The Blog/Light is Waiting

The festival proved incredibly overstimulating for me, so I unconsciously allowed this two or so weeks to go by before writing any more reflections on the films and surrounding experience. I apologize for anyone counting on the blog for up-to-date incentive to participate in the festivities. For now, let this be yours for next year!

The Sunday Shorts Program #4: The Cult of the Mustache and Other Cultural Phenomena was an incredible series, touted by all those who saw it as perhaps the best program of the entire festival. Because of my thesis work I was only able to catch the last film; and kicked myself deeply for being so responsible.

The Light Is Waiting by Michael Robinson proved an incredible ballzout blowout of finale. The film was entirely comprised of episodes from Full House. The beginning starts us off like any other episode, but completely breaks down at the drop of a TV. Existentialism and intimate horror swirl in as we are taken into a truly psychedelic journey into the cosmic underbelly of Full House.

Made perhaps fully with the program Aftereffects, it facilitated a very deep visual jam of effects and tricks; a kind of post-modern mandala for the new New age. Tony Conrad's groundbreaking film Flicker came to mind as the images of the happy family on a vacation to Hawaii breaks into red strobing and slow motion morphs, keeping me dead in my seat. A large portion of the piece is a symmetrical morph of different vacation scenes akin to some kind of mash-up of Family Circus and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom injected with a little dose of Holy Mountain.

I had to let a laugh escape at the end when Jesse is singing to a sold out beach crowd, holding an Olsen baby. The mandala symmetry morphs Jesse into the baby, almost as if to name her the new postmodern leader.