Dallas Video Festival Roundup

The 20^th Annual Dallas Video Festival has
come to an end. As usual I did not make it to as much as I intended,
and the thought that I would submit daily blog reports went by the
wayside. Carolyn Sortor, on the other hand, did a blow-by-blow report you can access here, although I can't get the video portions to work.

Here's a round up of what I did see that sticks in my mind.

The festival reached its intellectual highpoint early on with the Thursday night presentation of all three hours of The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema.
Not as spicy as it sounds, this featured the current toast of the
international academic crowd, Slovenian philosopher/social critic/
psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek
giving a highly personal and wildly enthusiastic tour of film history
in a Simon Schama style presentation that actually placed him, between
film clips, on the sets where the films were made.

 

I particularly liked
him rowing across Bodega Bay where Tippi Hedren gets bitten by the
seagull in The Birds. Zizek is a big burly guy who looks like the
dinner guest in a Woody Allen film that walks off with the girl and he
speaks an accented English that conveys unchallengeable conviction. The
showing started at 8pm and I only made it through the first hour, but
in all fairness it was shot for European television and never meant to
be seen in one marathon sitting. But I did learn that the three floors
of the Bates house represent, in descending order, the superego, the
ego and the id. And after a discussion of Norman Bates' efforts to
clean the bloody bathroom in Psycho, juxtaposed with Gene Hackman's
examination of the uncannily antiseptic hotel room where he knows a
murder has taken place—you know the scene, eventually he flushes the
toilet and blood burbles up and floods the floor. It was then that
Zizek, as only a Slovenian philosopher/social critic/psychoanalyst can
do, reminded us than when we watch films we are all watching the
excrement rise from the toilet. At the time I knew exactly what he was
getting at, but don't ask me to explain it now. I went home and
requested a book of his essays be sent to my local branch of the Dallas
Public Library. The Pervert's Guide is for sale on the internet.

On Friday, Carolyn Sortor assembled a group of short videos from the Graffiti Research Lab.
As a bourgeois property owner with a retail background, I do not
pretend to be a fan of “graffiti art.” Who the hell is Banksy, anyway?
But the GRL uses, at least in these videos, souped-up versions of the
type of laser writers that I guess you can buy a radio shack and they
produce spectacular interventions on the walls of buildings,
delighting, well obviously themselves, but also every non-policeman who
passes by. Even the police seem nonplussed, since the images disappear
almost as soon as they are made. Particularly enjoyable was Impeach the
Fucker, the GRL's unsolicited support of Dick Kuchinich's effort to
impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. They of course have a website.

If
you are connected to a university art department, you should track down
a copy of Here is Always Somewhere Else, a beautiful documentary on the
life of Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who made his way to
Southern California and into art history by crying in front of the
camera, rolling off the roof of his house, riding a bicycle into an
Amsterdam canal, and disappearing into the Atlantic ocean while trying
to make a solo crossing in the smallest craft ever designed for that
purpose. The film, a tribute by friends, family, and ex-students, is a
moving and poetic look at what it means to be an artist.. It also turns
out that the director, Rene Daalder, was not only a close friend of the
artist but also the director of the 1970's horror cult classic, Massacre at Central High.

The
Idiot Joy Showland Compilation included 27 short videos by the likes of
Michael Smith, Guy Ben-Ner, Doug Aitken, Larry Clark, Cindy Sherman,
and a whole roster of the well-known — in this admittedly specialized
field – and the up and coming. The two hour running time should have
been cut into two programs, but it functioned as a great crash course
in what video art looks like, at least in Chelsea, today.

 

I confess that I have often held a dvd by Guy Maddin in my hand at the video store – The Saddest Music in the World, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary.
They always look so interesting, but then I notice that the remake of
The Hills Have Eyes has just been released, and art loses out to pure
escapist entertainment. Well, having seen a Maddin film at last, Brand on the Brain,
I have become an instant if still somewhat tentative fan. Shot in
grainy black and white with lots of iris shots, title cards, and
over-exposures, this is a film that has everything: mad scientists,
cannibalism, cross-dressing, hints of incest, and performances that
make Theda Bara come off like Mia Farrow. I would have to see it again
to have any idea what it's all supposed to be about. But I would see it
again.

In Promised Paradise, Indonesian puppeteer Agus Nur Amal
makes a trip to Bali and succeeds in getting a prison interview with
the iman behind the bombing of the Balinese nightclub in 2005. That
bare description does absolutely no justice to this brilliant film. In
one of the final scenes, Amal visits a Balinese psychic in an effort to
contact one of the suicide bombers. Contact is made, but the bomber is
surrounded by too much darkness to make himself understood.

 

I ended the festival on a particularly grim note. The Empire in Africa
chronicles the civil war in Sierra Leone with footage that is among the
most starkly disturbing I have ever witnessed. But just as disturbing
is the consistent pattern of lies, self-justifications, and
self-satisfied claims for success from participants from both sides, or
rather all sides, the certainly being more than two in this conflict.
This is necessary viewing for anyone concerned with how the twentieth
century African conflicts that now stretch into the present century
originated, are perpetuated, and the absolute level of destruction they
bring with them. As is usually the case with material of this sort at
the Dallas Video Festival, I think it had an audience of about twelve.