Ray Pride

What are you doing at this precise moment?

A beautiful sentence written on a page or spoken on screen: it's not like someone next to you asking, "What are you thinking?" It's a question about an instant's flash of consciousness, even if someone scribbled it out hours or months earlier.

What kinds of movies are being made at this precise moment? With video ubiquitous in our culture, the ability to go out and make something, to shoot material inexpensively and to edit efficiently is, in theory, more democratic. But as the technology for making images and telling stories grows less costly and exponentially more powerful, stories told today about the process of making stories are more fascinating than the end result. So which end of the telescope are we looking from? In terms of cheap, efficient tools, we're well beyond the point Francis Coppola cheered for in "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," when he prognosticated, "There may be some fat little girl in Ohio who's the next Beethoven with a video camera." (Or the next Roger Corman.)

You have to shrug and say; it's the story, stupid. Same as it ever was. A couple years down the line, the process angle will find journalists offering up more than a few words about the impermanence of magnetic media. Celluloid lasts decades, but those using video today will find themselves duplicating material across a series of increasingly sophisticated digital platforms or perhaps even making an archival print on celluloid. Cinema pioneer Louis Lumiere supposedly said in 1899, "The cinema is an invention without a future." But video may be a medium with even less of one: works originated on video, if not carefully preserved, will become an art form without artifacts.

Several examples from the ninth edition of the Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF), with new work by filmmakers young and very, very senior, demonstrate how stories are getting told today. Let's say you go bowling one night a week to get goofy drunk with your friends, and decide, hey, there's got to be a movie here. That's "Monday Night at the Rock 'n' Bowl," Genevieve Coleman's charming first feature, about the punk rock bowlathon-drinkathon that's gone on for three years at the Diversey River Bowl in Chicago.

Coleman, 26, doesn't apologize for video but doesn't love it, either. "I am a total film fan, I love the way it looks, the general organic feel. But there is no way this picture could have been shot on film. It was simply not an option. I was shooting under fluorescent lights, with no control at all over the lighting, with thirty-six lanes of bowling going on simultaneously, about 150 half-drunk bowlers, and a sound system blaring music out of top-of-the-line speakers. So I shot on video, and I have to say the number-one advantage is the complete lack of planning it allows. I could just show up and shoot whatever I wanted, however I wanted, without having to worry too much about anything, which was what I needed to do in this instance, because there simply was no way to plan out what I wanted to shoot. Video allowed me to capture a large number of things all at once. It also allowed me to use a very small camera, which I think helped put people at ease. Video cameras are much less intimidating than film cameras."

Sounds ideal. "Well, let's face it, it's not film." Then there's the whittling-down of the ensuing Everest of footage. "I had a pretty clear idea from the start of what I wanted to capture. The only hard part was determining how to put everything together to give the right feel. With documentaries, it's so easy to accidentally exploit someone, or to [discover] something great [in the edit], and then realize that you could make a whole other film about that subject. I worked with Michael Palmerio, who is a great editor, and we just had to stop every couple days and say, does all of this contribute to what we want to show about this scene?"

Jon Moritsugu, maker of brazen, ragged movies like "Mod Fuck Explosion," describes "Scumrock," the festival's closing-night film, as commentary on a different sort of scene, his way of "saying fuck you to the digital revolution. Digital is just another way for The Man to keep the brothers and sisters down," he says with a swagger. A lo-fi satire about the lives of struggling artists in San Francisco, Moritsugu says of the style of "Scumrock," "We wanted to drag video down into the gutter and push it, you know... treat it like an electronic signal. So me and the DP [director of photography], Amy Davis, decided to shoot on analog Hi8. The format has incredible saturation and can look like a cross between super-8 and Technicolor. Plus, since this is an outdated format, the gear is totally inexpensive." So digital video can be a hindrance? "As far as DV, I don't think there's anything wrong with it as long as the footage doesn't look like a car commercial."

Suki Hawley and Mike Galinsky's impressive documentary "Horns and Halos" follows the trail of "Fortunate Son," a controversial biography of George W. Bush by J. H. Hatfield, which, among other things, alleges the president was once arrested for cocaine possession. Hatfield committed suicide during the film's production, and Hawley and Galinsky do a splendid job of balancing the stressed author's fearful paranoia with the ebullience of publisher Sander Hicks and his tiny Soft Skull Press, which acquired the book from St. Martin's Press after its veracity was questioned. Hawley and Galinsky, who are married, manage to challenge some of Hatfield's assertions while illuminating more generally the fate of any small man who dares speak out of turn to power. "'Horns and Halos' reveals the complexities of the decisions rather than simply the results," the filmmakers say of their second feature, after 1995's "Half-Cocked."

According to Variety, the digital version of "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones" was revised by George Lucas in response to critiques in the opening weeks. Hawley and Galinsky have been similarly able to revise their work to make it timelier. "The newest cut has more information about what's in the book, such as Sander reading the SEC letter out of the book and Zack Exley of gwbush.com on the Texas Rangers [financial dealings]. People definitely have a better idea of what's in [the book]."

In effect, film-festival showings have become test screenings for the independent filmmaker. "I was just thinking about that a few moments ago," Galinsky says. "We've been really lucky to have the opportunity to show it and see it with different audiences. We do a lot of screenings for small groups but that's a very different experience than watching it with 500 people you don't know. The first screening of the film in Rotterdam back in January was pretty tortuous. It was immediately clear which scenes were too long or redundant. We made some significant changes before we showed it at the New York Underground in March. That was a clearly improved film, but we got a lot of feedback that people wanted to know more about what was in the George W. Bush bio."

"Any normal documentary editor would take at least a year to edit a film," Hawley says, noting, "it's just now been a year. Without the resources to sit back and edit a movie full-time for a year, you do what you gotta do, and luckily for us people responded to the early versions which allowed us to review it with audiences and clarify points that needed it." So one of the little-examined aspects of video exhibition is that filmmakers don't have to "lock" their work until it's sold. Galinsky agrees. "The truth is that even if you shoot on film and cut on video you can learn by screening before you cut your negative, and a lot of festivals will screen on video. But it's a strange situation in terms of the fact that there are now so many film festivals and many of them want a world première. You can only lose your virginity once."

"It's not so much an advantage of shooting on video, but editing on video," Hawley clarifies. "And being able to finish on video for festivals now, not having to cut the negative, was an advantage for us, but I gotta say, that I never would have planned to do it this way. It's all serendipity that the cut got better and people continued to show interest and all the variables fell together so that now we can show the film at Toronto and they'll accept it as a première of sorts."

"But the cut that we will next show is so far removed from the first cut we showed in Rotterdam, it wouldn't really be that much of a stretch to call it a première," Galinsky adds. "This film, because of its complexity, needed a lot of time for us to feel comfortable with, and having the opportunity to watch the film with audiences helped immeasurably."

However, a film print is still necessary if you want to qualify for Oscars. "We're making a 35mm blowup to qualify for an Academy Award nomination. The International Documentary Association urged us to try so we've been doing a lot of work to raise money," Galinsky says. "The wonderful folks at the Benton Foundation recently gave us a sizable grant, as did Mr. Larry Flynt. At first we didn't think we had any kind of chance, but the goal gave us a good reason to focus and work on raising money to get it done. It also gave us a timetable for absolutely finishing the film. Having a print will help us to get it into more theaters and I hope we can even get it out this fall around the time of the election."

Winnipeg filmmaker deco dawson has gone the opposite direction, working in a magical, film-specific dream-world, which incorporates extremely convoluted uses of optical printing and defunct film styles. "FILM (dzama)" is a dazzling twenty-minute short by the twentysomething cineaste who shared many roles with Guy Madden on "Hearts of the World" as well the yet-unreleased "Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary." Dawson calls "FILM (dzama)" a "fictional biography," in which the young Canadian artist Marcel Dzama is played by the filmmaker's own father, wherein bears, robots, monstrous forests and lewd flappers run riot in a whimsical torrent of arcane and antiquated film styles.

CUFF contributed post-production funding to a new Dawson film, "Defile in Veil: the futility of purity" which is not ready. "Dracula," made on a modest budget for Canadian Television, contains some of the most jarring and hypnotic cuts and shifts in perspective in any feature film I can think of, yet its effects required finishing on video. But for his own work, Dawson persists in his anachronistic style even with plans for his first feature, a fictional making-of of a 1928 Hollywood crime musical called "Broadway." "There will be some Berkeleyesque production numbers. The film will be an awkward blend of silent film and early talkies--art versus studio production. I will be shooting it like the period, black-and-white, and I have 're-pioneered' two-strip Technicolor for the musical numbers."

75-year-old Alfred Leslie, a renowned painter and filmmaker, is CUFF's Guest of Honor, with two programs, including "The Cedar Bar," an experimental video feature about the explosive confluence of Abstract Expressionists and critics like Clement Greenberg in Greenwich Village in the fifties and sixties. Based on his 1952 play, rewritten in 1986, it appears to be about a presumptuous critic's upbraiding by a claque of artists during a long night's drinking. Deliriously intercut with all manner of stock footage, it's a wholly idiosyncratic stream of half-consciousness that could exist only with current technology.

A notorious 1966 fire in his New York loft, one of that decade's worst, killing twelve firemen, destroyed most of Leslie's paintings, drawings and writing. A second program of his work collects "Pull My Daisy," the well-known Beat souvenir he co-directed with Robert Frank, as well as shorter works, including "Birth of a Nation," which is a later retooling of the handful of minutes left from a 150-minute feature that had only just been screened by New York Film Festival programmers.

With decades of experience, Leslie comes straight to the point. I wonder how the editing and shooting efficiencies of contemporary video had changed his work. "Digital video is an expansion of our tools," he says. "For most people reality is a confirmation of their expectations. Artists offer an opportunity to re-see what we think we see."

He's casual about any notion of virtues of drawbacks. "Process is what you make of it." Once he discovered Final Cut Pro and other tools, it was, however, a revelation. "Exhilarating but in the end just as arduous," Leslie adds. "A difficulty of a different kind. It's enabled me to exercise more control over my stuff and to make works that would have been pretty much impossible for me to carry out without spending the rest of my life trying to raise the dough."

I bring up Lumiere's quote about an invention without a future. "I take it he meant moving pictures were an eternal present," Leslie says. So was Lumiere ahead of his time? Can a smile be a shrug, I wonder, as Leslie observes, "No, he was in the moment."

Precisely.

(2002-08-21)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Sandra Goldbacher's second feature, "Me Without You" is a concise gem, tracing the lives of two friends (Anna Friel, Michelle Williams) who live next door to each other in a small English town, from the 1970s to nearly today.
(2002-08-14)

Victorian Secret
"Possession" intertwines two passions in two periods. In the modern day, icy Brit gender-studies prof Maud (Gwyneth Paltrow) is forced to reevaluate her research when American grad student and poet-manqué Roland (Aaron Eckhart) finds letters between his subject, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), a Robert Browning-like Victorian poet, and Christabel Motte (Jennifer Ehle), a lesser-known fictionalized poet of that time.
(2002-08-14)

EVERYMAN OF ACTION
"XXX" is the most commercially calculated action concoction of the year, and that's not a bad thing.
(2002-08-07)

TIP OF THE WEEK
This 1974 bravura reexamines the detective film from a director (Roman Polanski), writer (Robert Towne), and star (Jack Nicholson) at the peak of their powers.
(2002-08-07)

OFF CAMERA
(2002-08-07)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-08-01)

CANDID CAMERA
(2002-08-01)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-07-25)

YOU'VE GOT ASS
(2002-07-25)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-07-18)

MICE DREAMS
(2002-07-18)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-07-11)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment