This year, we’re looking at film as a tool, as a medium that moves beyond the movie screen to play a central role in contemporary performance and visual practice. The filmmakers we’ve selected for TBA don’t work with celluloid and digital files in the typical way, instead looking outside of the film world for collaborators and new ideas. Meanwhile, a whole host of our performing companies incorporate innovative, real-time video and other filmic devices. So, for audiences in love with the moving picture, let’s just say we’ve got you covered.

One of our biggest opening weekend (and opening night!) projects comes from New York’s Big Art Group, pioneers of what they’ve labeled “real-time film.” In The People–Portland, the company brings together footage recorded of Portland locals during their Spring residency with live video and performance, all projected in real time on the exterior of Washington High School. It’s a bold project exploring our ideas of democracy and community, with a unique, internet-age approach to digital media.

Gob Squad (an early PICA alum) take a similarly inventive approach to film, devising complex live-streamed performances that create pure theater magic, dazzling the audiences with the charm and wit beneath their technology. In Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had it So Good), the company veils their live action behind a wall of screens, projecting their re-enactments of Warhol’s iconic 60s films in black-and-white. We won’t spoil the show, but suffice it to say, the company doesn’t completely hide behind the screens for long. The effect is wonderful.

In a very different exploration of historical documents, the Dutch artist duo Van Brummelen & De Haan re-create a controversial monument through 16mm film. Denied access to film the Pergamon frieze in Berlin (which had been “expropriated” from Turkey in the 1880s), the artists re-constructed the sculpture through hundreds of text-book photos. It’s film and photography as renegade archaeology.   In a time when film technologies are so rapidly changing, it is perhaps fitting that so many of the film-based projects take an interest in the past. Bay Area filmmaker Sam Green has looked back in time to one of the most future-minded figures ever: the visionary architect, inventor, and thinker R. Buckminster Fuller. Along with indie icons Yo La Tengo, Green will stage The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, a “live documentary” with a band-driven soundtrack and in-person narration about Fuller’s relentless pursuit of a better tomorrow.

While these projects all concern ideas and visions and projections on a grand scale, many of our TBA film events are rather more intimate. On THE WORKS stage, two innovative animator/puppeteers bring their charming, miniature performances to life through video projection. David Commander will perform In Flight, his biting analysis of contemporary media saturation and apathy, while Laura Heit will create diminutive worlds atop matchbox stages. Also lined up for THE WORKS, is a night of FUTURE CINEMA, curated by our friends at The Hollywood Theatre. With live performances by a group of “Terrifying Women,” some B-Movie Bingo of cult film clichés, and a new collaboration between Liz Harris (Grouper) and director Weston Currie, the night will be a far cry from the usual movie theater fare.

And in the visual program, Isabelle Cornaro approaches film as one of the many multi-valent tools of her practice. Much of Cornaro’s output exists in a sort of feedback loop of similar items and subjects reflected and re-reflected through different mediums. She sculpts architectural spaces, builds installations based on landscape paintings, and films her airbrushed paintings, only to then re-paint select frames of the resulting films. The ethereal results speak lovingly to process and medium, rather than overt subject matter; they are films and paintings about film and painting. So skip the multiplex and experience a new take on film in an age when our lives often seem to exist on screen.

PROPOSAL A: Strip all film elements down to the bone of outstanding acting, writing and staging, thereby reclaiming the character richness and psychological tension that was buried in the RAMBO circuses… a more violent VANYA ON 42ND STREET, you might say.
PROPOSAL B: Make a gleeful, silly, no-money, no-talent, no-skill, fart in the face of every big-money eye candy dispenser assembled by Hollywood… a self-aware PLAN 9, if you will.
The problem is that PROPOSAL A and PROPOSAL B didn’t become separate films but bedfellows in one film: In his performances, Oberzan gives heartfelt realism here and grade-school throwaways there. His properties include realistic weapons and wounds but also toaster radios and yarn-mask dogs. One moment we get a projected rural road background image, the next moment we get an apartment pillar with a piece of xerox paper serving as a road sign. Oberzan shows film making chops with his uses of split screen, sound design and back-forth continuity but then his haphazard framing, lighting and rhythm suggest someone who is trying all this stuff out for the first time.
Some might say that the inconsistencies are Brechtian but for me the experience was like eating veal cutlets stirred into Lucky Charms cereal: I find both to be delicious but not together.