Opening night was June 16, but seven programs remain in this excellent festival, now in its 17th year and running through Sunday, June 19, at Chicago Filmmakers.
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The festival is surprisingly somber this year: some of the best pieces document self-entrapment, many are haunted by terrorism and war. In Program 2 (Fri 6/17, 7 PM, 69 min.) Leslie Thornton’s Let Me Count the Ways Minus 10, 9, 8, 7… (2004) pairs a long voice-over interview with a Hiroshima survivor and aerial footage of New York, hinting at a horrific future. Lynn Marie Kirby dances along the border between film and video in Golden Gate Bridge: Poised for Parabolas (2004), combining filmlike textures and dense geometric patterns in unpredictable ways. Christopher Becks’s Pan of the Landscape uses gorgeous Brakhage-like painting on film to un-Brakhage-like ends: spectacular skies combine with the slow, mechanical movement of a silhouetted form to produce a biting melancholy, as if Becks is mourning the film’s removal from the world it glimpses.
George Kuchar and John Smith show hotel rooms as prisons in Program 5 (Sat 6/18, 8:15 PM, 94 min.). In Supercell (2004) Kuchar responds to a local TV report of a nearby tornado’s “doughnut hole” by eating a doughnut. In Throwing Stones (2004) Smith notices a poster of Chicago in his Swiss hotel room, reflects that he was here on 9/11, but seems powerless to do much more. Marie Losier’s quirky documentary on the great playwright-director Richard Foreman, The Ontological Cowboy, captures the hysteria of his “Ontological-Hysteric Theater,” if not the ontology.
