Electric Dreams 32nd Ann Arbor Film Festival

Electric Dreams

32nd Ann Arbor Film Festival

By Arwulf Arwulf

  February, 1994.  I was walking through the Law Quad, buffetted by sub-zero blasts of boreal winds fresh from Hudson Bay. Up ahead of me was a small knot of kindergarteners all holding hands and shivering. They and their adult chaperones wanted very much to move on out of the cold, but were forced to stand and wait for a straggler, one little girl, all by herself, staring as if in a trance at the ivy-covered walls and leaded windows of Hutchins Hall. It wasn't autism, it was fascination.

   Her classmates were not amused, and called her name repeatedly . Oblivious to them and to the dangers of frostbite, the child stood riveted to her spot with a crooked little smile and wide open eyes. She was having a moment of wonderment, and my heart went out to her for this was something I was terribly prone to as a youngster. Used to catch hell for it! Always staring off into space, reinventing the reverie.

   It's ironic, then, that I spend much of my adult life showing movies.Whole crowds of people gather into auditoriums and stare at the same images together, and I must stare too, until my eyeballs begin to jiggle with fatigue, for the image on the screen has to remain in focus. But I do love to stare. Always have.

   Now, whether the flick is a documentary, a twisted piece of experimentation, or a drama with a beginning and an end, it's a Film first and foremost, a ribbon of celluloid racing through the gate of a projector, throwing dreams along a beam of light onto a hermetically woven window away off to the front of the hall, and there's no medium can equal it. Video is full of neat tricks but it's nothing like real cinema; cinema's the stuff of which dreams are frozen, then thawed at each screening.

  At its best the cinema can take hold of us the way the little girl was taken with the intricacies of the architecture that day in the Law Quad; we are gently but firmly held by it, and everything else is put on hold.

   This effect often becomes dangerous and destructive when it occurs in one's living quarters, while staring at television. Cinema happens in a public temple of electric dreams, where participants have voluntarily placed themselves so as to be able to share in a collective ritual of mesmeric rejuvenation.

   Commercially, there are more crappy movies being made today than ever before; the motion picture industry, buggering itself with the brave new capitalism of home video, continues to emit a spew of expensive and only rarely worthwhile flicks.

   With this in mind, consider the 16 millimeter Film Festival which has been Ann Arbor's rites of spring for more than 30 years. This is a celebration of what cinema really is or can be or might be if someone dares to try and do it up differently. The festival was founded in 1963 by George Manupelli at the U-M School of Art. Glancing through Film Fest posters from back then, one is struck by the realization that for decades Ann Arbor has been a fertile stomping ground for creative expression (not to mention creative dissent). No matter how many abominations are committed upon the face of this city, we have an artistic underground which will not go away.

   Thanks to Vicki Honeyman and a small army of volunteers, the Film Festival is alive and well and ready to take over the Michigan Theater March 15th thruough the 20th. But it doesn't just simply pop out of the woodwork. There's lots goes into a festival of this magnitude. Starting with some 340 films, the screening committee devotes six weeks to viewing the entries, watching movies every weeknight for the duration of the screening process. What ends up being shown to the public constitutes somewhere between 70 and 100 flicks, each a fairly striking example of what is meant by the term independent and experimental cinema."

   l've always loved the mix. Something positively non-objective, given over entirely to colors and patterns, might be directly followed by a gritty documentary or a disarmingly funny narrative miniature of only three minutes. Some of the strangest ideas in the world appear at this festival, some of the most profound, and certainly the very silliest.

   I remember a film entitled "New Hope For The Headless" which came across like a propaganda documentary describing the plight of people without heads and the concerted efforts to rehabilitate them. Then there was the horror story of one man against a world-gone-mime; white face and clown like demeanor have infected the population like a plague. The reason our hero remains unaffected is that as a boy he was bitten by Marcel Marceau. Described here on this page it might sound only moderately funny. On the screen it was a scream! I almost got sick from laughing and had to put away my Milk Duds.

   Again, the films are shown in a progression which more often than not mixes the genres in such a way that any given show will provide a healthy range of styles. The nature of this medium and the artists who work with it in such innovative ways makes for often mind-boggling results.

   A bit of suggested Film Festival manners: if you somehow find rt in your heart to resent, say, a fifteen minute study in repetitive forms, please consider the others who are in the theater with you trying to draw their own conclusions. l've noticed a lot of impatient noise whenever there's something on the screen that doesn't conform to certain peoples' preconceptions.

   No, not everything has a punchline. Yes, it's art and it's being shown so that you can have a chance to experience it for just once n your life. Some of the voiced objections bring to mind the blockheaded attacks made by Republicans on art in general and arts funding nationwide. Same narrowmindedness.

   On the other hand, audience participation is a wonderfully cool part of the proceedings. I make noise at the festival. Most people do. But it's good to go there with an open mind. That's possibly the most important principle of the entire week: keep your eyes and mind open or you will miss out on something wonderful. And narrowed thinking is a degenerate condition. If tedium is the medium for a few minutes, then why not groove on it and see what happens to you inside. It's like listening to WCBN; wait a small while and it's likely to change dramatically. Don't underestimate the uniqueness of the moment. As Morris Lawrence said: Now will never come again. So celebrate, Ann Arbor, the tradition of imaginative cinema. Invest in a week-long pass, take a few deep breaths and plonk yourself down in the mighty and majestic Michigan Theater. The Ann Arbor Film Festival is among the greatest cultural treasures we have left, here or anywhere on this sweetly ravaged continent. See you in the balcony.