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LOVE AMONG THE RUINS (PAGE TWO)
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The morning program at Flickerings is always a little
different than the rest of the schedule, since that's the time when those in
attendance are mostly younger people who may not come for anything else at
Flickerings — kids who probably stayed up late the night before going
to concerts and who aren't quite awake enough for a seminar. Yet from the
beginning, they've always been a surprisingly-eager audience for our early
morning short film showcase — and for good reason. An hour or so of
outside-the-box thinking from new filmmakers, often as young as the people
watching, can inspire one with that astonishing sense that the world is much
bigger and more interesting than we might have thought. This year we had the
usual variety of films and filmmakers on the program — short narratives,
documentaries, animated and experimental projects. Fresh from Sundance
acclaim was Rob Van Alkemade's Preacher With an Unknown God, featuring
televangelist-styled performance artist and anti-consumer activist, "Reverend
Billy." Rob's just finishing up a feature version of this film that you'll
be hearing about. We also screened a selection of films from the Winnipeg
Film Group, led by the Group's shining star, Guy Maddin, whose film with
Isabella Rossellini My Dad Is 100 Years Old was a poignant close for
our Rossellini program.
Speaking of Winnipeg filmmakers, among the films screened in the morning
Showcase program we had a look at two projects that were actually made last
year at the festival as a part of the Flickerings Film Lab — Kevin
Nikkel's Distance and Bevan Klassen's Festival Incidents. These
two guys have been a part of Flickerings from the beginning and have been so
generous with their time and energy and creativity over the years. Even given
the crazy circumstances of shooting a film during a music festival, they
produced a pair of fine short films and continue to inspire our little
community with their steady progress as filmmakers. Soon enough we'll be
filling entire morning movie slots with their debut feature films.
On that note, this was indeed the year that we had to begin to find room for
feature-length projects in our morning Showcase. It's hard enough to find room for
all the short films we'd like to show; to program our Showcase I've had to
utilize some quantum minutes that give us sixty-four and more minutes per
hour. The other Flickerings staffers shake their head over my overstuffed
schedule, but until the festival can expand to a few more days, I'll probably
continue to shoehorn films into the Showcase slots and give as many
filmmakers a chance to share their work with us as possible. (With that in
mind, make sure you get us your short film by next year's Showcase entry
deadline, March 1st. Updated entry information will eventually be posted here.)
Of course, putting the Danielson movie into a 9:00 AM slot was a dirty trick,
but it worked: this documentary about a quirky local favorite musician filled
the house with the biggest audience we had all festival. I joked with the
crowd that now that we had them in there, we were going to spring the
Dardenne's L'Enfant on them. Very funny, they thought, but I suppose
you don't want to push too far with this crowd that early in the morning!
Dan Smith is actually someone I got to know years ago, when fresh out of
Rutgers he went to find himself in a religious community (where some of us
are still looking for ourselves.) The self he found turned out to be one of
the most unique, unforgettable individuals you'll ever meet. I first heard
Dan singing at a gallery opening of a mutual friend. He was set up in a
corner, belting out a tune in a way that I thought must be what Mighty Mouse
might have sounded like if his foot had been caught in a Kryptonite trap.
But that was Danielson, the one that soon became the darling of the New York
club circuit and music magazines, and favorite son of Cornerstone Festival,
where he appeared frequently over the next few years. In talking about St.
Francis at the Imaginarium and Flickerings, the term "Holy Fool" was used
again and again to describe both the saint's childlikeness and also the
scandalous way he upset conventional expectations — and with such a
firm and an appealing sense of who he was, it was no wonder people wanted to
follow along. Dan's the same way: if I was making a new life of St. Francis,
I couldn't think of a better person to play the title role. It was a
privilege to screen the documentary Danielson: A Family Movie at
Flickerings this year.
The other feature we screening in the morning was Sidney King's Pearl
Diver. Bevan actually met Sidney at the Winnipeg International Film
Festival last year and invited him there to come down to Flickerings and share his film
with us — along with the backstory of how it was made. Sidney and Bevan
(who is indeed currently preparing to shoot his own first feature) made a
great team in their seminar on independent filmmaking. Bevan knew just what
questions to ask, and our audience, being especially attuned to the nuts and
bolts of filmmaking, was also fully engaged in the discussion. Along with
his seminar and screening, Sidney pitched in with our evening filmmakers
meeting, where (unbeknownst to most of our crowd) some of the most meaningful
moments of Flickerings occur each year. Each evening, filmmakers present at
the festival gather and talk shop, screen works-in-progress, and generally
encourage one another. In these meetings we often get a first look at new
work by some of our regulars, including Bevan's dynamite new short, which
should be finished in time for next year's Flickerings Film Showcase.
Another new and welcome participant in both the nightly discussions and a
morning workshop was our old friend Jim Andre (who actually worked a couple
days on Sidney's film). Jim runs the lighting and grip equipment rental
company, Film Branch in Chicago and has worked on many independent films and
has lots of war (and horror!) stories. The first day of the festival, Jim
conducted a workshop on film lighting and had a couple dozen newly-minted
grips unloading gear and assembling c-stands and flags as they lit a scene in
the Flickerings building. This "hands-on" aspect of our event is crucial in
keeping Flickerings the sort of film festival we envisioned at the beginning.
Our other two morning movies were powerful and even
sobering. The first time I saw Sophie Scholl: The Final Days my
response was, "This is definitely a Flickerings film". It's a fairly
conventional melodrama in some ways, but watching with our audience at
Flickerings, it hit me especially hard. The fact that our audience was
roughly the same age as the protagonists had something to do with it, but so
did the fact that while they were watching the first half of the film, I was
in the back laying out copies of the White Rose leaflets for people to read
as they exited. It was, in fact, the furtive distribution of those very
leaflets to college students in 1943 Munich that got the members of the White
Rose resistance group arrested by the Gestapo and their story turned into the
film we were watching; the experience was haunting in the extreme. In
general, I find booing movie Nazis can become a form of "cheap grace": it
doesn't take much courage to say that Nazis are bad or root for the
Resistance to win. What I want from such a film is a finger pointed right
back at me, asking hard questions that stay with me long after the film has
ended. Sophie Scholl, and both the courage and cost of discipleship
the film dramatizes, remains with me.
Likewise our other morning film, Winter Soldier. This was a
last-minute addition to the schedule. A documentary featuring (shockingly!)
young American veterans talking about terrible things they saw and did in
Vietnam, this film virtually vanished for thirty years after its 1972
release. Like the war itself and its veterans, few wanted anything to do
with Winter Soldier except those who passed it between college
campuses like samizdat. Last year, the film was finally given a
limited theatrical run and released on DVD. This year, events in the news
made me think that bringing it to our audience was a way of supporting troops
nobody listened to for so long, but whose stories of just what war can do
even to decent Americans needs to be heard in our time. No doubt, the
discussion afterward might have gotten ugly, and I had tried to prepare
myself for that possibility, but our audience kept things very thoughtful and
respectful. That we might have Vietnam vets in the audience with their own
difficult stories was something I didn't expect, and the onscreen realities
were brought home in a powerful and unforgettable way as one of these shared
his own still-unresolved feelings the film stirred once again. Like at the
Imaginarium, where real losses and griefs became in some way the matter of
the program at our Day
of the Dead service, it's an important reminder to tread carefully
anytime the topic we're discussing is wrapped around real people's lives and
hearts. But then again, the topic of war and atrocities is wrapped to a
certain degree around all of our hearts at present, certainly my own, and its
hard to imagine not trying to at least talk about these matters together in a
setting like Flickerings.
We've talked quite a bit, over the past six years, about the difference
between product and process at Flickerings. For the filmmakers, it has to do
with getting as much out of the climb as the summit; making the creation of
art a journey and ongoing wrestling in which any particular product is
actually less important than the ongoing process of creating them. For film
watchers, the struggle can be the same. How do we break the habit of just
blankly, abstractly, consuming films and going home unchanged? How do we
prevent Flickerings from just being one more way to use media to put distance
between ourselves and one another and the world? It's an ongoing problem,
and each year we have to come up with new ways to try to make sure this event
remains fresh and engaged and continues to value process as much or more than
product. As for me, I can tell you I'm definately not finished with
Rossellini, that my personal process with that filmmaker and his work is
ongoing — and that the paths he has helped open up for me will surely
lead to other directors and works. And I have a feeling that it will be the
same for some of the other people who we've helped "ruin" by exposing them to
these sort of challenging films and directors. To answer the young man's
earlier question — "How did you know to do this?" The answer I gave him
was basically that we're just making it up as we go along. The initial
impulse involved a deep desire to connect with other people over meaningful
experiences with film, to generate a discussion that was larger than any one
particular film or even film itself. Flickerings is just one annual
manifestation of that discussion. Our hope is that you carry it on in other
ways throughout the year and bring your experiences and insights back next
year to pick up with us where we all left off. That deadline for the Short
Film Showcase again is March 1st.
We hope to see you next year at Flickerings 2007.
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* For more post-fest coverage, see Imaginarium 2006 report
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