Roberto Santaguida CA Miraslava

The scene at Directors Lounge on February 5th was inspired and chaotic. In fact, during intermissions, the huge screen looped an Italian short film called Chaosmosis, which depicted gelatinous substances breaking off and forming new shapes, as if to drive the point home. While the screen conducted its miniature science experiment, the room filled with artists, filmmakers, curators and cinephiles—including a surprising number of blind people complete with dogs and canes. I used my journalist drink discount to take in a few beers while I scoped the crowd and waited for the films to begin.

In total there were 21 films screened opening night, so rather than describe each one, I will focus on a thematic link. The aesthetics of postmodernism and metanarrative were alive and well and winking their wry smile last night. Perhaps the highlight film in this category was a short from Keith Sanborn, a US filmmaker who made a short inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Marxist literary critiques. The film opened with a short quote from Benjamin—something about art and copied transaction—then for 3 minutes the screen filled with a series of FBI copyright warnings through the ages, dancing to a Bossanova version of ‘Mac the Knife.’ The joke of the film was clever enough to stand on its own, but on another level this film managed to expose the FBI warning as a cultural artifact, one that has evolved enough beneath our radar that when I was presented with the consummate 80’s version, I was brought back to my childhood as profoundly as Proust with his Madelines.

The Spanish short, Telemaco by Jorge Rodrigo (2008), was less successful at achieving a clever balance between postmodernism and, well, entertainment. This film was driven by a hyper-conscious narrative…’My story is still inside my head and I have to get it out of my head…I should start the way Western films end, with the Hero fading into the horizon…It won’t be drama or comedy…I’ll film the credits in reverse to represent the ungraspable past.’ As the narrator announces these possibilites the screen filled with corroborating images, weaving and unweaving itself as the narrator changes his mind about the nature of the film. Without humor or poetry, this film restrains itself to the point of only being able to negate its own nature, which is theoretically interesting but just theoretically.

More successful was the Canadian short Miraslava by Roberto Santaguida (2007). In many ways the film began much as Telemaco did, with metanarration and vaguely titilating images of nice looking young people. But about two minutes in, the film shifted to a more autobiographical, humorously self conscious story about the limits of good taste in filmmaking. Santaguida apologizes for his poor choices but he makes them confidently and poetically. The narrative is absurdly overwritten, referring to dawn as a ‘viscious scorching rampage on urban life.’ Or lunch as the time when ‘dying people seek nourishment to save their lives.’ The narrator muses about the ‘perfume of General Tsao’s chicken’ and the film takes on a tongue-in-cheek mundanity that reminded me at times of Warhol’s biography, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. The film ended with a montage of the protagonist heading back to nature and frolicking in the Canadian snow with a pretty girl while Canned Heat’s, ‘Going up the Country’ played.

Less Charlie Kauffman (as the previous two films were) and more Fellini in its subversive qualities, was Philip Wennig’s Discussion (2008) in which a panel discussion shot in black and white deteriorates into chaos, regains itself briefly and plunges back into chaos. I debated about whether the language the characters were speaking was real or nonsense. I’m leaning toward nonsense, which aligns itself nicely with the strange close up shots of chins wagging and people gesticulating wildly to each other. Either way this was the best depiction of an anxiety dream about academia I have ever seen.

Check back with me tomorrow as I review another round of screenings.

-Sabrina