FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 

New York Underground Film Festival

As the lights went down on the opening night of the 6th Annual New York Underground Film Festival, the screen filled with possibly the shortest film in festival history. Crack, Jon Moritsugu’s (Fame Whore) new film clocks in at just forty seconds. The scenario is this: a sound guy wakes up late for a film shoot. Frantic, he unsuccessfully searches for his boom pole, and in a fit of fury he cracks the handle off his broom, and voila!, a make-shift boom pole is born. The perfect forty seconds to kick off a five day festival celebrating the roots of DIY aesthetics: fast, short, pointed and furious. Filmmaking by any means necessary.

Julien Nitzberg's Bury Me in Kern Country

As punk has long since been the aesthetic at underground film festivals, NYUFF festival director Ed Halter sharply observed "This year we’ve gone from being rockers to mods." This year’s batch of filmmakers seem to be trading in their hair spray for gel, producing a new crop of smoother, shinier and altogether glossier films. Yet while Moritsugu’s presence attests to the fact that punk will never die, the NYUFF has managed to develop and expand without selling out. With ticket sales greater than ever, and with only a couple of the films slated for theatrical release, the New York Underground Film Festival has secured itself a place above ground without losing any sense of its cultural urgency.

The opening night film and winner of the Best Feature Award was Paul McGuigan’s The Acid House, adapted by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh from his collection of short stories. The Acid House out-glitzed the Mods with its Scottish sarcasm and hyper-rave hallucinatory visuals. As the opening night party swelled into the night, (appropriately held at the pharmaceutically decorated Barmacy) local film luminaries such as Anie S-8 Stanley (programmer of the NY MIX festival) and M. M. Serra (director of the Film-maker’s Coop) danced to grooves spun by Welsh himself.

There was a special tribute to beat artist Alfred Leslie whose 1959 short Pull My Daisy (co-directed with Robert Frank and written by Jack Kerouac) is considered an underground classic. Leslie was present to introduce his films and take questions from the audience. In his The Last Clean Shirt (1964), a man and a woman get into a car, tape an alarm clock to the dashboard, and drive around with the woman talking continuously in an unknown language. This same action is repeated three times with different stream-of-consciousness subtitled narrations by poet Frank O’Hara. O’Hara’s writing brings a smartness to such silliness with lines like, "Our culture is embarrassed by its propensity to entertain." Birth of a Nation (1965), originally 120 minutes, was nearly totally destroyed in a fire, yet Leslie recovered fourteen minutes of the charred footage and recontructed the remaining pieces a few years ago. What remains is artist Willem de Kooning as Captain Nemo and actor Patrick McGee reading from the works of Marquis de Sade as two men and a woman tumble about in a freeform orgy.

It’s rare in a festival built on economy that the quality of features outweighs the quality of shorts, but this year proved exceptional in many ways. Chi Girl, directed by Heidi Ven Lier and winner of The Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance, was a compelling and fresh fictional narrative about a girl who bets a documentary filmmaker that she can pick up any guy she wants, because all men are scum, and the subsequent attraction the documentary filmmaker feels toward this fairly unlikable girl. Todd Verow’s sexy and relentless digital feature, The Trouble with Perpetual Deja-Vu won The Kim’s Festival Choice Award. The Trouble with Perpetual Deja-Vu is a gritty story about a young woman’s explorations into the outer limits of extreme sexual addictions, and is the final installment of Verow’s Addiction Trilogy which includes Little Shots of Happiness and Shucking the Curve. Sleep, the debut feature from Peter Calvin, plays with structure and high concept in an ambitious exploration of restless desires as portrayed through four characters’ unusual sleep patterns, and The Atrocity Exhibition, directed by Jonathan Weiss and based on the J.G. Ballard novel of the same name, brought the grotesque to the screen without losing its literary edge.

Programmer Andy Lampert served up a cultural smorgasbord of shorts programs for goths, punks, mods, rockers and all those whose tend to like a little dirt served up with their art. The Ultravision program featured Bang Bang, winner of The Best Experimental Award, The Psychotic Odyssey of Richard Chase by Cary Burtt, Under Chad Valley by Jeffrey Erbach and the two films which split The Best Animation Award, The Bats directed by Jim Trainor and Evil of Dracula directed by Martha Colburn. Lisa Hammer’s neo-expressionist films Crawley and The Dance of Death were featured in the Children of the Night program and The Best Short award went to Tony Cicero (Rat Dyke) for his creepy sleazy half-hour opus, My Brother Cicero. Winner of the Best Documentary went to Jeff Krulik and Diane Bernard for I Created Lancelot Link, a look at the creators of the classic ’70s TV series about a secret agent chimp and a far-out monkey rock band.

Additions to this year’s festival included panels, on-line sites, programs from the U.K. and screenings at The Pink Pony, a boho theater/cafe located a stone’s throw away from Anthology Film Archive. Jack Sargeant, British author and cultural theorist presented a rare screening of the banned mondo film True Gore, directed and produced by Industrial Culture icon Monte Cazazza that had the gore hounds squirming with every gut-wrenching frame. Jane Gang, a British painter and filmmaker, now living in New York, curated Turf UK! which featured new films from the London underground. Bradley Eros and Brian Frye, local cinephiles who run the weekly Robert Beck Memorial Theater screenings presented the shows at The Pink Pony which examined the more alchemical elements of film, featuring work by Julie Murray, Thad Povey and Mara Mattushka.

All of the panels were sold-out including "Unnatural Acts of Distribution," sponsored by AIVF and featuring Martha Colburn (Evil of Dracula), Larry Fessenden (Habit), Lance Weiler (The Last Broadcast) and Maya Churi from indieWIRE discussing the ins and outs of self-promotion. "Believe the Hype! New Technologies," a panel discussion on digital filmmaking sponsored by Film Bytes and moderated by Eugene Hernandez of indieWIRE featured a spirited exchange between Todd Verow and Todd Lincoln, as Verow told everyone to sell their film cameras and join the digital revolution.

The most notable panel was "Farewell to the Forty Deuce," a personal look at the sleazy days of 42nd Street before it got sanitized by politicians washing their hands in the pockets of real estate developers. Presented by June Lang and Jeff Krulik, panelists included Frank Henenlotter, director of the feminist classic, Frankenhooker, who presented clips from Something Weird’s video archive of rare ’50-’60s sex loops; Josh Alan Friedman, author of Tales of Times Square, who reminisced about the heyday of exploitation films, and exchanged teenage sneaky peaky stories with Henelotter; and Uncle Lou Amber, chauffeur to the strippers who had nothing but kind words to say about all the women he drove to oblivion. June Lang presented clips from her forthcoming documentary Farewell to the Deuce featuring Allen Ginsburg, porn maven Al Goldstien, and the cheeky Quentin Crisp who slyly proclaimed, "pornography is the endeavor to sell sex for more than it’s really worth." But the panel, and possibly the whole festival could be summed up by the awe I felt sitting behind Rudy Burckhardt as his films Square Times and Sodom and Gomorrah played on screen. His camera penetrated the faces of the hookers and patrons from the ’60s, while lingering on storefront windows with signs such as, "we give plaid stamps." Yes, 42nd Street once was this sexy place where it was okay to bring the wife and kids, and here was this artist who brought that history to my eyes; an old-timer who’s still making art, who’s survived it all in spite of the odds.



 
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