Everything Else is Everything Else

(JB) Time for my last post on this years Directors Lounge festival, which ended with a feature film, performances and a best-of screening on Sunday. To accordingly keep the mood down for a bit, I'll start with a rather not-so-good review of Marcel Grant's full feature film “Coffee Sex You”, about a young, attractive and upwardly mobile banker who decides to kill herself on her 27^th birthday for reasons of unresolved childhood issues and an insufficiently medicated psychiatric disorder. Also, her married lover dumps her right in the beginning of the film, and we will see these three, obviously inter-related quandaries repeated throughout the narrative in flashbacks lest we forget that it's really tough. Grant and lead actress Rosie Fellner do a good job in depicting clinical depression as a state which is essentially dullness and self-injury, and not a certain wackiness and truly deep emotions as shown often in mainstream cinema, but things go decisively wrong with the introduction of virtually every of the film's other characters, which all look and act like straight out of a H&M advert. There is the thoughtful-but-charming main male lead (a screenwriter and the heroine's obvious love interest) in a corduroy jacket, blue jeans and colourful oversized scarves, and a tough-but-sexy indie film director, who – believe me – sported a fedora and neck-tie, because that's apparently what you wear when you're gender-concious female artist. While the “romantic comedy” aspect of the film prevails most of the time (apart from various hints to the 2005 London bombings, which I disliked even more, as, well, Terror is about real people dying and not the emotional predicaments of the young urbanite), the heroine – I'll spoil this one for you, this time – does indeed kill herself in the end; you might try to, by force, interpret a kind of unreliable narrator device into the film and thus legitimize the clichéd plot & characters as something she had constructed / seen through during her downward spiral. But maybe you don't have to, just watch “Last Life in the Universe” instead for a non-mainstream take on aimless & suicidal people in their late twenties.

There was a similar disparity between form and substance in several of the films during Friday's Film and Poetry programme, for example in Kylie Hibbert's animated short “Mirror” (2005) after a poem by Sylvia Plath, which was illustrated with cut-outs straight from drawings & adverts from 50ies magazines and set to a gaily bouncing, funky tune; it did look fluid and charming indeed, but stood in an rather irritating contrast to Plath's haunting and desperate poem. Again, one might understand this as a subliminal critique of the gender main-streaming propagated through fashion and advertising, but as – according to the description on the zebra award's website – it's basically about “expand[ing] typographical conventions of published poetry“, Hibbert might not have been particularly interested in either the poem itself nor its author's era and biography.

Form & substance joined nicely in Joe Merrell's outstanding “Universal Now”, though, another piece from the Urban Research programme shown in the foyer. Merrell used the usually corny technique of 3D glasses to create a eerie, dreamlike promenade through a night-time city by layering slightly displaced footage and aligning the layers to different levels of depth; in the most mundane sequences, it was a genuine recreation of the simple effect you get by looking through multiple, reflecting glass panes at night, in others, the displaced lights and signals hovered in front of the screen like the apparition of an elusive urban deity. Like many pieces of good media art, you can describe the concept of “Universal Now” in one sentence, but have to experience it at first hand to actually understand how it works.>

Another work I enjoyed was “Beatbox” (2007), a short film by Finnish artist Jani Ruscica, which sets the fine art of beatboxing in a let's say very spatialised urban context (I missed it during Tuesday's screening, but it was fortunately shown as one of the highlights in yesterday's compilation). The film itself is roughly divided in two parts, the first one starring Brooklyn slam poet Vocab, the second one showing a performance by several beatboxers, who recreate the sounds and rhythms of their home city in a both hyper-realistic and very theatrical, staged way; the second part being shot in the dark, using a flash-light or beacon to track the performers while they produce a live soundtrack you can easily mistake for the authentic noises of night-time animals and urban racket in the beginning. While difficult to pinpoint, it is obvious that this kind of performance has its political undertones, as has the high-speed flow of the spoken word artists; in a sense, they reclaim the rogue, irrational elements of the city's sound-scape to give it a new texture, and signature. I like this, and I hope you did as well, and also all the other fine films we had the opportunity to see during this year's Directors Lounge –

Thank you for reading,

Jacob

Keats and Yates are on Your Side

(SS) Saturday night, the Directors Lounge presented its second collaboration with the Zebra Poetry FiIm Festival. This project sets poems to film--film being anything that shows up on a screen--and for some poems, this process breathes new life into the medium. The good, from my perspective, was the poetic interpretation by Jochen Kuhn, who animated his poem Sonntag 1. This poem was a rambling narrative of one man's uninspirational Sunday walk through an archetypal deserted urban landscape. The poem and the animation explore how the absence of anything spectacular can actually produce an inspired work of art. The notion of writing a poem about not having anything to write a poem is about as postmodern as you can get. And yet, Kuhn makes the world of the narrator accessible and funny without losing the sense of ennui that inspired (or didn't inspire as it were) the poem. One of my favorite lines goes, "Normally your gifts regulate things but I'm too old to be gifted." The monologue has the quality of a balloon slowly leaking air and the animation does as well. The monochromatic gray palette reveals all kinds of typical scenes in urban dwelling but somehow they are magically empty as opposed to boring.

Another wonderful interpretation of film and poetry came from the Russian director Igor Strembitsky with his piece Podorozhni (Wayfarers). The poetry of this film is spoken not in a conventional story mode but through various living poets in the director's landscape. The camera leads us through a slightly terrifying mental asylum in the Russian countryside and we first meet a doctor who cheerfully looks after the inmates. He walks into people's rooms and introduces them to the camera. At one point he holds up a long-haired cat and tells it to smell the camera, "Smell the camera and be in the film," he says and there is this sense of spontaneous poetry alive in his words. The inmates also add to this sense of poetry by singing traditional Russian songs about love, the comfort of sleeping and waking to find your mother holding a glass of milk for you, the pleasures of springtime and all manner of subjects. At other points the film is silent and the inmates pose candidly before the camera reminding one of the photographs Diane Arbus became famous for in the 1960's. In richly rendered black and white, the faces of the inmates, rain dripping over leaves, the long spooky corridors of the asylum and the cat's curious face sniffing the camera all have the poetic power of a thousand words. Maybe it's cheating to call this poetry but the landscape is so lush and strange I don't mind. 

The poetry/film combination was not always successful however, and one example stands out for me as really atrocious. Taatske Pieterson's, One Person/ Lucy was a poem and a film that struck a continual sour note. The visual trick to this film was to have a woman's head repeated over and over again, each head representing the deaths of unknown masses which she rattles off line by line. One person dies by swallowing a bad cheeseburger, four people die from a roof collapsing on their heads. Each line is structured in the same way and the effect is not chilling, as I think it was intended to be, but more like one of those reactionary American news programs where everyone is about to die from some toothpaste or bleach product or another and the newscasters faithfully incite terror in the average human being over activities as simple as walking or going to the grocery store. Death is a really interesting subject, no doubt, but relying on the profundity of death to carry a really bad poem is like presuming that just by wearing a tight dress and a lot of lipstick, you will become sexy. There's more to death and sex than merely following a formula and there's more to poetry than words. 

-S.S. 

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Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Cities So Different, So Appealing?

(JB) Apart from the regular screenings, the Directors Lounge programme included several works that were shown in the foyer as projections or via PC screens; as I unfortunately didn't catch much of Saturday's screenings, I'd like to drop some lines on some of these pieces, which were also part of Klaus W. Eisenlohr's Urban Research series.
First, there was [13terShop], a documentary project by Florian Thalhofer and Kolja Mensing, shot during one month spent by the two artists in a mall in Bremen. The DVD was made using a Flash-based authoring system by Thalhofer himself; the project's websites are rife with the usual buzzwords like “rhizomatic”, “non-linear” or the invariably misunderstood “interactive”, which I stopped caring about some time ago (and even more with the advent of a new breed of brilliant, cinematic video games like Portal or Gears of War, which make all the ruminations on narration and/or interactivity somehow irrelevant), but I do care about a intuitive interface, interesting footage and some good editing, which were all present in Thalhofer's and Mensing's DVD piece. The editing itself is part of the new-media approach of the [13terShop] DVD, which consists of a number of short scenes – interviews with workers and shoppers, and rather atmospheric footage with a voice-over by the artists themselves – that are arranged in a way that creates various possible paths through the material (after watching one of the clips, you can choose between two others). I'll refrain from using the term “story-lines” here, as this entire idea of the project seems not to be the creation of a coherent narrative, but an accumulation of fragments; you will recognize the faces of the different interviewees after a while, so it's up to you if you choose to listen to another of their stories, or somebody else's. Obviously, the choice of the material included on the DVD has been the artists' in the end, but the process that led to the film's creation was somehow opened to the public by a web diary and the possibility to comment on and even contribute to the work via the internet and, of course, directly in the shopping mall itself. This kind of both very subjective but, yes, interactive – obviously not through the simple click-to-choose element of the DVD, but rather through many layers of possible feedback included in the documentary process. I suppose this might be the way journalism will be going in the future; Gonzo journalism had unearthed the subjective core of the documentary process in the 20^th century, and maybe it's time to pack even more subjectivity into it with some advanced media technology. Way to go, Web 2.0! (I suppose this will sound as stale as the entire nineties “rhizome” thing ten years from now, but, well, I'm writing a blog here)

I had been writing about the parasitic use of the urban environment earlier in the context of the Surveillance Camera Players and other works; there was a hint of the irreverent usage of architecture too in “The Happy Ones”, a video installation by Ellen Bornkessel from 2007, although the scenes of urban leisure and relaxation she had captured might have been as much intended by well-meaning architects and planners, as also somehow accidental re-interpretations of various spaces by the cities' inhabitants (including rabbits). Official urban planners often try to stress the friendly and somehow utopian qualities of new-built environments, and Bornkessel managed to work out situations in which the often bizarre concepts of utopian aesthetics collided with similarly dubious or blunt displays of innocent fun & frolicking – including an image of a huge cluster of fancy balloons, which might have come out right of a Superflat painting with its rather demonic incarnation of juvenile paraphernalia.

Cheers, JB