Directors Lounge magazine: Sabrina Small

Sunday, February 17

Saturday, February 16

Thursday, February 14

Architecture is Ruining my LIfe

(S.S.) A little backtracking to do here...I'd like to start by talking about the fascinating lecture Merce Rodrigo Garcia gave about her research as an architect into the virtual representations of inhabited space in Japanese independent film. The idea of a Spanish architect studying Japanese independent films and scouring them for traces of inspiration about what it means to inhabit Japan is mind-boggling in and of itself. The fact that MRG can make such a coherent argument out of this practice is down right incredible. I think the key argument for her has something to do with the idea of built space versus the idea of inhabited space. Cities that change very rapidly, like Tokyo, have a lot of flexibility when it comes to the way the population uses space. There is this organic, real time, fluid approach to using space that is a model built by the everyday people that populate Tokyo and then there is this prescribed top-down model of building space which begins with some megalomaniacal architect and a lot of money and ends with a bunch of people who feel trapped by their working and/or living quarters.
The film clips MRG showed represented both sides of this architectural dialectic. On the "built" side of things the film clips from Crazy Family (80's) and Tokyo Fist (90's) represented the suffocation of the average man by the oppressive architecture of Tokyo in the midst of an economic boom. Crazy Family told the story of an upwardly mobile family who move from the city to an American style suburban house on the outskirts of Tokyo. Once settled there, the family becomes obsessed with their individual privacy and they slowly disappear from each others lives culminating in an absurd parody of suburban life. The family leaves their home in the suburbs and takes up a nomadic existence in between two highways. In this primitive base camp, the family unites once more. The fact that their peaceful existence occurs in a space that is not recognized as a home speaks to MRG's notion that inhabited space is less suffocating than built space.
In Tokyo Fist, a Japanese version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, or Fight Club, a man's subjectivity is taken over by his urban environs. He mounts the platform for the subway, climbs the endless stairs to his cookie cutter apartment, and works in his cubicle like everyone else. At some point, he snaps and tries to destroy his environment. He pounds at the walls with a pipe and exasperates himself in the name of liberating himself from his oppressed lifestyle.
The built landscape of Tokyo in the 90's melts into the virtual realities of the current decade. Tokyo has become a place for fetishized subcultures to flourish. In the film Peep Show, two seemingly unconnected subcultures function as alternative landscapes and define spaces in the city for their purposes. The first subculture is the Gothic Lolita fashion subculture, most prevalent in the Shibuya district. These women dress like Victorian dolls with Mary Jane shoes, ruffle dresses, pinafores and knee-high stockings. The effect is sexy and ridiculous at the same time. These women congregate in certain quarters of the Shibuya district providing the rest of the city with a chance to check out their world. The film explores the notion of bifurcated personas these women experience when they dress up as something or someone they may or may not really be. The notion of costumes and hiding within them in order to evade reality is a theme throughout the film. On the other end of this virtual coin are the Otaku, a real group of Tokyo-ites who are so socially withdrawn into their computer worlds that they never leave their rooms. They communicate via the Internet and find the greater physical world exhausting.
MRG sees the inhabited spaces of Tokyo as being linked to a historical and cultural process so for her, the fact that subcultures occupy virtual space is just as important to the architecture of the city as when they occupy actual space. The fact that Tokyo shifts to accommodate new cultures and identities gives it a virtual quality as well. And when the streets are flooded with Gothic Lolita's, there is a carnival like atmosphere which exists both physically and virtually. Space is per-formative, MRG reminds us. This is very clear in the 16mm film Private Novel, in which a filmmaker shoots his life, his friends and and his surroundings over a ten year period. The city takes on a haunting quality under his gaze, especially when he films Emperor Hirohito's funeral.
In conclusion, MRG suggested that the tactics of independent film could be beneficial to architects. Viewing the way people use space, virtual or otherwise, is a more useful process than contracting to build giant space sucking monsters that only serve to oprress their inhabitants.

Wednesday, February 13

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Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

The idea of universal sisterhood is about as preposterous as the idea of universal language but advertising and the media machine pushes this insipid notion on women at every turn. We want makeup, jewelry, babies, yogurt, perfume...carefree fun. It's always profoundly revealing when women filmmakers, artists and writers endeavor to suggest the truth about their needs and desires or their particular spin on the desires of other women. Over the past couple of days, I've been taking special notice of women as directors, actresses and subjects of their own films and it has been a very revealing process.

Catherine Forster's We Shop (USA 8min 2007) took on the subject of shopping as a woman's favorite pass-time and chose the rural suburbs of North Carolina rather than the saturated commercial landscape of Madison Avenue as her microcosm. The film follows two women, a middle-aged granddaughter and her elderly grandmother, as they tour their favorite stores and then go home to refresh and beautify themselves. The film opens with an acapella rendition of Cyndi Lauper's hit Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Against the backdrop of passe department stores and dinky boutiques, the song has a haunting quality. The vocals alone sound so empty and the experience of shopping takes on an inevitable emptiness as well. But the two main characters are unperturbed by the supposed meaninglessness of shopping. They speak about the activity as if it were their life support. Shopping is a way to evade loneliness. Department stores are places to eavesdrop on funny conversations that you can laugh about with your friends later on. The middle-aged granddaughter insists that Belks, the store they most often frequent, is 'like a second family. We know everyone. We talk to everyone and we become a part of these people's lives.' She says without a hint of irony.

For Forsters part, she allows the women to speak openly and resists the urge to satirize her subjects. These are very normal Southern women with what they perceive to be very normal interests. They are feminine to a fault, even up into their 90's but Forster doesn't dwell on the futility of dressing up when you are so old you can barely reach the clothes in your closet. She does pan a couple of times to closets filled with junk and she suggests the American disease of consumerism in these moments but mostly she avoids this judgement. In fact, Forster does something really brave--she allows the women to enjoy their shopping without villianizing them or making them pathetic. Shopping becomes a ritual for female interaction, a chance to smell different, smooth your skin and chat about your life. It seems as harmless as a quilting bee. But that eerie acapella Girls Just Wanna Have Fun reminds the viewer that the ritual of shopping carries a good deal of mythology and can never just be shopping in and of itself.

Ann Hirsch has a complicated relationship to consumerism and femininity as well. In her short film I Love You, I Hate You, Emaciated, (5 min 2007) she covers her mouth with a cellular phone and mouths 'I love you' over and over again, making exaggerated kissy faces at the camera. This goes on for quite some time and then their is a sharp cut to a girl in a t-shirt with her hair severely pulled back sitting on a dormitory couch. It seems like the same girl who was mouthing I love you just seconds before. With unmistakable candidness this girl begins to describe her anorexia and the complicated manipulations she must enact in order to continue to starve herself. She realizes that the disease is her burden and that other people don't want to shoulder it so she performs normal eating habits in front of them to trick them into thinking she is healthy. ' I just eat a donut a couple of times in front of them and they think everything is fine. Then I don't eat for the rest of the day. ' The irony of pretending to want anonymity as an anorexic and then making a film about yourself and your anorexia is a bit heavy handed. But the subject of anorexia itself is so indefatigable for viewers that Hirsch can get away with this hypocrisy. Our obsessive need for information about anorexia is like our addiction to shopping. It's unhealthy and it's a closed system that perpetuates itself. The more obsessed you are with image and consumerism, even on a supposed informational level, the more likely you are to have actual image and consumer issues. As in We Shop, the most winning aspect of Hirsch's short is her directness and honesty. Both films involve a greater media driven system but the perspective of these women is refreshingly sincere and unapologetic.

Maja Borg SE Ottica Zero 8 min , 2007

Nadya Cazan's unapologetic nature is surprisingly the sort of attitude that Madison Avenue tends to co-opt for commodification purposes. She's beautiful, cool, enchanting and she doesn't seem to need much. If I saw her in a commercial for perfume or yogurt, I would probably immediately go out and buy some. In the film Ottica Zero, Swedish filmmaker Maja Borg relies heavily on the muse like qualities of Nadya Cazan. The film is half biography, half futurist fantasy. Nadya is (or plays) a woman who was on the brink of major commercial success when she turns her back on the star system ('I didn't want to make anything that had no purpose,' she says) to live as an ascetic amongst modern society. She does not touch money. She wears a Muslim-style body covering. She lives on kosher food and fish heads. As Nadya speaks about her past and what has led her to her present, their is a second monologue from a 90 year-old futurist (can somebody say oxymoron) who has dedicated the rest of his life to offering an alternative resource based economy. No more money and all the messy social strife that goes along with it. In his Utopian vision, people would trade useful resources for other useful resources and we would all be free from judgement.

NEM in Maja Borg´s Ottica Zero

The film is breathtakingly beautiful. Borg captures Cazan as some sort of modern day Alice in Wonderland and asceticism hasn't looked this good since Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Somehow these three films orbit each other in their relationship to judgement, consumerism and the feminine ideal and I suspect beauty is at the heart of this constellation.

--more soon S.S.

Sunday, February 10

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A Rude Kind of Staring Contest

Shaun Wilson, Uber Nocturnus iii (2007), HDV , 9 mins

Saturday, February 9th--Tonight the real meat and bones of experimental short films were out in full force. The traditional narrative was no where to be found and the idea of film itself was taken for quite a philosophical ride by a variety of film makers from Australia and beyond. Shaun Wilson, whose name reminds me of the Factory records impressario Tony Wilson in it's seeming innocuousness compared to such a controversial personality, curated a set of Australian films that touched on his favorite subject matters--destruction, mystery, horror, the undead, and pornography. These films relied on odd juxtapositions, spooky lighting filters, and eerie music.

Tammy Honey, 9 Cinemas (2008), HDV as single channel projection, DVD, colour, sound, 5 mins

Shaun Wilson's wife Tammy Honey provided the most unique vision in this series of films. The film called 9 Cinemas opened with a screen filled with nine boxes reminiscent of the opening credits for the uber drippy and inexplicably popular American tv series, The Brady Bunch. Instead of a Brady in each box, however, they were filled with scantilly clad women in various states of undress and arousal. The continuous soundtrack throughout the film was filled with the sighs, moans and heavy breathing we've come to associate with pornography. Slowly the differences between 'popular pornography' and this particular instantiation become more clear. These women are shaking their bodies far more vigorously than one would expect from a seasoned porn queen. Their breasts and stomachs and thighs bounce and jiggle with a spastic motion that seems only slightly out of place for the genre. Secondly, the costumes are close to the usual porn-fare but slightly off somehow. One actress has on construction worker's safety headphones, another wears a Rambo commando outfit complete with gun, still another wears a navy blue farmer-girl turned grunge goddess buttondown, her hair in pigtails. Somehow all of these costumes are a bit complicated visually. Typical pornography is so direct in its motivations and its presentation that the viewer does not need to think about what he or she needs to think about while they are watching. Tammy Honey's honies, on the other hand, provoked the slightest question mark. Or maybe it was the setting--an art film festival--that problematized the viewers relationship to the actresses onscreen. Every so often a woman would be shown shoulders up, in one of the saucy costumes, just staring at the viewer questioningly. I can't even be sure it was the same woman every time, although I seem to remember this. There were 9 screens afterall so it's hard to keep track. But this woman seemed to be staring at the viewer so directly that if you happened to be looking back at her, it was uncomfortable. Was that Tammy Honey, I wondered? It was over before I could form any solid guesses. The sighs and heavy breathing just gone and the room, like all rooms where pornography has taken place, was eerily silent.

The second curator Saturday evening, Daniela Butsch, showed a series of minimal films (compiled by Barbara Hindahl (pK) ) under the heading Minimale Veraenderung. These films were certainly all minimal but they had very different approaches to minimalism. Some were more contemplative including Butsch's own piece Speed Manipulations where she shot the jet propelled current of ocean water at different speeds changing the sound quality and the pattern of the water itself. Martina Wolf had two pieces about the reflections of windows, in the film Fensterbild (13 min, 2001) a window tilted into a room reflects the sterile industrial building outside. Using her hand or a string to pull the window closer and farther away from herself, Wolf creates a dreamlike undulating reflection where the outside and the inside conflate. Perhaps my favorite piece from this series was entitled, The Department of Water and Power, and the film was simply 7 or 8 minutes still shooting a generator during the night. Obviously this is boring. It's the same image and there is no expectation that the image will change while being filmed. It's a power station, they're pretty stable. But it wasn't at all Zen like either as water or a window or a wall might be Zen. No, this was a stare down between the camera and the generator and as soon as I wrapped my head around that, I began to really admire the piece. A still frame shot in real time with real sound, The Department of Water and Power was an experiment in confronting the menacingly banal. The generator whined and hummed continuously, one became aware that the generator would continue to make its generator noise even when the camera was gone. The camera was just doing the difficult work of an investigative journalist with a bad interview--simply observing and trying to push back against the monolith with its own presence. It's certainly a rude staring contest and a thankless job which the camera won't win but for the duration of the film, the audience was just as powerless as the filmmaker and just as exasperated. When the film finally ended, just as suddenly as it had begun, the absence of that awful whining noise was as gratifying as being released from nipple-clamps. Lars Von Trier needs A-list actresses and brutal schedules to create that kind of symbiotic torture with his audience. It's really more minimal and economic to go the route of the power station.

--More Monday, SS

Saturday, February 9

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Carole Kim

Friday, February 8th--Carole Kim is mainly an installation artist from Los Angeles but last night Catherine Foster from the Live Box gallery in Chicago put together a series of Kim's short films. I have to admit that I had not seen any of Carole Kim's work before but as the first short, Old Faithful, filled the screen, I felt she was a girl after my own heart. Old Faithful, for those of you who don't know, is a geyser in Calistoga that goes off once every hour or so unleashing thousands of gallons of water into the sky. Old Faithful is also; a tourist trap, a metaphor for male erections and male orgasms, a kitschy excursion on the way to Calistoga wine tastings. You can sense immediately that Kim understands all of this. She sets up her shot a meter or so away from the Old Faithful crowd and lets the scene unfold as faithfully as any gathering of mixed American tourists will allow. Just before Olf Faithful spurts his juice, the screen fills with typed text, 'Did you ever light a firecracker and have it go fizzle instead of go BANG!' One is inclined to see these as Kim's words, her retrospective narration of the scene. And the words seem to function on multiple levels just as the name Old Faithful does. Is she talking about all the worlds small attractions and their mediocre-at-heart nature? Is it a metaphor for the lives of these tourists that sit patiently awaiting the blast off and then scuttle back to their tour buses on the way to another preconceived, regulated activity? Whatever it is, those words seem profound and function like an insider wink between the viewer and Kim.

It's always a bit difficult to figure out the tone of these 'hands off' pieces. Tourists are silly and sort of unsympathetic and they behave faithfully for Kim's camera, saying all manner of typically hilarious touristy things like--'now we're just in time for the bus,' and 'it didn't smell as sulfur-y as i thought it would.' Inevitably the sense that their's a cruel distance from Kim, that she's inviting us to laugh at these tourists, sinks in. But then something remarkable happens--a man on his way past Kim's camera toward the parking lot mutters the words that filled the screen only a few minutes before. With a slightly midwestern accent and a tone that conveys nothing and everything he says to his wife--'Did you ever light a firecracker and have it go fizzle instead of go BANG!' It's a small moment but it totally changes the meaning of the piece. She, Kim, was uttering someone elses words. She found them poetic enough to set the whole scene around and her intentions become more alligned with those of the watchful observer than the cynical satirist.

In Confromed Bits, another film by Kim, she continues to engage the tension between what is ordinary and what is deeply imbued with meaning. We watch a woman's arms carefully washing dishes, methodically drying them and placing them in a rack. Once again the screen fills with text--'Feeling overwhelmed by the mundane and the profound my brother told me to do the dishes and the rest would follow.' Kim makes the task of doing the dishes dreamlike by slowing down the sound and making the pitch low and echoey. She also plays a bit with color, at one point filling the smaller sink with a red color fill that suggests not so much blood as something magical and magenta. The viewer is transfixed by the spectacle and the whole Obsessive Compulsive ritual of washing dishes does seem to flutter between the mundane and the profound without ever choosing a definite side. Perhaps this is Kim's gift, to take us only so far down the philosophical hedge path and then drop off and let us fend for ourselves.

--more soon S.S.

Chasing the Pools 8 min 30s, DV, 2005
Chasing the Pools is a single-channel video based on an immersive performance /installation exploring live cameras on dancers seamlessly integrated into the landscape of live-mix video projection. Their lit bodies became one moving image, dematerializing or re-materializing the body, while the background remained another. These channels were projected onto numerous scrims in a large tree grove. The video combines the composite live-feed image with the original source material.

Friday, February 8

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Opening Night and Two Spanish Shorts

Opening Night and Two Spanish Shorts

Thursday, February 7th: Hi, I'm Sabrina Small, blogger number 2 for the Directors Lounge. Having been in Berlin for only five months I am still fairly awed by the creative capabilities of this city and its independent filmmakers. I grew up in Los Angeles, the polar opposite of free-thinking and free-filmmaking Berlin and until I was about 21, I believed that films were made with famous actors, big studios and lots of wasted money. Ok, I exaggerate because actually, I was lucky enough to take an experimental film class in highschool and I was exposed (my eyes almost fell out of their sockets) to the non-narrative, psychologically profround, whimsical, and aesthetically free world of experimental films. The first experimental film I ever saw was Moth Light, in fact, and it was playing last night in the foyer of the Director's Lounge, perhaps as a sort of talisman for the films being shown behind the curtain.

Of the films shown last night, I was struck most by the two very different comedies from Spain. Of all the films shown, these two were by far the most traditional in their narrative structure but sometimes it's that which seems familiar that helps us to glimpse how very different these films are from the usual box office fair. In Ciro Altabás's Made in Japan, (2007, 10 min) the set up is like an old fashioned joke and like all good jokes, the success is in the storytelling. Here our storyteller is a slightly befuddled everyman with sympathetic bulging eyeballs , who must explain to his extremely ticked off girlfriend why he missed her sister's engagement party. With accelerated voiceover interspersed with bits of dialogue and some of the most economical visual storytelling I've seen recently, we follow the hero of this joke from his mother's mink coat, to the crowded airports and streets of Japan, to a kendo sword fighting competition, as he searches for his'true' father and a way to evade the wrath of his girlfriend. Altabas uses his footage to maximum comic effect, like when the hero departs the plane and is greeted by a crowd of screaming Japanese women. The side angle shot of him coming off the plane gives the viewer just enough of his expression and the blushing embarrassment on his face to make the scene intimate and hilarious. Likewise, the supporting characters are so warmly rendered that you'd almost like to see a film about any one of them as well. They seem so rich and so real. The hero's spanish couch-potato father has a truly sublime and undecipherable bullfighting demonstration with a sheet in the living room that was imaginative in its use of camera angles and very funny indeed. Altabas crams so much into 10 minutes that it leaves you on the one hand, impressed with the compression and amazed by the fullness of the film, and on the other hand, wanting to see about two hours more of whatever he'd like to show you.

In Xavi Sala's La Parabólica (2007, 12 min) the visual world builds up very slowly. There's a hill and some sheep and a man listening to the radio, the sheep herder presumably. Slowly the camera covers the village and the radio or a television broadcast keeps it's presence in every shot. Soon it becomes apparent that we are in Valencia and that the new Pope is visiting the town in his weird little Pope-mobile. There is one man in the town who seems uninterested in this spectacle and as he searches futilely for a Pope-free channel his television reception cuts out and he is forced to confront his broken antenna on the roof of his house. In a screenwriting class I took in college the most important thing we were told was 'show don't tell' and Sala's La Parabolica does a lot of showing. The action is propelled by exactly what happened before and is shifted by whatever happens next. You can almost imagine the story of this film being told at the bedside of a small very-unsleepy child who constantly insists, 'and then what...and then what,' to avoid having to go to sleep. The story is so linear and simple it makes every scene seem somehow more than it is. One man's struggle with his busted antenna becomes a metaphor for dissention from catholicism, the dichotomy of industrialisation and pastoral life in a little Spanish village, the struggle between belief and failure. Just when this man has done everything humanly possible to fix his antenna, it still doesn't work. He makes another in a series of cross village bike rides to get a large bottle of wine and he sits in his small house drinking wine in the dark with the sounds of static hissing from the tv set like some sort of spectral warning to those who think they can champion the gods of industry. Just then a chicken flies into the net of the antenna and the man gesticulates wildly and verbally to get the chicken off his roof. It was only in this moment that I realized the film was more of less silent. Besides the radio/tv broadcasts. Of course the chicken is the miracle and he lands in such a way that the tv recpetion comes back into focus with heightened powers. Suddenly this village man in Valencia is flooded with a veritable orgy of channels and we see with him the good, the bad, the ugly and the more or less indescribable world of televisual imagery.The sound of the channels keep changing as the camera pans out and closes with a bookend of images leading this time from the center of the village back to the hills.

The two films, both Spanish, both comedies, both roughly the same length have such incredibly different speeds or modalities in which they run. Altabas's film feels fast and jaunty while Sala's feels much more contemplative and slow. One is absolutely reliant on dialogue while the other's success is due in large part to the fact that there is no dialogue. But I think what they both share is a very precise sense of characterization and impeccable comedic timing.