The sixth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, August 13 through 19, at the Village, 1548 N. Clark. Tickets for most programs are $6; a $25 pass will admit you to five regular programs, and a $75 pass will admit you to all festival screenings and events. For more information call 773-866-8660. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 14
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
The title gives you a good sense of what you won’t find in this program of mostly excellent experimental videos–realistic, representational imagery. In the best of them, 60Hz by Gene Ertel, James Woodfill, and John Sjoblom, kinetic installations–a spinning disk, a swinging lightbulb–produce repetitive but evocative light patterns that complement the slow trance music. Brian Trecka’s Movement is a lovely, gentle study of abstract colors and animated dolls. In Miranda July’s The Amateurist one woman seems to control the poses of another who’s seen on a video monitor; both are played by July. Filmed in supple black-and-white eight-millimeter, Paul Tarrago’s Human Error in the Mechanical Age is a cryptic narrative that includes the shooting of a toy dog. In Spank, Diane Nerwen manipulates a very short clip of a little girl getting spanked, distending the tiniest moments, her repetitions creating a strong metaphor for the characters’ entrapment in their roles. On the same program: Bryan Boyce’s witty Special Report and Jennifer Reeder’s Nevermind, which turns Nirvana into endless drone music. (FC) (3:30)
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Smug and rancorous, Gordon Eriksen’s mockumentary about East Village residents who use an on-line dating service lacks the soul of Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961), the trailblazing French documentary on which it’s modeled. Becca (Marlene Forte), an investigative reporter and one-woman morality brigade, hunts down some of the site’s pseudonymous users and confronts them with their fibs and sexual fantasies; clearly her agenda’s not journalistic, but Eriksen’s script never explains what she’s after or why all but one of her quarries are black, Latino, or Japanese. Some of her interrogations are natural and hilariously candid, but most of them seem forced; Eriksen settles for cheap laughs at the characters’ embarrassment rather than insight into their desperate need for sex or companionship. (TS) (5:00)
4 The Target Shoots First
Patrick Friel of Chicago Filmmakers curated this thought-provoking program of films–most of them excellent–that makes us more conscious of the viewing process. The strongest and weirdest is Brian Frye’s The Anatomy of Melancholy: huddled figures mouth fragments of dialogue, apparently rehearsing for a play, until images that seemed stilted and static become powerfully iconic, almost frightening. Michael Johnsen divides Surds/Turds into 18 short sections, playfully exploring the suggestive possibilities of rephotographing graphic imagery. In Test, Kerry Laitala refilms a multiple-choice test (perhaps from a filmstrip), the torrent of images mocking the haste we bring to such exercises. In Luis Recoder’s Bare Strip, a fragmentary image of a nude woman appears on the right of the frame, while the remainder is taken up by blank space and sprocket holes, forcing on us a voyeurism that’s never quite satisfied. Julie Murray’s New York by Night and Elizabeth Powers’s Untitled 1998 each show a grid of four images, two of them upside down, which filmmakers will recognize as “unslit regular eight-millimeter”; the format creates a tension between the subject matter and our awareness of the medium’s physicality. (FC) On the same program: Aaron Scott’s Ambulo, Ellen Smithee’s Oona’s Screen Test, Scott Stark’s Back in the Saddle Again, and Stephanie Barber’s Shipfilm and A Little Present. (7:00)
