The Fourth Annual Vancouver Under-ground Film Festival
see me, feel me
November 25, 2001
The Blinding Light!!
November feels like a while back, I know, but with Discorder’s annual hiatus and all, there were some worthy events from late autumn that didn’t get covered. So for the first column of the new year, I’m reaching into the bleeding, knackered corpse of 2001 to fish one of them out.
Some fairly savvy curation went into programming the vast number of short films and videos on offer at this past fest. Not counting those screenings devoted to a single filmmaker, there were no fewer than 39 works that came in at 10 minutes or under. These were grouped into clusters whose screenings bore names obliquely referring to the territory that the films seemed to share.
This night in particular, felt like a kind of themed cinematic cabaret, in which each little film had the chance to stand as a fully realized piece of screen art. Perhaps it was my hangover from the LIVE biennial which was raging to a close at the time, but a strong performance art flavour come through in many of the works collected under the programme title see me, feel me.
One of the standouts was Emma W. Howes’ Kitchen Dances, in which a woman moved claustrophobically beneath a kitchen counter. As her manoeuvres became more overtly skilled, her restless frustration seemed all the more perverse. The strong, velvety blues song on the soundtrack was in perfect counterpoint and felt like it could have been coming from a radio just out of shot. The whole thing was strangely exhilarating. Equally physical, but in a very different way, was Erika Lincoln’s The Cannery. It both fascinated and repelled. A woman’s body, all flattened and smeared inside a tight suit of transparent plastic seemed to leak body fluids as the suit filled and overflowed with water.
Nature provided the set design in Clancy Dennehy’s Path, as two Kokoro dancers crawled naked toward each other like lizards about to fight or mate. The final, unexpected shot of them leaving tracks in the sand as they slithered toward the sea was amazing. This was an intimate and accomplished piece of work.
Amey Kazmerchyk’s Finding the Truth in Difficult Times kept resonating long after the screening was over. It featured a heterosexual couple fucking on a bed. The woman, however, was rivetted by a rape scene playing on television. The brutality of the sex on the telly was in jarring contrast to the gentle, consensual coupling happening in front of it—and in an insidious way, tainted it. The rape scene looked like it was a clip from Boys Don’t Cry. If so, it was an interestingly layered choice. Another keeper was Brian MacDonald’s Sex and Sadness. Deceptively simple-looking, its power built relentlessly as it recorded a young woman reciting her absurdly dire resume of sexual and familial relationships. Putting an odd spin on things was the fact that her voice track was reversed, and like a “foreign” tongue, had to be subtitled.
The latter two films occurred early in the programme and were hard acts to follow, but karaoke man Rob Dayton can be quite the palate cleanser. In Jacob Gleeson’s Showdown, he belted out an earnest rendition of “St. Elmo’s Fire” while a dignified old drunk in the foreground studiously ignored him. The static camera gave it all a low-rent verité quality. The other performance documentary was Flick Harrison’s Kunk, which could have kept us entertained at twice its length. Tracking the eponymous cabaret  duo whose act blends old-fashioned burlesque with Betty Crocker, its dead funniest moments actually occurred offstage. Harrison’s camera knew just where to be and he nudged things into place with some impish editing.
Kim Dawn and Scott Russell have been popping up a lot lately on the local performance art and indie video scenes and their collaboration on Because I’m Fascinating was the biggest giggle and shriek of the evening. As we watched their upside down heads engaged in one of those silly but crucial relationship conversations, our visual orientation was knocked akimbo. Oddly enough, this made what they were saying come through all the more fresh and clear.
A few of the films, while admirably executed and interesting as ideas, didn’t really squeeze me. Chris McCaroll’s endlessly repeated sequence of a woman pacing across a room in A Single Yesterday did convey “internal struggle,” but the point remained cerebral and was made in the first three or four takes. The rest was fingernails on chalkboard. Evan Tapper’s study of a street artist and his chatty subjects made such frenetic use of fast-forward in Fleeting Intimacy that form was interfering with content. The opposite felt true for Brad Poulsen’s Osmosis. Two separate 16mm educational films were projected simultaneously and blended in a live edit. Filmmakers in the audience were mightily impressed, but I couldn’t help wondering if it might be better to do this with more interesting films.
Thanks to festival director Alex MacKenzie for orchestrating what he called “four days of insanity” and for lubricating the last night of the VUFF with free beer and port for everyone at the post-screening mingle! •