Film critics rarely refer to narrative movies when writing about experimental cinema—or vice versa—and this might create the impression that the two are entirely separate forms. Yet they’ve overlapped for as long as movies have existed. For instance, the innovative editing of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1920s features owes much to the experiments in montage that other Soviet filmmakers were constructing around the same time. More recently, well-known narrative filmmakers like David Fincher (in Seven) and Gus Van Sant (in his “death trilogy” of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days) have shown the influence of experimental cinema in their films’ textures and atmospheres. On the other end of the spectrum, American experimental filmmakers ranging from Joseph Cornell to George Kuchar have made certain aspects of narrative movies (acting, the manipulation of suspense) the central subjects of their work.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Macao‘s slender plot was inspired by detective fiction; the plot of Saint Anthony’s Day is a mystery in itself. An opening card introduces the title holiday as a Lisbon tradition where “lovers must offer small vases of basil with paper carnations and flags . . . as a token of their love” for the city’s patron saint. What follows is a series of vaguely connected shots in which young people walk slowly and silently through Lisbon, first in groups and then individually, performing strange, sometimes self-destructive acts as if in a trance. Do these behaviors represent modern-day love offerings, or are we watching some high-art remake of Night of the Living Dead? Either way, the images are consistently gorgeous and classical in their compositional sensibility, as if the director himself were under some archaic love spell.
Less emotional but even more tantalizing as narrative is Ben Rivers’s Phantoms of a Libertine, which screens in the opening night program at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Thursday at 8:15 PM. After Mike Leigh and Terence Davies, Rivers (Slow Action, Two Years at Sea) may be England’s greatest living filmmaker, which makes any new film of his is a must-see. His small body of work looks like nothing else past or present—indeed one of the most extraordinary things about his films is that they don’t seem to come from any particular time. Rivers shoots much of his work on grainy 16-millimeter film; while his images have an artisanal, rough-hewn quality, they never seem amateurish or “old.” They suggest some lost chapter of cinema history that may exist solely in Rivers’s imagination. This fake nostalgia is at once inviting and eerie, like half-remembered fragments of stories not read since childhood.
The other programs screening at the Ferguson Theater on Friday and Saturday—as well as the three screening at the Music Box on Sunday—spotlight more abstract traditions in experimental filmmaking. Of these, I’m most fond of “Wandering, Pausing,” which screens Saturday at 1 PM, and “Illuminations,” which screens Saturday at 5:45 PM. Many of the works in these programs evoke painting and poetry more than photography and prose, creating specific, ineffable moods. Vincent Grenier’s Watercolor (Fall Creek) and former Chicagoan Jake Barningham’s Pták básně I a II (playing in “Wandering, Pausing”) present dialogue-free images of landscapes, employing various cinematic devices (filters, dissolves, etc) to disrupt our sense of temporal flow. These short works encourage a sense of contemplation, only to throw it out of balance—they are far less comforting than they first seem. (The same might be said of Phil Solomon’s Empire, screening at the Music Box on Sunday at 2 PM, which is a “remake” of Andy Warhol’s experimental classic created with images from Grand Theft Auto IV.) Conversely, JB Mabe’s To the Change Assigned and Lewis Klahr’s Kiss the Rain (playing in “Illuminations”) organize their visual elements erratically, even vertiginously, privileging subjective experience over onscreen content.
Fri-Sun 9/6-9/8 various locations; for a complete schedule see chicagofilmmakers.org/onion_fest
