Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival

Foggy Mountains Breakdown More Than Non-Foggy Mountains

In addition to opening night on June 14, the 19th annual, expanded edition of the festival includes two programs of French films (see capsules on The Virgin's Bed and Vite/Deux Fois), two one-person shows, and six programs of shorts. Most of the work is excellent, but what's distinctive is the variety -- even the weak films are innovative. Programs run through Sunday, June 17; all the ones listed here are at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $8, $7 for students, $4 for CF members. For more information call 773-293-1447 or check chicagofilmmakers.org.

With its absurdist intertitles and bright abstractions, Jessie Stead's charming, playful Foggy Mountains Breakdown More Than Non-Foggy Mountains (2006, 59 min.) lives up to its weird name. Nine different renditions of a bluegrass tune are in keeping with the film's postmodern spirit, arguing against fixed forms and ideas. Stead will attend. Fri 6/15, 11 PM.

The longest piece in "Group Program 1: Tonal Variations" (91 min.), Luther Price's Kittens Grow Up, has an emotional edge. It intercuts cute footage of a cat mothering her kittens with scenes from a family drama featuring an abusive dad. In Black and White Trypps Number Three Ben Russell offers intense, fragmentary views of dancers, illuminated by a single spotlight, at a rock performance. Joe Gilmore and Paul Emery's Clut is an impressive essay on three-dimensional abstraction, while Kyle Canterbury continues his poetic investigations of the nature of video in four 2006 pieces. Sat 6/16, 5:30 PM.

The best piece in "Group Program 2: More Than Meets the Eye" (79 min.) is John Smith's Pyramids/Skunk (Hotel Diaries 5). Smith's visual and voice-over comments on the minute details of two hotel rooms have a wry self-indulgence that sets up his observations on the real-world horrors in Palestine. In Happy Again (2006) Gregg Biermann superimposes Gene Kelly on Kelly in footage from Singin' in the Rain to create a sensuous texture that captures some of the musical's spirit. Sat 6/16, 8 PM.

"Group Program 3: 'Curiouser and Curiouser!'" (89 min.) includes Corinna Schnitt's curious Once Upon a Time (2005): circular pans of a living room reveal more and more animals. Kittens are no surprise, but by the time goats and pigs are eating the plants she's made a wonderful point about living creatures versus bourgeois decorating. Guy Ben-Ner's Truffaut remake -- Wild Boy (2004), using his own son -- is inexcusably self-indulgent and cloyingly cute. Sat 6/16, 9:45 PM.

"Group Program 4: The Political Edge" (78 min.) includes Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville's densely allusive Freedom and Homeland (2002), which suggests Godard's own history. In Ken Jacobs's superb Capitalism: Child Labor (2006), rapid cuts between views of a huge turn-of-the-century factory magnify this massively oppressive space. Sun 6/17, 1 PM.

The films in "The Intimate Distance -- A Tribute to Mark LaPore (1952-2005)" (80 min.) were not available for preview, but LaPore's quiet observational cinema, tinged by melancholy, is well worth a look. Presented by Mark McElhatten. Sun 6/17, 3 PM.

The longest piece in "Group Program 5: Luminescence" (80 min.) is Marya Alford's Bouvier and Prusakova (2005), in which a Russian woman talks about meeting her American suitor in Minsk, marrying, and emigrating to the United States. Only at the end do we learn that "Lee" is JFK's assassin, a shock that recalls other hopeful stories gone bad. Robert Todd's Qualities of Stone and Diane Kitchen's Ecstatic Vessels are both gentle, poetic observations of small details, the texture of a surface or the shape and color of a leaf. Sun 6/17, 6:30 PM.

"Group Program 6: Dreaming Awake" (75 min.) includes abstractions like Thorsten Fleisch's Energie!, in which jagged shapes crackle with energy -- unfortunately smoothed over by the drone soundtrack. In Robert Daniel Flowers's Stereoscopic Experiment for Audience No. 2 repeated geometrical shapes produce labyrinthine effects suggesting a hall of mirrors. Rae Staseson's When Owls Dream shows a bird flying through superimposed Canadian landscapes, which gives the land a lightness and spirituality. Sun 6/17, 8:30 PM.
--Fred Camper

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