Film Art as Insult

Last night, I watched some of the worst art films of my life. It was at the "Cabinet of the Muses", an inter-genre festival organized by Berkeley-heads and took place in a theater here in the Mission. We had sat through some okay poetry and an interesting dance piece. And then there was film.

With a measured pace, our projectionist, a thin emaciated man, with a gaut face, and displaying delicate manners, took command of the room. He spoke passionately of the three films he was going to show us, and informed us that he had planned half an hour of film pleasure. Little did we know that it would be half an hour of his hideous celluloid slapping us in the face until we had submitted ourselves to the will of film art.

The first film was "based" on some Gertrude Stein writings - "The Making of Americans". It starts off okay, a slow sweeping camera movement over a tableau of objects, some with obvious American resonances. This then cuts away to the torture. It doesn't start off as such. Imagine the scren is cut into six boxes. In each box is a woman. Each woman thus repeats a phrase, some kind of pathetic sociological pusing like, "More and more, americans repeat themselves". Then for the next 15 minutes, we watch these women say this, in different combinations, in different ways. For the first 20 seconds, it's kind of amusing, then you try to search for a pattern - maybe there's some kind of rhythmic pattern, but 20 seconds later, you realize to your horror - there isn't. The film maker couldn't possibly have that much imagination. We sit through the most mind-numbingly boring 10 minutes watching these women repeat themselves. Suprisingly, there was moderate applause at the end - probably due to the Gertrude Stein references.

Film two was a very average film, not shockingly bad, but incoherent - some hokey dialogue scratched onto the film as text, played over some background imagery. References to spermicidal creme and vaginas provoked laughter in the adolescent teenager dancers from the dance piece earlier in the show. After the end of this film, the organisers turned on the lights lights thinking "golly gee - let's start the break and give the audience some mercy" But no. Our film projectionist quickly barked out in a haughtingly hurt tone, "No. The films aren't finished yet. There's one more" I could hear the audience groan as the lights were dimmed once more.

Called Photoheliograph, this last piece is one of the worst things I have seen, and I have seen some pretty bad things. It starts off with 5 minutes of black and a humming track. Then there is a few more minutes of black with some slivers of color. Then a horrendously lurid pattern writhes on the screen - something with the attractive patterning of vomit. We were privileged to witness this for a few more minutes where the pattern changed in an epileptic-fit-inducing manner. Finally, it ends and there is relief.