Presented by Chicago Filmmakers, the 22nd Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival runs Thu 6/17-Thu 6/24. For more information call 773-293-1447; a complete schedule is available at chicagofilmmakers.org. Following are selected works from the festival’s nine programs; most of the things I previewed were interesting at the very least, and many are either boldly original or surprising variations on existing forms of experimental filmmaking.
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The opening night program (Thu 6/17, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center) includes some of the best pieces. Janie Geiser’s Ghost Algebra surpasses her earlier work, suggestively using contrasting shapes, colors, and rhythms to depict a woman in the midst of some unspecified search. Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby mix animation and live action to produce Beauty Plus Pity, an ecologically themed short that’s moving yet nutty (in one vignette, a beaver gives an audience of forest animals an illustrated lecture on teen alcoholism). Jia Zhang-ke (The World, Still Life) directed Cry Me a River, which powerfully evokes the rapidly changing nature of current China; four friends reunite for dinner after a decade apart, and the turmoil in their lives is mirrored in the river that serves as a backdrop and in compositions and camera movements that create a sense of instability.
I was especially excited by the work of four digital-video artists in their 20s, two from Chicago and two from Istanbul, several of whom are friends and have influenced each other. All four understand that abstraction is a necessary function of digitizing images, and their shorts, most of them silent, use the medium for its unique qualities of flicker and pixilation. Kyle Canterbury (full disclosure: a good friend of mine) took this approach in his earliest videos, but more recently he’s turned his attention to close study of solid objects, noting the odd effects of rendering them on video. In February (Sat 6/19, 9:15 PM, Chicago Filmmakers), the slight video flicker generated by the camera’s movements beautifully accentuates the variegated shapes of striated rocky cliffs and silhouetted tree branches. In Yoel Meranda’s Bsorb (Sat 6/19, 7 PM, Chicago Filmmakers), a turquoise orb and the surrounding orange make for a stunning contrast, but the aggressive colors are also wildly unstable, with fuzzy shapes blurring and dissolving. In Eytan Ipeker’s austere Cloud (Sat 6/19, 4 PM, Chicago Filmmakers), a sea of pixilated black and white shapes gives way to fuzziness and then suggestive pulsing curves, as if biological forms were starting to emerge. This same effect can be found in Jake Barningham’s Concerning Flight (Sat 6/19, 4 PM, Chicago Filmmakers): brief glimpses of a flying bird lead to an X shape, and pixilations everywhere reflect the underlying geometry of DV as diverse forms collide violently, struggling to be born. Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark, $8; Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, $10; and Nightingale, 1084 N. Milwaukee, $8. —Fred Camper
