Resfest Digital Film Festival
See Critic’s Choice. (8:00)
Included in this program of 14 music videos from the last couple of years are three by Chris Cunningham, the genre’s current whiz kid. His growing stylistic confidence and command of digital technology–and fetish for androids–can be charted from his first video, Second Bad Vibel (1996), to his latest, All Is Full of Love, which ingeniously matches Bjork in a duet with herself with a vignette about a female robot who creates a clone, then embraces and kisses it. Afrika Shox (1997), a promo for the song by hip-hop band Leftfield, shows Cunningham’s talent for adding context to lyrics–he’s turned the music into a gruesome, bleak account of a black man gradually falling apart, mentally and physically, as he winds through the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan. The rest of the videos aren’t on quite the same level, though Jeremy Hollister’s Music for 18 Musicians, set to a Steve Reich remix by DJ Coldcut, is hypnotic, and Teardrop, Walter Stern’s clip for Massive Attack, has the wailing ballad sung by a fetus. And Acne International’s video for Whale’s “Four Big Speakers” digitally manipulates still photos of the band members in a Dragnet parody. (TS) (10:00)
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Each of these five recent shorts, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes in length, points to a different direction for digital video. The most conventional and amusing is Stephen Dooher’s Searching for Carrie Fisher, in which the smugly persistent young director uses a digicam to track down the object of a childhood crush, finally cornering her outside a hair salon. Sophie Fiennes’s Lars From 1-10 is a talking-head video whose subject, Danish director Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves), self-importantly describes his “Dogma 95” manifesto. Patrick Demers’s Discharge, in which a couple confront a dangerous man from their past, is viewed by some as a parody of the French New Wave, but despite some vertiginous and suspenseful effects, it’s ultimately pointless. Plug, by Meher Gourjian, mixes sophisticated computer graphics and real actors for an ironic parable about a future where people prefer projected dreams to reality; a drag race through miles-tall skyscraper canyons brings to mind The Fifth Element, and the startling transition from fantasy to reality borrows from What Dreams May Come. James Sommerville’s visual tone poem Negative Forces, Witchcraft and Idolatry, with its scratchy, fractured images and jerky motion, owes a debt to Seven, but this mosaic is so expertly assembled that it evokes in a fresh, eerie way the paranoia and alienation experienced by New York’s subway riders. (TS) (4:00)
