Knocked for six: My reaction to Matthew Barney's River of Fundament

Yesterday I went to the George Eastman Museum with my friend John Karyus for a screening of River of Fundament, a six-hour experimental film by conceptual artist Matthew Barney.

I knew going in that this one would be an ordeal, not least for its monstrous length (with two intermissions dividing it into three parts) and because Barney is best known to film buffs for his 5-part Cremaster cycle, which I've never seen but which is notorious for being bizarre and "challenging" to sit through.

A bit of Googling (and looking at the description in the Eastman Museum's bimonthly program guide) suggests that this is all an opera loosely adapted from the Norman Mailer novel Ancient Evenings, and that Mailer (played by various actors in caked-dirt makeup) reincarnates three times over the course of the film. But this and other nuances were unknown to me during the screening. I can only report on what I saw:

The first of River of Fundament's three sections revolves around a funeral reception for Mailer. This reception is attended by real-life celebrities such as Salman Rushdie, Fran Leibowitz, Elaine Stritch, and the spirit of Mailer himself. Paul Giamatti plays the representation of an Egyptian god named Ptah-Nem-Hotep.

The second section revolved around a car and its gold-straitjacketed occupant plummeting off a bridge and then later being recovered as two female police investigators holler strange music at the spectacle. One of the two women is an elfin character with big blue eyes, and her face - contorted with emotion and streaming with saliva as she howls at the water - is the image that stuck with me the most. This second section was my favorite, despite its use of the hated experimental-film fakeout of fading out to black and fading out the audio - creating the deception that it was over - only to fade right back up again.

I've already kind of forgotten the third part, though I believe this was also the section in which actors portrayed the mythic conflict between the Egyptian gods Set and Horus, mediated by the father-god Ra (a conflict also depicted in the underrated recent action film Gods of Egypt). I do remember that near the end Ellen Burstyn gives a deathbed speech about the cyclical nature of birth and death. For me this scene stood out in a film that was otherwise reluctant to spell out its theme or point too clearly.

River of Fundament should probably be regarded as a modern-art installation or performance, rather than a film per se. Like much controversial modern art it is scatalogical - there are plenty of shots of human orifices and the things that can pass into or out of them. Reoccurring images include a pig roast (which slowly becomes more decayed over the course of the film) and the disemboweling of a dead cow, either to remove a stillborn calf or to allow a male character (Mailer's ghost if I remember) to crawl inside it.

Most of the film is urban and industrial in its imagery - a crane spectacularly destroys a car, a fist-fight breaks out between two men in a warehouse, etc. For this reason, the nature imagery (trees, fish, etc.) that occurs late in the third section was a huge relief to me. No matter how self-consciously icky the subject matter gets, the 4K digital photography is gorgeous, the music and sound design is hypnotic, and the overall austere tone is impressive.

I've run the gamut of emotions on experimental films, from resenting them as a self-indulgent waste of the audience's time to cherishing them as a refreshing break from conformity. As Hollywood movies become slicker and more dependent on pre-sold properties, I've become more indulgent of experimental films that at least seem to come from someone's own unique view of the world. But for me, watching this was the experimental-film equivalent of reaching the proverbial end of the Internet.

My past enjoyment of experimental films has been on the grounds that they are essentially underground and personal (like poetry or punk music) and I'm mainly used to seeing older, analog entries in the genre, shown on grainy 16mm in a college classroom or hole-in-the-wall art gallery. Yet this is a massive epic featuring celebrities like Maggie Gyllenhaal, with large and complex crowd scenes (such as one involving steel workers dealing with molten metal) that I'm told were performances staged for the public while being filmed for inclusion in this piece. The film's main set seems to have been built on a floating barge, housing both the dinner party above and a flooded basement below.

My friend John loved it, was only occasionally bored by it, and saw it as proof that one can still make truly weird or shocking movies. My response was more mixed. I was bored for longer sections of it than he was, and I was less sure what value to derive from it all.

After sleeping on it, I suppose the film's most obvious message is that decay and disorder - not to mention death - are natural aspects of life that we cannot and should not ignore. Part of me finds this deep, yet another part of me questions the value of this insight. Surely there is greater survival value in postponing death, and avoiding disease and decay, rather than dwelling on them?

This might seem like a tangent, but I once read an interview with Woody Allen in which he discussed his enjoyment of old Fred Astaire musicals. He said that Ingmar Bergman (an arthouse filmmaker he admires) is grappling with weighty issues you know cannot be solved, whereas Astaire offers at least temporary satisfaction and happiness.

Similarly, there's currently a lot of nostalgia for the comedies and action films of the 1980s, even among viewers who weren't alive when they were made. I recently rewatched Back to the Future for the first time in years, and also watched Critters for the first time. Seeing these, it occurs to me that 1980s popcorn movies are about characters with achievable goals - get the girl, kill the monster, win the big race, etc. - unlike the more acclaimed films of other eras that are about a more nebulous search for identity and meaning.

The core appeal of this has become more clear to me. I still believe that conformity should be resisted, not just obeyed. And yet the older I get, and the more our existence is defined by social interconnection, the less sure I am of the value of wandering further and further away from the herd.

What good does it do to ingest (or create) a difficult work like River of Fundament, if doing so just leaves you even more removed from the masses who haven't? As the modern economy demands us to be ruthlessly practical with our scant resources, how does one justify the time or expense of making, let alone seeing, something so strange and user-unfriendly? What is the reason to be the audience for - or a maker of - experimental art?

I guess it's simply to see what will happen. To see what can be learned, or experienced. To see what the limits are, and where they are.

Lessons learned in 2014

"[E]very time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things—connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect. Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. ... I’m shocked that there are so many people that live to divide."

-Joss Whedon, 2013

"I want to spend time doing films and exploring ideas, with the opportunity to fail - which you don't have in the professional film business. You've got to win every single time, and it's very difficult because you end up making very safe movies: you know this works, so you do it. ... I want to try making some films that I'm not really sure will work or not."

-George Lucas, 1981

* * *

At the end of 2013 I wrote what I thought was one of my best posts to this blog. Then, some weeks later, I discovered that it had only gotten about a dozen hits (it’s had more since then) … and that the new blog entry I was about to post covered very similar ground.

So I took it as a sign that maybe this blog had reached its natural end. It had begun as an online tie-in to my then-new indie film Saberfrog, and I also used it to discuss topics that I felt were related to the movie. By 2014 the movie had been out for a while, and I figured it was time to move on.

Saberfrog still pops up anew from time to time – opportunities still arise to sell some additional copies to interested viewers. But in 2014, my focus has switched to an older project that I am now remastering – a Super-8 stop-motion animated sword-and-sorcery film that took me two years to make as a teenager, and that had languished forgotten for decades.

I spent much of 2014 reconstructing this old project – transcribing my old handwritten script into Celtx, getting the Super-8 footage digitally transferred, making a temporary soundtrack to sync with the rediscovered visuals.

Rediscovering this project has been an emotional experience. Whereas Saberfrog was the angst-ridden tale of an adult trying to get his life back in order, this older project was the more innocent work of a teenager who had his whole life ahead of him, and was absolutely confident of his purpose in life.

I felt that reviving this older project would be a way of reconnecting with my less jaded self, who believed wholeheartedly in a life of filmmaking, before adulthood intervened. It was an opportunity to set aside the cynicism I’d developed in recent years, and return to the joy and optimism and positivity that originally fueled my passion as a young filmmaker. I also set up a crowdfunding campaign with a friend of mine, after doing as much research as I could on the brave new world of social media and online fundraising.

Unfortunately, both I and my crowdfunding partner ended up going through major job changes at the time, and I was therefore unable to devote the necessary time and energy to promotion. Prioritizing my new day job was a major reason why I failed to commit more passionately to the campaign.

But it was not the only reason. Even after all the groundwork I’d done, I found myself extremely hesitant to promote the project on the Internet, even though I knew (from telling strangers about it in person) that this was a project that would probably interest people. I had to think hard about why I now had such cold feet.

I realized that – for the first time in my many years, off and on, as a filmmaker – I was now afraid of the audience. That fear was holding me back, and I needed to overcome it once and for all.

* * *

Like many teenagers, I was a bit of a misfit and an introvert. But I loved movies, and I loved sci-fi and fantasy. And it seemed like those things came from a world that was somehow better – a world of artists and thinkers, a smarter and more tolerant community than the “mundane” world of regular people who weren’t fans.

When I first became an aspiring filmmaker, it was a time when people loved movies, and admired and respected filmmakers. Creating an entire world from one’s own imagination, and sharing that personal vision with an audience, was a celebrated achievement. Filmmakers were praised for pursuing their own visions, rather than allowing focus groups and studio conservatism to tell them what they could and couldn’t do.

Today is actually not a bad era for movies. Mainstream Hollywood has fully embraced the once-marginalized world of geek culture, creating ambitious and interconnected stories. Independent films continue to explore brave new territory. VOD has made acclaimed, limited-release films available even to people without specialty theaters in their neighborhoods. And even if none of that were true, DVDs and Blu-rays and VOD continue to make the riches of the past as available as those of the present.

And yet, nowadays I often sense a deep hatred and resentment of movies and the people who make them.

When people badmouth certain films and filmmakers – as well as other storytellers working in TV, literature, or comics – they do it with such a swell of pride, as if the highest demonstration of intellect was to be unmoved by a creative work.

That is not an attitude I’ve ever identified with. Even as a kid, I always thought that seeking out and appreciating the good work was more important than dwelling on lesser work.

And the people who made the good work were my heroes and role models. I always respected people who did the work more than I respected people who could only find fault with the work of others.

Has Internet culture turned this value system upside down? Is it now the social role of artists and storytellers to simply be punching bags for people whose self-esteem needs a boost?

I hope not. Especially when promoting this new (old) project, I want to believe that audiences are open and accepting, that they will give a movie the benefit of the doubt instead of deciding in advance that it sucks.

* * *

I guess I’ve always seen sci-fi/fantasy movies as a more expensive type of experimental film. Movies like Star Wars and Tron and The Dark Crystal seemed like someone’s personal, creative vision – passion projects that a studio was somehow convinced to pay for.

When I was real little – we’re talking late 70s / early 80s – the line between mainstream and experimental was a lot blurrier. Underground filmmakers did animation for Sesame Street. Oddball short films were regularly shown to the public, projected on 16mm in schools and libraries, or used as filler between movies on cable. Stand-alone animated specials would show up randomly in prime time. UHF stations and fledgling cable networks showed any obscure movie or foreign TV show they could get their hands on cheap.

That great churn of the weird and wild and unexpected had just as much impact on my interest in filmmaking as the more universally recognized hits like Star Wars. You would see these strange things as a kid, not knowing where they came from or who made them or why they were being shown. Maybe years later, you could finally look them up on the Internet or ask someone else if they knew what the title was. But the stuff you remembered less well would always be out of reach, and probably not easily available on video even if you could identify it.

Maybe a part of me is still wedded to that time when movies were mysterious and magical, when seeing a movie was an ephemeral privilege. Perhaps the permanence of home video was what enabled the modern nerd instinct to collect and categorize and rationalize. Like a villainous computer in an old Star Trek episode, we now try to explain away anything strange or unexpected as simply incorrect or impractical.

I guess I still crave the experience of seeing a movie I don’t know that much about, in a dedicated cultural venue, in the company of actual humans who shared my curiosity enough to go see it too. You don’t get that by watching a movie at home on VOD. Even with video stores you had to go somewhere, browse the shelves, and talk to the weirdo behind the counter.

Roger Ebert once pointed out that Starbucks offers not just coffee, but also a trip away from the office. He meant this as an analogy to argue that Netflix and video on demand would not supplant the experience of going to video stores. But clearly he was wrong – a lot of people are happy to watch movies at home, or on portable devices, without having to go someplace or interact with other people.

Is that antisocial attitude now manifesting itself in the tone of Internet culture?

* * *

In the last few years I’ve been to a fair number of independent filmmaker conferences, and read many articles about indie filmmaking, in an attempt to keep up with a changing industry.

One of the major messages that keeps coming up is that filmmakers need to be marketers and self-promoters. The days of a Kubrick or Kurosawa being allowed to concentrate simply on creating his art, and let distributors and critics do the work of convincing people to go see the finished product, are over. With the decline of brick-and-mortar cultural hubs (not just video stores, but also record stores and bookstores), it’s become more important for the artists themselves to maintain an online presence. You need to be on social media. You need to engage with your audience in a personal way.

But to me, interacting with strangers on the Internet is a daunting prospect. The Internet is where people seem to drop all real-world pretense of civility and politeness, and vent their frustrations and hostility at length. And major media outlets feed this climate with their clickbait headlines, generally phrased in terms of disdain and rejection: Why You Shouldn’t Watch This Movie, Why You Should Stop Watching This Show, Why This or That Person is a Hack or a Jackass.

Perhaps it’s mainly the big Hollywood productions and franchises that generate that kind of hostility, while smaller independent production are relatively safe. But should artists really stay small – never leaving the garret or the garage – to be safe from criticism? Is that really how we should think? Are we not supposed to be bold and strive?

* * *

The original Star Wars was one of the films that inspired me to become a filmmaker. I certainly enjoyed watching it as a kid, but when I was old enough to read accounts of how blown away people were in 1977 – by the opening shot, by the cantina scene, by the jump to hyperspace, by Han’s heroic return at the end – I thought, I want to do that. I want to make something that amazes people. Not by making a Star Wars fan film, but by learning the craft well enough to come up with something of my own that would have a similar effect.

Is that still a realistic goal today, when so many people seem to hate movies before they even come out? Or does it only seem that way on the Internet?

* * *

These thoughts have led me to at least one positive lesson. I never thought of myself as particularly social or outgoing or extroverted. But Internet culture has forced me to realize how comparatively well I thrive in real-world situations. When I introduce myself to strangers, I hear myself speak with much more charm and confidence than I ever feel when I’m brooding in isolation, staring at a computer screen, reading hostile text written by trolls.

This revelation has motivated me to go to the movies more often than I’d been doing lately, and to attend social and cultural events even when I’m not quite in the mood. The Internet might often seem like a race to the bottom, but the real world is a place where skill, accomplishment, and distinctiveness are still somewhat valued. And realizing this has helped me to reconnect with humanity in a way that the Internet – seemingly designed to connect people – has not.

When you go to a movie, you have to leave the house. You are watching, on a big screen, something that took a lot of effort and expertise to complete.

And more often than not, it tells a story of a goal-driven person who accomplishes something difficult.

(Maybe that's why Internet trolls hate movies.)

So that refuels me as an audience member. But what about as a filmmaker? In the digital age, what kind of film can you still reasonably aspire to make, that has enough of a sympathetic audience to make it worthwhile?

* * *

I think a mistake I’ve made in this ol’ life is looking mainly to the big successes for inspiration. I was a precocious filmmaker at an early age, and I went to one of the most celebrated film schools. So I’ve allowed myself to believe that I was destined for big things, and that if I didn’t achieve that then I was not successful.

But there are other frames of reference, and other models of success. Completing projects is success, regardless of their scale or profile. Doing what makes you happy, no matter what other people think, is success.

You can make something very commercial, and be dependent on the approval of a large number of strangers … or something low-budget enough that you don’t need everyone’s approval.

The purpose of being an independent artist is not to keep up with the Joneses, or to bow to peer pressure, or to try to appease audiences who don’t get it. The purpose of being an independent artist is to be true to yourself, to be unique and different, and to have faith that there are audiences who do get it.

And if I do better in real-world situations than I do online … well, then I should tell more people in the real world about my work, and show it to them.

The audience is however many people you can get to be interested, in whatever walk of life, online or in reality, whether it’s 50,000 or 500 or 15.

Just make your art, and be happy.

Making sense of it all

It's been a busy two months. I sent out some screener copies of Saberfrog, and have gotten a couple reviews – a very positive one from a German site called Search My Trash, and a rather more mixed review from Film Threat.

Getting that kind of public feedback for the movie has been a big shot in the arm. In the years since I started this blog, I've sometimes filled the slower months with blog posts about semi-related topics about filmmaking, discussions of movies that had some indirect kinship with Saberfrog, and the occasional flat-out rant about things that were bugging me about my generation and/or modern culture in general.

In hindsight, it seems like the plot of Saberfrog, and the writing, production and release of the movie, has been part of a larger effort to make sense of, adapt to, the world that's very different from the one I knew in my 20s. Over these past few years I've witnessed the rise of transmedia, the demise of Borders and classic Final Cut Pro, and a general shift from a world of sensitive artsy loners who were philosophical about art and filmmaking to a slicker, snarkier, hyper-social, on-demand world where there's more competition for attention and eyeballs.

I think the biggest shift of all has been the shift from a culture of analog media to a culture of digital media. People my age learned to embrace the scratchiness of a 16mm film screening, the grubbiness of a VHS bootleg, the mustiness of a used paperback. I remember “watching” scrambled pay channels that still let you listen to the sound even if the picture was garbled. I even remember fiddling with a TV aerial to try to pick up snowy, distant transmissions from stations in faraway cities.

It's not that those days were better, necessarily. It's just that we folks of a certain age learned to associate those kinds of analog artifacts with authenticity. Knowing that a work of art had some miles on it, or survived in only compromised quality, made it seem more rare and valuable somehow. Every counterculture aesthetic – from the hippies to the punks to the grunge slackers – embraced the idea that dirt and distortion and rawness made things cool.

But that was an analog attitude, and we're in a digital age now. There are no garbled or snowy TV channels – either you get a channel or you don't get it at all. People still like movies, but they're not held on a pedestal anymore. Movie theaters aren't these sacred cathedrals where you go to worship the art of cinema – they're just one of many possible outlets where a piece of “content” will become available. You can still make a low-budget movie, but you're no longer a one-of-a-kind hero for doing so, and if you do it's not supposed to have the bedraggled Clerks aesthetic – now it has to be shot on a DSLR and look like an Oscar-winning Hollywood cinematographer shot it in order to stand out as a professional production amid all the kittens playing piano. As a fellow producer recently put it, when you submit a movie to a festival nowadays, “you're competing against high school kids with cell phones.”

Saberfrog didn't seem like that weird a movie when I wrote it or shot it, because my head was still in the analog era, when people reached into their soul and pulled up something strange and raw and personal because that's what they had to do and because that's what independent film audiences were looking to see.

But perhaps it's a good thing that I didn't know any better, or I might not have made the movie. No matter how much the world changes, I think there will always be a need for people who see things differently, who have the guts/craziness/courage/foolishness to do what other people aren't doing. At the very least, it shows other people that such things are possible.

Sometimes, like Josh in the movie, I have an internal debate raging in my head. I wonder whether making low-to-no-budget movies is still worth the trouble, what kind of movies I should be making in today's world, whether there's a big enough audience for the kind of movies I believe in, and whether I have enough of the huckster instinct that it seems to take to promote yourself nowadays. But somehow I always end up coming to the same conclusion: Just do what you believe in.

And every effort opens doors. You end up going places you otherwise wouldn't have gone, and meeting people you otherwise wouldn't have met. And as easy as it is to get confused about where our online culture is headed, with all that crowding and diversity, you have to remember that no one is consuming all of it, that there are still niches, and that if you're smart and persistent then you can find the folks who get it.

I've been doing a lot of writing in the past couple months, and I'm plotting what my next project will be. It might be connected to Saberfrog in some way, or it might be something new with completely different characters. There's life in Saberfrog yet, but I'll probably be switching my energies to a new project in the next couple months. And I hope that those of you who've followed the Saberfrog journey this far will join me on the next journey as well.

Stay tuned …

16mm awesomeness in three cities

When I was a kid, we used to watch short films in class, generally prefaced by a title card that said “from the Reynolds Collection of the Rochester Public Library” or words to that effect. Many of these were educational films of the sort so often parodied in commercials and comedy shows. But some were just … odd. They may have been comedies, or art films, or animations, or various combinations thereof, but the purpose of showing these films in class seems elusive in hindsight.

The most famous of these was Hardware Wars, which had a decent afterlife on cable and video, but many of the others are now obscure. Some I can still kind of remember if I think about it enough, while others have largely faded from my memory.

These kinds of films showed up not only in class, but in more public settings as well. The Rochester Museum and Science Center's Eisenhardt Auditorium had weekend shows of kid's movies (I remember seeing animated films based on the Paddington Bear books and Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat). A robotic-dinosaur exhibit that came to the RMSC in the mid-80s was accompanied, in one room, by a set of dinosaur-related films, including Will Vinton's famous Siskel-and-Ebert parody Dinosaur and a more realistic stop-motion film from the National Film Board of Canada. (I – or, more likely, my mom – actually videotaped these films from the audience with our giant camcorder, back in the days when no one thought to object to such behavior; maybe I can still find that tape if I dig through enough boxes.) When my family traveled to Toronto to see the Ontario Science Center, my favorite “exhibit” was a small booth that showed the stream-of-consciousness clay-animated film Clay, Or The Origin of Species.

I can remember when a local library branch put on a little animation festival in a room upstairs. The films themselves included Jiri Trnka's stop-motion film The Hand, in which a stop-motion puppet is relentlessly pursued by a marauding human hand; an art-film parody called The Critic, in which the voice of Mel Brooks heckles an abstract film in humorous proto-MST3K fashion; and a Disney adaptation of Peter and the Wolf. There were two other films whose titles are unknown to me – a time-lapse movie of a building under construction, which I guess counts as an animated film; and a film about an urban family attending a funeral, seen from the point of view of the youngest family, and depicted in a constantly flowing art style that was probably created using finger paint. [Update: I've since seen the latter film again: it's The Street by Caroline Leaf.] Those are the five I can still remember, over a quarter-century later; whatever other films might have been in the program are now long-forgotten by me.

The 70s and (early to mid-)80s must have been the boom time for such things; back then, you would still see obscure short films padding out the running time between movies on cable, and of course Sesame Street and The Electric Company had their share of whimsical, borderline-experimental animation. Yet I seldom seemed to meet people from other areas who had similar memories of seeing oddball animated films in class or elsewhere. This left me wondering if the Rochester area – or perhaps my grade school in particular – was somehow unique in exposing its students to oddball short films that seemed to come from nowhere. Even as the home video boom made movies more accessible, and the Internet made it easier to dig up information on even the most esoteric topics, these obscure 70s/80s films seemed to drift into the dreamlike haze of fading childhood memories.

But these films had a huge impact on me as a kid. They always looked handmade; anyone who owned a home movie camera with single-frame capabilities could theoretically make one. The fact that these films were made by no one you'd ever heard of, and shown in environments other than regular movie theaters, must have also intrigued my young brain somehow. I credit these unsung films with inspiring me to make my own films.

Some time in the late 90s/early 2000s, the Rochester library donated its 16mm film collection to the Visual Studies Workshop, a school/art gallery (associated with SUNY Brockport) which also played host to the occasional underground film event. Yet except for a single multimedia show early on (in which old industrial films were played as background), the VSW never seemed to do anything with that vast and mysterious collection for years afterward.

My interest in “ephemeral” films (as I guess they're called now) was rekindled a couple years ago when Skip Elsheimer, manager of the AV Geeks film collection, came to town to put on a show at the George Eastman House. Lo and behold, here were exactly the sorts of weird and wonderful films I saw as a kid, even if the particular titles were new to me – such as Shake Hands With Danger, a workplace-safety industrial film whose title song has become an Internet phenomenon; and Malakapalakadoo, Skip Too, a truly bizarre clay animation intended to encourage children to use their imaginations. When I later went to the AV Geeks website and browsed their list of films, I found titles that I did recall from back in the day, such as The Wave (a film about students forming a paramilitary clique) and an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. I slept better at night knowing that films like these were still out there, still remembered, and still loved.

Why am I writing about all this now? Well, such is the revival that these films are enjoying that I have been able see such films as they were meant to be seen – on 16mm in an alternative venue – in three different cities over a seven-day period, without even realizing it until later.


BUFFALO

The adventure began on Sunday, October 10, when I went to Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo to see a show of experimental animation that was being presented as part of the Buffalo Film Festival. Squeaky's website explained that this was actually a traveling animation show, separate from the Buffalo festival, and co-managed by Larry Cuba, who did the computer-animated Death Star plans for the original Star Wars. Cuba would be at the event in person, and showing three of his own experimental films from the 1970s/80s.

That the event had such low attendance is a measure of how far the arty world and the geek world have drifted apart from each other. This was a free event, and the equation of “free event” plus “guy who did special effects for Star Wars” probably could have draw every fan within a 200-mile radius if only that audience had heard of the event and/or had any taste for abstract animation. It's too bad because, in my brain, the two worlds still seem linked somehow. George Lucas' background was in experimental filmmaking before he went down the Power-Of-Myth road, and to me there's not really a big difference between an abstract 1970s computer animation and, say, Pong or Asteroids; it's all pioneering stuff from the early days of digital imagery.

I'd lost my appetite for purely abstract films after being force-fed too much of it in college, but I still dig the 70s ones, partly because they have a certain innocence to them (with none of the anger or pretentiousness that seemed to take over in later years) and partly because they tend to have groovy soundtracks. Cuba's three films, and some other old-school animations that he also screened, were an enjoyable blast from the past.


TORONTO

A mere five days later – on Friday – I decided to hoof it to Toronto for an evening to catch a film screening or two. I'd received Facebook notices about a couple different screenings going on that evening. One was a film festival event, and I thought it might be a good opportunity to network and spread the word about Saberfrog. The other was the regular Friday-night screening at Trash Palace, an industrial building (apparently used as a small press during the week) that screens 16mm films on Friday night. It was the latter that I ended up attending.

I'd been to Trash Palace once before, for the same reason – there were a couple different screenings I wanted to go to in Toronto, but Trash Palace was the only one I could make it in time for. Last time they were presenting what was supposedly a show of rare early student films from people like Tim Burton, Brad Bird and John Lasseter – a bit misleading, as these turned out to be live-action student films made by someone else, but gave minor credit (art direction or “Thanks to”) to Lasseter et al. Nonetheless, I got a taste of the Trash Palace experience and enjoyed it immensely, especially since other people brought their own 16mm student work to screen, which meant films I knew I would not have heard of and would never see again.

This time, the main event was a 1970s crime flick called Puppet on a String. The best way I can think of to describe this film is to say that it was like a blaxploitation film with an all-white cast. The film took place in Amsterdam, the main character was an American born in Holland (played by an actor with a Dutch-sounding name), and the cast seemed to generally be Brits (particularly the hero's obligatory you're-not-playing-by-the-rules superior), yet the film was full of Shaft-style badass music and fight scenes, including a rather impressive motorboat chase through the streets of Amsterdam.

The film was preceded by some pretty cool 1970s kung-fu trailers, with titles like The Chinese Professionals, Triple Iron, Black Dragon, and Black Samurai (those last two may have been the same film under two different titles).


ROCHESTER

I returned home to Rochester, and attended a 16mm screening the very next day at Visual Studies Workshop. Yes, VSW has finally begun unleashing its sweet collection of celluloid obscurity onto the public.

This was the second of what promises to be a monthly show at VSW; the first had had a specifically education/classroom theme, whereas this one was entitled “There Is No Reality” and was devoted to some of the more surreal and out-there films in the collection. Yeah.

The films included two Norman McLaren animations about moving lines (not quite as dull as it sounds, and actually quite hypnotic); the music video for the Dr. Demento-approved novelty song “Fish Heads”; and Help! My Snowman's Burning Down, a Richard Lester-esque film about a guy sitting in a bathtub on a New York pier and having various Magritte-like adventures.

Two of the films in the program were slightly familiar to me: K9000: A Space Oddity, a goofy animation about a dog who's captured by scientists (or whoever they are) and sent into space in a rocket ship to encounter a bunch of weird crap; and Why Me?, a National Film Board of Canada cartoon about the stages of acceptance faced by the terminally ill. Stills from both of these had been featured in the late-70s edition of Kit Laybourne's The Animation Book, which was a bible to me as a teenager; in fact, that book used storyboards and other development materials from Why Me? as examples. This was actually the second time I'd seen Why Me?, though I can't remember if I saw it in college or on cable TV.

The finale of the program, a 1970 film called Hello Mustache, was far more obscure; in fact, the guy curating the show said that he had been able to find out almost nothing about the film, “except that we have a copy.” This was a black-and-white, dialogue-heavy film about a hippie male (complete with poncho and brimmed hat) and a square female. Well, supposedly square, since she's wearing an outfit I didn't know was ever considered ordinary – a loud necktie with dress shirt, a vertically striped miniskirt, and white go-go boots. (I quite liked that look, though, and hope that it comes back; it didn't hurt that the actress wearing it was extremely cute.)

Both characters were Jewish New Yorkers, and it seemed like the film was trying to be a surreal/whimsical look at relationships in an Annie Hall-esque manner, but somehow ended up less like Woody Allen and more like David Lynch. This was partly due to the shadowy black—and-white photography, and partly due to the sheer strangeness of the dialogue. The opening scene of the film was just a black screen (with a small, moving white blob that may or may not have been just a scratch on the print) accompanied by a lengthy offscreen phone conversation between the two leads; I thought at first that the entire film would be like this. The ending of the film is equally memorable – the lead actress standing in the doorway of her apartment, at the end of a dimly hit hallway, forlornly calling the hippie – “Alan … Aaaaalaaaaan...” – like a mythical siren.

The sexual themes in both Hello Mustache and Help! My Snowman's Burning Down made me realize that there must be even more strange films in the Rochester library's collection than the ones I saw in class as a kid. Somehow I'd always assumed the films in that collection were all educational or otherwise kid-friendly, simply because those were the ones I would have seen. But clearly there are even deeper waters to be explored.

The enigma of Hello Mustache was as fascinating as the movie: Who made it, and why? Was this a theater piece that someone decided to commit to celluloid? Was this a student film, or funded by a grant? Did these people ever make any other movies? Where are they now, and are they even still alive? How did the Rochester library come to possess a copy – was it donated, or did they purchase it, and in either case how did the library come to know about the film in the first place? Was any of this at all unusual for the time, or was 16mm filmmaking (complete with optical sound) as common back then as, say, YouTube postings today? So many tantalizing mysteries.

The other great thing about seeing 60s/70s curiosities like Hello Mustache and K9000: A Space Oddity is that it reminded me why I was attracted to filmmaking in the first place. Nowadays, it seems, both Hollywood and the audience (now narrowly defined as the ComiCon audience only) seem to have mutually concluded that any new movie must now be based on something you already know before you even set foot in the theater – it must be a remake of a movie you've already seen, or a novel you've already read ... or a comic book, or a video game, or an old TV show … and must contain absolutely no artistic, creative or personal stamp.

But twenty, thirty, forty years ago, it was the opposite. Film was the medium where anything was possible.