Movies

Antigenic Drift

Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival

Among the strongest of the dozens of films and videos screening at this festival of experimental shorts are several that offer sensitive observations of details, advocating for an accepting, even meditative approach to the world. Nicky Hamlyn’s 2007 Quartet (screening as part of Group Show 6, Sun 6/22, 8 PM) offers gentle, spare black-and-white imagery of an apartment, intercutting images such as nearly blank walls and two knobs of a dresser against white to build an architecture of colliding lines and surfaces. The outdoors is seen through windows, which gives it the sense of having been filtered through an inner eye. Madison Brookshire’s similarly gentle Opening (screening at Group Show 4, Sun 6/22, 3:30 PM), a 2007 film of urban and rural landscapes, is attentive to small movements—cars in the distance, a herd of sheep. Austere but intensely focused compositions suggest that mindful observation can render ordinary sights meaningful. Fred Worden’s 2007 The After Life (screening at Group Show 5, Sun 6/22, 6 PM) rapidly intercuts similar views of a shopping mall, store signs moving slightly, consumers on an escalator in some shots and not in others. The mall’s red and pink cotton-candy colors seem appropriate to our surfeit of consumer goods.

Another group of works succeeds by juxtaposing diverse images. Densest is Daïchi Saïto’s 2007 All That Rises (Group Show 2, Sat 6/21, 7 PM), whose very brief bursts enjamb leaves, urban scenes, and abstractions. Fragmentary violin sounds form an apt soundtrack, creating a sense of points in time and space that partly come together and partly do not. Lewis Klahr, long known for his cutout animation films, confronts the medium of video in his 2007 Antigenic Drift (also part of Group Show 2) with strange and imaginative combinations, airline tickets and baggage tags floating in space like disconnected memories. And the collisions in Luther Price’s 2006 Inside the Velvet K (Group Show 6, along with Quartet, above), are wonderfully demented—an authority figure examining an X-ray surrounded by a suggestive chaos of imagery that includes a woman’s face, a flower, and an explosion.  All Group Show programs screen at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark. The festival’s opening night screening, highlighted in last week’s Reader, is Thu 6/19, 8 PM, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. There are also screenings Fri 6/20, 7 and 9 PM at the Nightingale, 1084 N. Milwaukee, 773-289-4329; and Wed 6/25 at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria. See chicagofilmmakers.org/onion_fest/onion.html or call 773-293-1447 for more info. —Fred Camper

Send a letter to the editor.

From the Reader blogs

On Film Ed M. Koziarski: "Mustachioed perverts in a spaceship fire upon a deformed, nude woman daily" in Lale Westvind's "Flesh Gun," screening in Chi(a)nimation All-Stars Sunday at Nightingale.
Friday at 11:37 am