The PDX Fest, Day 2.1

5pm Screening: 'Lay Down Tracks' + shorts about labor

I was quite excited to see a program of films dealing with issues of labor. Considering how much time labor consumes from most of our lives it has always been surprising to me how uncommon discussions or depictions of labor are in this country. But I am being naive, I suppose. This is America, birthplace of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and crap like 'Nicole and Paris on the Road.' Anyway, I digress.

This program proved to be a very mixed bag and, even though the program contains my favorite film so far from the festival (including the two programs that followed this one), I was pretty disappointed with the selections overall. But on to specifics.

Meeting with a Mortician, DV, 3'05, Tom Hanson
The description for this video is "a brief glimpse at a very mysterious profession." This thin description is appropriate as this is a very thin video. Technically it is pretty unsophisticated and, to be blunt, I don't think it is really ready for festival inclusion. . But forget the cutting from camera a in color and camera b in b&w or really develop the technique because the current usage is either little more than empty styling or a meager attempt at disguising a technical problem. Digging deeper into the interviewee would really help this video, too. Her story could end up generating deep and moving subject matter, but right now its just cute.

Getting Up: American Street Art Culture, DV, 15'00, Colin Brown
A surprisingly dull video on a very interesting and socially challenging topic is how I would sum this piece up in one sentence. But that wouldn't be completely accurate and I would hope someone would challenge me if I limited my review to such brevity. Perhaps I just have a good hangover from last year's doc on Ron English, which was both hilarious and charged. This video does start picking up when it interviews a professor, from SFSU if I remember correctly, who has great wit and offers socially trenchant commentary on the forms, implementations, and what the work means for both sides: artists for freedom, and "arbiters" of taste and social control. The graffiti artists themselves come across pretty poorly, however. For creators of "vibrant" art, they aren't very vibrant, and seem more fed up than excited about much of anything. The first interviewee does get animated toward the end of the video when talking about "the only thing that will kill graffiti is legalizing it," and it would be nice to see more of this and the professor's kind of content. The best part of the video is the art itself and, once the video gets into stride, it actually starts working quite well.

Tales From the Vertical City, DV, 13'00, Morgan Currie
I absolutely, unequivocally, loved this video. This is the closest thing to a perfect film I have seen since I don't know when. And, since I can't actually think of anything I'd want to see changed, or that stuck out as askew from the rest of the film, perhaps I should call it a perfect film. I'm just speaking for myself, of course, but let me count the ways:

1. brilliant cinematography, composition, and sensitivity to color and architectural space--while watching this video I kept thinking of Robbie Mueller's work in Wender's "The American Friend" and how he dealt with the colors of Berlin (btw, Wender's talks about this a bit on the recent dvd release of "TAF"). The visualization in this video feels very grounded and connected with the content. This works very explicitly, but connected on a very subconscious level for me. By that I mean I wasn't sitting in my seat going, "ooh, how beautiful" or, "look at that shot!" Rather, I was connecting with the spaces and places being filmed in a very visceral and direct way.
2. no narrator or voice over--this video is beautifully pure; no omniscient narrator telling me what to think or feel; no overbearing voice-over from the people depicted; just direct captures of real exchanges between the people depicted. This was absolute bliss for me. I am so fucking tired of technique taking precedence over content--that's just so TV (or Michael Bay). This video exhibits a wonderfully refreshing and respectful balance between form and content. An aside here: years ago I programmed a film series at the bar Tin Pan Alley in NYC. One of the evenings was dedicated to the work of Hermann Schlenker. I didn't expect his films to wow the audience, but as I admired the directness and purity of the films (people working at daily tasks overlaid with locally, or at least appropriately local music), I thought it might make for a unique night of viewing. Not only was that latter assumption correct, but each of the films screened received extended and robust applause that exceeded any of the other films screened during that series, and most other film screenings I've seen for that matter. That kind of reaction would be entirely appropriate to this video that Morgan has created.
3. respect for the characters lived lives--this video just feels extremely honest to me, and completely gutted of filmmaker ego. Again, I think of that night at Tin Pan Alley because content in this video takes precedence over any "stylings," and this is an all-too-rare quality in contemporary filmmaking in my opinion. Not to say I don't like stylized work, or to suggest that this film doesn't submit to certain stylistic choices or depictions but, in this case, all work in service of the experience of the video in a marvelously nuanced way. This film breathes, slowly and steadily, like a living thing.

Perhaps the best way of summing up my reaction to this video was the completely unbidden "wow!" that escaped my lips when the credits came up.

Lay Down Tracks, 16mm, 60'00, Brigid McCaffery and Danielle Lombardi
This is the film which, so far, has caused me the most consternation. The cinematography is great. Sensual, lyrical, intimate, almost ambient and dreamlike at times. The content and choice of people investigated is challenging and thorough. But editorially, this film is a mess, and I became increasingly frustrated as I sat through it. I can appreciate the "experimental" nature of the film's construction, and sometimes it works very well (particularly with the Chimney Sweep and Carney stories), but I was simply too confused too often by vague imagery that bridges stories being told by different people; who's world is this? who am I hearing? why did they put images from that person's life over that other person's voice? And the brevity of certain quotes was even more irksome. A little bit about the construction of this film for clarity. There are several characters who operate as the focus of this film: a semi-disabled male Carney, a young female Truck Driver, a young male Chimney Sweep, a (possibly) near retirement male Railroad Executive, and a female Riverboat Pilot. Each is covered for their discrete stories, and then each of their stories is broken up and intermingled. So far, so good. The problems occur, however, in how these stories are broken up and intermingled. Most of the time it seems completely arbitrary and, even more frustrating for me, a piece of extreme brevity (a one sentence quote from the Riverboat Pilot, for instance) is dropped between more extended pieces (say from the Railroad Executive and the Truck Driver). There is no connection between the content of the three pieces, so why are they even next to each other? I don't even know if the example provided is accurate because the same thing happened so many times I lost track. A very frustrating experience because, as I said at the beginning, all the pieces are there (visual/content) but they are assembled so chaotically that they undermine any inherent qualities of the source material.