. Mutum, supported in part by Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund, began with a long preparatory process in which the actors, nearly all nonprofessionals, moved into a farm well before shooting, establishing a strong connection to the place and with each other. When the crew arrived, Kogut remembers that they felt like asking if they could come in, so strongly had it become home for the (fictional) family. Even as shooting took place, the actors that were not in the scene were still in the house, staying in character, which is to say, remaining themselves. Kogut notes that the actors, who had never seen a film before, recognized themselves in the characters. Determinedly playing on the border between documentary and fiction, they “became the characters,” improvising dialogue instead of learning lines. Kogut rewrote the script every day on set, responding to everything that happened along the way: “I had the impression we were dealing with something that was alive.”

The story, adapted from João Guimarães Rosa’s well-known novel, Campo Geral, centers on Thiago as he, along with his brother Felipe, attempt to make sense of the world around them, particularly the lives of their parents. Mutum, the name for a mountain region in Brazil’s remote hinterland, the sertão, originally began as a workshop study in rural life, with Kogut traveling to different parts of the country and visited with local schoolchildren. She describes the film as being more a dialogue with Rosa’s novel than a faithful adaptation; instead of the descriptive elements of the text, Mutum is focused on the “inner landscapes” of the characters, one whose visual textures and emotional range is richer than most fictions can imagine. For it’s only when he must leave his home that Thiago sees his surroundings clearly for the first time. The short-sightedness he discovers late in the film is present throughout, not only in the way Thiago can or can’t see certain things, but in the myopic perspective of childhood itself. It’s “a manner of situating oneself in the world,” limited in some ways, perhaps, but utterly magical in others.
—Genevieve Yue

It's late out here at Telluride, and there's no real time for a full considered review of what is sure to be one of the year's most remarkable movies: I'm Not There. Not to be all David Poland about things and blurt out half-formed opinions, but I have to say that what Haynes has accomplished here is so ingenious, intelligent, unique, and wholly entertaining that it's unfair to other filmmakers. I left the theater shaking and stammering, wanting to make out with everyone involved (sans Harvey), and if I'd been offered the opportunity, I would have walked right back in and seen it again.

Expect a lot more on I'm Not There from Reverse Shot in the weeks to come.

Last day of the NYUFF, and boy are there some treats for the hardcore. Beyond repeats of Frank and Cindy and Celluloid #1 there are also repeats of short programs "Poems and Problems" and "Head Rush." The former contains serious documentaries: Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, the Law, and Poetry by Paul Chan interviews the apparently unjustly disbarred and 30-year sentence-facing title lawyer, charged as part of aJohn Ashcroft's anti-terrorist sweep with smuggling messages out of jail from an Islamic client. Her recitations of the poetry she loves -- Ashberry, Blake, and Brecht -- are stirring appeals for liberty and constitutional sanity. The Mendi by Steve Reinke is a much more wry, biting (literally) undermining of ethnographic film -- in this case from the CBC's '70s television series Man Alive. The voiceover of the director, who worked as a teenage assistant to the show, over footage of the titular African tribe is a hilariously upsetting wrench in the works that points to the gap between the known and unknowable of other cultures. The Professor is a return to earnest documentary. Director Jason Price follows and interviews David D. Kpormakpor, former Supreme Court Justice and Interim President of Liberia. Exiled to Staten Island after serving during that country's civil war, Kpormakpor tragically lives out his elderly years in regret and loneliness. Price's treatment of his subject is both sympathic and unflinching, a depiction of a lost man and the current community he can never truly join.

Found footage is the dominant element in the shorts of "Head Rush." There's an Arnold Schwarzenneger "mandala" in which the chaos of Terminator 2 and Total Recall is superimposed and kaleidescopically manipulated to thrilling, beatific effect in Jimmy Joe Roche's Ultimate Reality. Through These Trackless Tears is less post-modern and more classical, using industrial and educational films a la Bruce Conner to warn us of our spiritual and material hubris. The program standout might be Slow Jamz, a decelerated highlight reel of Michael Jordan's Slam Dunk Contest feats that builds in uncanniness and pathos to a "screwed" version of a Kanye West track. Slow Jamz creator Karthik Pandian mainpulates the innate nostalgic effect of antique video to manufacture a new kind of emotion: MJ becomes more than an icon, achieving the burden of eternal myth, etched in analogue feed as our desperate emblem of althetic commerce. I could be like Mike -- if he existed.

Yes, Virginia, there is an underground. It's real. And it consists of creative individuals making films outside the military-industrial complex of production and distribution forging ahead with technological limited means and making audiences squirm and squeal by fomenting discomfort, laughter, renewed vision, and love.

If you want living evidence, Virg, check out the "Welcome to Normal" shorts program making its repeat showing tonight at 8:45pm (you don't have a seder to attend tonight, right, Virg? The Mets have a day off, so there's no conflict of interest there, either). Kelly Oliver and Keary Rosen's First Firing is a play of associative and rhyming terms rattled off in British deadpan over some matching and non-matching images that's fun and strangely inspiring, especially if you, like me, enjoy words. In fact, language is the symptom the films and videos of "Welcome to Normal" wish to cure. Check it, Virg: For a Blonde... For a Brunette... For Someone... For Her... For You... by Mike Olenick appropriates James Stewart's run-in with the second incarnation of Kim Novack in Vertigo as an interactive karaoke for himself (acting as Stewart) and the audience (following the bouncing ball of Novack's dialogue). David Butler's Untitled Film, No. 9 is a little more obvious, but still good for a chuckle -- a Shatner-esque "serious" actor intoning with gravitas a collage of pop music lyrics ("Hey, little sister. Shotgun.") in front of green screened flowers and astral footage; Marianna Ellenberg's Welcome to Normal -- the title track of the program -- is, quoth the filmmaker, "An Exquisite Corpse compendium of hypnotic sounds, symptoms and neurological disorders. Instructional video meets psychedelic Haiku -- treatment is just around the corner! " Yes! But wait! Michael Bell-Smith's Battleship Potemkin Dance Edit (120 BPM) might very well recross the circuitry of Soviet montage and MTV without any recourse to the cheap thrills of ironic suture. And Ryan Trecartin (he of the Experimental People) has fashioned the ridiculously demented (Tommy-Chat Just Emailed Me which, while not thorough in its mindfucking as A Family Finds Entertainment, will surely provide some eerie memories for a future moment filled with awkward tension, Virg, I promise you. This isn't a warning but an enticement: distorted voices, disembodied tit-for-tat, the screaming heebeejeebees of a world unraveled through new collisions and destabilizations of sound and vision. The underground is the dark unconscious of a repressed, over-civilized medium.

It feels weird to review films that most people won't be able to see anytime in the near future, but who knows: if Paterson-Lodz can receive limited distribution in the UK, then perhaps it can here, too. Not that you should hold your breath: Redmond Entwistle's film installation is a work of fragments mocking and challenging completion. Speakers strategically placed throughout the theater create enveloping, alternating soundscapes of street noise (from both of the title cities) and interviews, the former coinciding with black film leader and the latter with "impressions of the ground from Paterson, New Jersey and Lodz in Poland cast into glass and then filmed against the sky as the light changes through their intricately detailed surface," to quote the filmmaker. To quote further: "Each time the film is projected a computer selects new fragments of the histories and new sounds of the cities to play over the image. This is a history that goes backwards and forwards in time; that changes according to new sets of connections in the sound; in which beginning and end are unclear." The lack of clarity is meant, I'm guessing, to place in focus the ongoing dialogue between the past and present -- history as continual reevaluation, a Marxist understanding of social and cultural forces poetically fitting for a film whose central events are the 1905 revolution in Lodz and the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike.

My viewing of James Fotopoulos' The Sky Song was unfortunately rendered fragmented due to scheduling conflicts that had me leaving the two-hour opus an hour early. But of what I saw -- wow. Fotopoulos is by this point an underground legend based mostly on earlier 16mm work like Migrating Forms and Back Aganist the Wall, and the mere mention of his name in certain circles generates controversy. I've only seen roughly three or four films out of his insanely prolific body of work, so I'm not sure if I'm qualified to pass significant or even knowledgeable judgment, but I do know The Sky Song, like other Fotopoulos films and videos, is something I won't soon forget. In short, it makes Inland Empire look like Apollo 13. Fotopoulos describes The Sky Song as "something to do with revenge (particularly in action films), American Indian tribes, goblin sharks and fragments of memories I had of the day the Chicago Cub lost the playoffs in 1984.” Baseball's all over the NYUFF this year. But the video, which received its world premiere yesterday to an audience of roughly two, is notable largely for image-manipulated actors performing wooden script readings of a disturbed Western punctuated by psychosexual bloodlettings, primitive 3-D computer graphics of naked bodies and childlike drawings, and a series of flashed icons ranging from barnyard animals to an array of fruit. The word "nightmare" could describe The Sky Song, but not easily: it's an indescribable experience, though mine was sadly truncated. If you somehow get the chance to see The Sky Song please outdo me.

Robert Todd's Evergreen

Before it's too late, I'd like to call attention to the New York Underground Film Festival's 1:30pm, Sunday screening of the shorts program Natural High. As the title hints, the films contained therein are thematically linked by their cinematic/videomatic interpretations and modulations of the natural world. In Jason Livingston's July Fix a 16mm camera mimics the movement of a bee vis-a-vis its desired flowers, bobbing to and fro as the soundtrack likewise fades abruptly in and out to anxious, unnerving effect. Robert Todd's Evergreen is an extended, medium-paced montage of urban nature portraits that accumulate and rhyme in the fashion of Bruce Baillie, though Todd's work may be even more subtly powerful. A more mythic, iconic journey takes place in John Standiford's Fading Star, a just-a-bit-too-long Lewis Klahr-style animation of pop culture cut-outs and found sound that has a cowboy embarking on a railroad voyage through the history of America and its physical and psychic landscapes. My personal favorite of the program, and maybe of the festival (of what I've seen), however, might be Michael Robinson's The General Returns from One Place to Another, an unclassifiable assault on Thoreauvian transcendentalism. Combining distant sounds of gunshots, blurred, ghostly 16mm-to-video images of rustic scenery and a couple of dazed rural explorers, and a reconsideration of the evil roots of beauty (both in art and nature) in some terrifically worded subtitles, among a few other clashing elements, The General disturbs the idealization of nature to arrive at an unsettled juncture between man and the world.

Man? Or God?

On my way to the opening night of the 2007 New York Underground Film Festival last night I passed by graffito written on a Bleeker Street wall that read, simply, "Film ≠ Cinema." A puzzling equation (or inequation, as it were), but one that means a great deal after a moment's thought. Namely: "film" can be defined as a whole bunch of things; "cinema" can only really mean the transcendent potential of the motion picture medium. "Film" is derived from the Old English fell, for "skin" or "hide" -- in other words, something that covers or shields. "Cinema" is derived from the Greek kinein, for "to move." Film keeps us out; cinema takes us places we've never been.

All of which is a pompous way of saying that one man's moving pictures are another man's protecting images. I couldn't help feeling that way, and doubtful of my own convictions, when I listened to most of Anna Biller's Q & A after the screening of her Viva, and after gauging the various reactions to it. My view contrasted dramatically with the many who saw Viva as "superficially superficial" (as one spectator put it by quoting The Earrings of Madame de . . .) -- on the surface glib but on a deeper level a critical take on a genre and the politics of sexual experimentation. While I stick by my review, I now see that Billar's precisely undertaken film is a Rorschach-esque experience good enough to at least generate debates regarding intention, tone, and reception -- not just for Viva but cinema in general.

By now you're probably asking, "What's this have to do with the greatest fielding major league first baseman of all time and one of the veteran cornerstones and catalysts of the 1986 World Championship New York Metropolitans -- the greatest team in the history of the sport -- whose picture you attached to your post?" Glad you asked. See, I'm Keith Hernandez, a short film by Rob Perri, screens tonight in the NYUFF's "Fierce Creatures" shorts program. The film, a fast-paced, irreverent, and very funny rundown of Keith at his best (clutch hitting in the World Series, a legendary Seinfeld appearance, never forsaking his power-enhancing moustache) and his worst (drug use, porn acting, kowtowing to Ronald Reagan), is supposed to "discuss how male identity is shaped by TV/film, sports, advertising, and pornography." It's a little too silly to follow through on this weighty thesis, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for featuring that shocking porn footage, noting the hypocrisy of professional athletes' anti-drug advocacy, bringing up some interesting ideas about how sports distract from political reality (Game 6 diverting attention from Iran-Contra?), and allowing me to relive '86 for the one billionth time. Why sympathy for this and not Viva? We all have our soft spots, and this critic admits complete bias when it comes to anything involving my Mets. Opening day is three days away, and I'm Keith Hernandez makes a perfect inaugurating film for those who understand the brilliant absurdity of our national pastime, and the absurdly brilliant men who play it.

Where have all the flowers gone? Viva, the 2007 New York Underground Film Festival's opening night (tonight) film, perhaps provides incriminating evidence that the current crop of underground directors are more interested in retro DIY rather than untrodded fields of creativity. Opposed, positive signs abound in this NYUFF's arsenal, but there's a definite security in Viva, a tongue-in-cheeker about the 70s' sexual revolution that plays as a condescending/reverent homage to Playboy After Dark and other swinging antiques from a more "innocent" era of pornography, pop art, and interior decorating. Director-lead actor Anna Biller shoots Viva as wall-to-wall eye candy, reimaginings of jet set catalogs circa 1971: color coordinated outfits and decor, mod fashion and hairstyles, and -- to send it all over the top -- purposely awkward line readings (including a constant stream of vacuous guffaws) and anonymous pseudo-lounge rock that in the second half morphs into kitschy musical numbers. Does plot even matter here? Barely. It has something to do with Barbie (Biller), a gorgeous housewife married to a corporate mannequin (Chad England), venturing out into "liberated" universes of free love, from hippie nudists to Warholesque art scenesters. Like the quasi-naive Barbie, who refashions herself as the aspiring title vixen, Viva is a contrived invention, offering nostalgic fabulousness for an underground generation longing, perhaps, for the Garden of Eden of pre-AIDS sex (and, in order to hold its libido in check, ends with a conservative return to a monogamous, materialistic dream life). The film is supposed to be a retelling of this era from a woman's perspective (Viva's escape from bourgeois boredom only lands her in the chauvanistic playground of male entitlement), but how can such a critique carry weight the whole film is so cartoonish and the swinging milieu so clearly coveted by the camera as to distract from any feminist message? Biller, an underground filmmaking vet, offers enough ironic cheesecake (and eats it) to please an audience only looking to take their counterculture so seriously, and in this sense Viva is poised to be a crowd pleaser.

Which brings us to the question posed by Nathan Lee in this week's Voice: "If the underground is defined not only by economic status but aesthetic opposition to mainstream culture, where are the escape routes in a mainstream culture that instantly commodifies and co-opts?" Allow me a tentative answer. The underground should challenge and provoke, but the people -- even underground people -- get what they want. If a largely hipster audience outside the realm of museums and galleries -- where "aesthetic opposition" remains largely contained within academic confines -- demands vicarious hedonism, then the audience has spoken. This audience. There exist countercurrents inside countercurrents, and the NYUFF is diverse and rich enough to provide more substantial fare beyond the accessible, palatable "works of homage, pastiche, and appropriation" which, yes, remain the underground's easiest sources of amusement and targets of criticism. Trust me, there's more, and better to be seen at this year's NYUFF. Keep checking back here this week for further tips.