Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Asian Focus: "Axes of Dwelling: The Video Art of Yuan Goangming" & more
by christopherporter
"Axes of Dwelling: The Video Art of Yuan Goangming"
Asian Focus | New Media | Short Films
We've all seen countless homes, city streets, and natural landscapes in our lifetimes -- but never seen them quite the way Yuan Goangming does. The Taiwanese video artist's work is full of such commonplace imagery, but through innovative presentation and perspective, Yuan imbues familiar sights with surprising new feelings of both wonderment and unease. A wide variety of his works will be shown during the career retrospective "Axes of Dwelling," for which Yuan will appear and participate in a discussion with University of Michigan professor of Asian cinema Markus Nornes.
Take for example Yuan's 2011 short work Disappearing Landscape: Passing II. The piece features three channels of video, previously presented as a room-scale gallery installation but shown at AAFF in a single channel. Yuan mounted three cameras adjacent each other and filmed simultaneously as he tracked through various scenes, including multiple homes (some pristine, some dilapidated), a forest, and city streets. The final effect is a nearly 270-degree view of each setting, not unlike the 360-degree videos that have proliferated online since Yuan created the work, but also presenting the viewer with much greater perspective and sense of momentum. Yuan writes that the film was inspired by his father's death, his child's birth, and having built his own home "on ruins," and it's easy to feel and relate to the awe and melancholy that accompanies these wide-open, well-observed vistas.
Similar themes are present in Yuan's 2014 work Dwelling. The single-shot film displays a lovely, sunlit, attractively decorated room with a newspaper standing up improbably on its own centerfold as a gentle breeze ruffles its pages. Then, suddenly, several explosive charges go off and the contents of the room shatter upward in slow-motion detail. As the explosion reaches its peak, the video runs back and the fragments of the room reassemble themselves into their original order. Yuan addressed the piece in a 2015 interview. "From one perspective, it means destruction," he said. "From another, it can also represent rebirth."
Not all Yuan's works tackle such hefty themes. His 1998 installation The Reason for Insomnia featured a bed, bare except for a pillow motorized to rise and fall, emulating a breathing sleeper. A video projector controlled by a knob on the bedframe casts unsettling images that take on a disturbingly lifelike quality when thrown against the white bed sheet. A slit slowly appears in the sheet in one projection; in another, a mysterious bump crawls slowly beneath the sheet from the foot to the head of the bed; in another, the bed appears to catch fire.
The title of AAFF's retrospective is apt because dwellings and the nature of the spaces humans fill (or vacate) are clear preoccupations for Yuan. But the concept of the axis is key as well. Many of Yuan's works revolve around a distinct physical axis -- as in Disappearing Landscape, or his 1995 work The Cage, in which a fixed camera looks directly up through the bottom of a birdcage while someone carries it. But even outside his works containing unconventional visual perspectives, Yuan also consistently reorients the viewer's axis in the more general sense of an agreed-upon reference point. He has a playful sense of how the world turns, and he encourages us to rethink our own preconceived notions and play along with him. (You can also see his 2014 installation film Indication at the Ann Arbor Art Center.) March 25, 9:15 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
More Asian Focus films:
The River
Films in Competition 3 | Asian Focus | Shorts in Competition
In this Taiwanese short, which will screen as part of AAFF's "Short Films in Competition 3" program, director Ya-Ting Hsu explores the idea of pregnancy as a traumatic, recurring, intergenerational experience. The film is inspired by Hsu's own pregnancy. Hsu's co-director Geoffrey Hughes will be in attendance for this screening. March 22, 7:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
A Page of Madness
Special Program | Asian Focus | Music
This 1926 Japanese silent avant-garde film following the story of a janitor in an asylum was lost for 45 years before director Teinosuke Kinugasa rediscovered it in his own storehouse. Kataoka Ichiro will fill the traditional Japanese role of benshi for this screening, providing live narration for the film, while local tiny-instrument trio Little Bang Theory provides musical accompaniment. March 22, 9:30 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Commodity City
Films in Competition 5 | Asian Focus | Shorts in Competition
Director Jessica Kingdon will be in attendance for this screening of her short film about vendors who work in China's Yiwu market, also known as China Commodity City, the largest wholesale market on the planet. Kingdon focuses on the relationship between commercial goods and those who sell them. March 24, 9:30 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Mein Hutong
Films in Competition 9 | Asian Focus | Shorts in Competition
The blend of languages in this film's title expresses the cultural push and pull in Jie Jie Ng's work. Although he is of Chinese heritage, the director lives in Germany and has never resided in China. The film focuses on his fascination with Beijing's hutongs, or alleys, many of which have a rich cultural history despite being increasingly demolished in favor of new development. March 25, 12:45 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
"Video Bureau: Selections From an Archive in China"
Filmmaker Ellen Zweig curated and will present this program of short works collected by Video Bureau, a Chinese artists' nonprofit dedicated to archiving and exhibiting video art. The films range from a performance piece featuring a literal human chameleon to a documentary in which a filmmaker returns to his childhood home to explore the lives of coal miners. March 25, 2:45 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
Furusato 古里
Amazing Stories | Asian Focus | Features in Competition
Director Thorsten Trimpop will be in attendance for the North American premiere of this heartbreaking film about a village that fell partly within the evacuation zone for the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Residents have been allowed to return, but as Trimpop shows, their lives are anything but back to normal. March 26, 2:15 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and the managing editor of Concentrate.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 | A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Music Focus: "Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present" & more
by christopherporter
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present
Feature in Competition | Music
For a man who was a paragon for expanding the paradigms of what constitutes art, music, and film, the subject of Tyler Hubby’s documentary Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present looks like any other rumpled khakis-and-button-down-shirt-wearing older professor. But when Conrad opens his mouth and the words begin to tumble out, his flowing imagination, sense of mischief, and singular view of the world make him anything but a tenured bore.
After graduating with a degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1962 and working as a computer programmer for a year, Conrad spent the rest of his life rebelling against anything as structured as those disciplines.
“He’s definitely got issues with authority,” says Tony Oursler, an artist and frequent Conrad collaborator.
In 1964, Conrad became a member of the pioneering group Theatre of Eternal Music, aka The Dream Syndicate. “I think one of the accomplishments of the group I worked with,” Conrad says in the film, “with John Cale and La Monte Young and Angus Maclise and Marian Zazeela was the inauguration of a minimal sensibility in music.”
“It was this very reductive process where they’d just settle on a few microtonal intervals,” says Jeff Hunt of the Table of the Elements record label in the film. “They’re playing very precise pitches for a very, very long time. It’s physically grueling.”
But soon after the group disbanded, Conrad turned his attention to experimental film, the more aleatory the better. “This logic was not recognizable to audiences,” Conrad says in the doc about his fractured narratives, “and I thought, ‘Excellent! Good.’” He would go on to film himself cooking film, and eventually reduced the definition of “film” to anything you’d see in front of you. For instance, Conrad would paint a yellow square and call it a film.
“I don’t think he’s an easy artist to take,” Oursler says in the movie. “He’s done a lot of stuff against the grain.”
Even his closest pals didn’t always understand Conrad’s quirky contradictions, which were as much about eliciting a reaction as they were about creating a finished document. He spent one period painting corkboard with underwear pinned to it to address aging issues, such as incontinence. His art friends were aghast; Conrad was delighted with their reaction.
After leaving Theatre of Eternal Music, Conrad rarely made music for the next two decades. He spent his time making art and movies as well as teaching media at the University of New York - Buffalo, a fertile ground for the avant-garde in the 1970s and '80s. It wasn’t until Table of the Elements reintroduced Conrad’s mostly forgotten music to the public that his genius could be heard by a wider audience with the label’s 1993 release of 1973’s Outside the Dream Syndicate, an album made with krautrock icons Faust.
“The drones that he would create, I found them to be very calming,” says musician Moby in the movie. “Like, you could feel your metabolism sort of sinking and slowing down in a really nice way.”
Table of the Elements also released a 1964 recording called Four Violins (1996), which is one of the few tapes Conrad had from his Eternal Music days. It features Conrad overdubbing himself with four violins to create a discordant drone that was later heard in The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” courtesy his old bandmate and VU co-founder John Cale.
Otherwise, Young recorded all the Dream Syndicate’s practices and performances between 1963-65 and refused to release anything, leaving this music to the dustbin of history until courts said all the members were equal owners. In 2000, Table of the Elements released the CD Inside the Dream Syndicate, Volume I: Day of Niagara (1965). That album and Four Violins helped rewrite modern music history and Conrad’s central place in it.
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present does a wonderful job of not only tracing Conrad’s influence on the avant-garde, it also shows him to be witty, playful, provocative, and funny into his 70s. At one point in the film, Conrad is standing on a sidewalk, and later in the middle of an intersection, directing a piece of “music” by calling out the cars and trucks that are about to fly, acting like a conductor does when it's time for the violins to rush in. “Now I need a truck -- there it is! ... No, I didn’t ask for a motorcycle!”
Conrad died April 9, 2016, age 76, and this documentary is a meaningful memorial to a man who, to the end, lived up to this quote in the film: “I resisted all ideas of professionalism.” March 26, 12:00pm "> Michigan Theater Screening Room
More Music films:
A Page of Madness
Special Program | Asian Focus | Music
Silent movies in America were accompanied by live music, but they relied on the film’s intertitle cards to convey dialogue and plot developments. But in Japan, silent movies were shown alongside a benshi, a performer versed in the kabuki and Noh theater traditions, who would voice dialogue, read the intertitle cards (if there were any), and made comments about the on-screen action. Tonight’s screening of Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 avant-garde film about a janitor in an insane asylum will feature benshi Kataoka Ichiro with live music by Little Bang Theory, the Detroit trio that specializes in silent-movie accompaniment using toy and tiny instruments. March 22, 9:30pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Short Films in Competition 11: Music Videos
Shorts Program | Music
Compared to MTV’s heyday, music videos have lost their elite status in pop culture. But they are still regular parts of promoting a musician’s vision thanks to the internet, and videos have continued to be vital art forms even if they’re not shown on TV much anymore. Long-time concert promoter Greg Baise curated the 18 videos here, which run the gamut from Lightning Bolt’s animated headbanger “The Metal East” (directed by Lale Westvind) to director David Chontos’s short film “Sisters,” whose b&w dreamscape is soundtracked by the bleak electronica of Fever Ray. March 25, 7:00pm | Lorch Hall
Christopher Porter is a Library Technician and editor of Pulp.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 | A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | New Media: "Post-Internet and the Moving Image" & more
by christopherporter
"Post-Internet and the Moving Image"
New Media "> Shorts Program
"Film was the medium of the 20th century," video artist Jaakko Pallasvuo somberly intones in voiceover in his short video Bergman. "Film is radio. Film is painting. Film is a drawing on sand, about to be swept away by the ocean."
The descriptor "video artist" is used pointedly here, rather than "filmmaker," because Pallasvuo makes that distinction quite clearly himself in Bergman. Pallasvuo's short essay on the great director Ingmar Bergman juxtaposes brief clips of Bergman's films with recognizable icons of the internet age, like the Gmail and PayPal logos. Pallasvuo drily asks: "Do all video artists fantasize about becoming directors? It's a fantasy about traveling in time."
In Andrew Rosinski's curated program "Post-Internet and the Moving Image," Bergman is just one of 13 offerings that are ostensibly short films but assert themselves as something other in their embrace of technology. Rosinski characterizes the program as an attempt to define the nascent genre of "post-internet cinema," noting that most of his selections were created to be viewed online, not in a movie theater.
And yet many of them certainly still benefit from viewing on a large screen. Take for example the lovely short Stream, which opens Rosinski's program. Artist Joe Hamilton compiles countless still and moving images of water into a constantly changing collage, forming images that suggest babbling brooks as well as scrolling web pages and loading online videos. Hamilton playfully blends references to the internet-age definition of the word "stream" with references to the bodies of water the word originally denoted. The beauty of his constantly shifting imagery is undeniable, and Hamilton even mines his concept for a little humor when the video stutters to "buffer" for a moment.
Similarly, Emilio.jp's short Opening Folders draws remarkable beauty from one of the most banal elements of the technological age. Screen-captured video shows the artist selecting and then opening a series of 50 folders on his computer desktop in various orders, a concept that at face value sounds potentially even less interesting than watching paint dry. But each of those folders contains a vibrantly colorful image file, with gradients arranged differently so that the images create roughly animated undulating patterns as they open and close. It's CGI, but rather than trying to create something sleeker and more realistic than the latest big-budget movie, Emilio.jp embraces the beauty inherent in the most basic functions of our most commonplace technology.
Not all the selections in Rosinski's program embrace the beauty of technology. Andrew Norman Wilson's Workers Leaving the Googleplex features Wilson's disheartening tale of his repeatedly thwarted attempts to chronicle the second-class Google employees -- mostly people of color -- who scan pages for Google Books. Darja Bajagić's Tanya versus Irena comments on the ubiquity of online pornography by presenting a lazily paced, discomfortingly distorted series of images of the same two women disrobing.
But true artistry pervades the selections in Rosinski's program -- artistry that wouldn't work without technology, and that wouldn't work as well in any format but the often-ghettoized internet video. "Film would be perfect," Pallasvuo sighs in Bergman, while also admitting that he'd be "mediocre at every individual aspect of making a film." He and the other artists featured in "Post-Internet and the Moving Image" have excelled at something else entirely. March 22, 5:00 pm "> Michigan Theater Screening Room
More New Media films:
External Memory
Opening Night Screening "> Short Films in Competition 1 "> New Media "> Shorts in Competition
Filmmaker Yuan Zheng says this short tells the story of "a man who visits a place without ever going there," rendered in rough, colorful computer-generated imagery. The film will make its world premiere at AAFF. March 21, 8:15 pm "> Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
"Short Films in Competition 7: Animation"
New Media "> Shorts Program "> Animation
AAFF's animation programs always offer a lively variety of films, and this year appears to be no exception. New media will be represented in films including Artificial Intelligence for Governance: AI the Kitty, a computer-animated tale of an artificial intelligence with the appearance of a cat who becomes a government official in the year 2039. March 24, 9:30 pm "> Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
New Media "> Friday After Party
U-M professor and artist Osman Khan's live performance Drone is a singularly inventive example of AAFF's increasing embrace of "expanded cinema" -- immersive cinematic experiences that reject the traditional model of sitting in a theater, watching a single screen. Drone blends pre-recorded drone footage taken in a variety of situations with drone video recorded live during the performance. Live musical accompaniment will play off another sense of the word "drone." March 24, 10:00 pm "> Ann Arbor Distilling Company
Axes of Dwelling: The Video Art of Yuan Guangming
For our full review of this event, click here. March 25, 9:15 pm "> Michigan Theater Screening Room
Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and the managing editor of Concentrate.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 "> A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Political: "Socrates of Kamchatka" & more
by christopherporter
Socrates of Kamchatka
Political | Amazing Stories | World Premiere
The first thing that strikes you as you enter the world of Socrates of Kamchatka is that your experience is being intermediated by the whimsical soliloquy of its titular world-weary horse. This gives the film a fable-like sheen and makes the central dramatic arc -- a rural community’s struggle to adapt to unceasing waves of national economic and political change -- at once both familiar and strange.
Socrates is no mincer of words, and he tells his story with deft aplomb, fully realizing the benefits of his equine perspective on human happenings and behavior. “Mother always bit my thighs for asking questions,” our narrator confides, before adding, “But then why name me Socrates?”
Each decade of Socrates’ tale is represented as an -ism and portrayed not simply as a unit of time but as a distinct locality. Hence, we see our human protagonist, Anfisa Brazaluk, move from the bucolic pleasures of the village of socialism to the centrally planned cement town of communism, and on through the fields of capitalism before finally settling in the otherworldly town of tourism. Along the way, the bonds between people and horses progressively fray to the point of tearing asunder, culminating in a stark, fatal winter with bleak consequences for community members of both species. It is in the aftermath of this pain and darkness that Anfisa hatches a plan to make her Kamchatkan hometown a destination for tourists eager to experience the very same bucolic pleasures everyone had left behind decades before.
Through a combination of traditional interviews, political speeches, home movies, and artful reenactments, all sewn together by Socrates’ probing narration, filmmaker Irina Patkanian (who will in attendance at this screening) delivers a compelling and compassionate inquiry into the consequences of entrusting ourselves to the care of others. By telling the story in Socrates’ voice, Patkanian engages human life on animal terms, reminding us how little separates these two worlds.
Although much of the film is viewed through the thin gauze of history, it steps closer to the keen edge of current events in its concluding moments as it documents the local Kamchatkan reaction to Putin’s return to the office of President of Russia in 2012. This brief window into contemporary Russian politics is made all the more potent by the clip that precedes it, a haunting allegorical yarn about breaking the spirits of wild stallions. This is, after all, the story of a horse, albeit one given to clear-eyed philosophical musings. March 22, 7:30 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
More Political Films:
A Prerequisite for Rebellion
Political | Shorts Program | Black Diaspora
A Prerequisite for Rebellion is a cycle of seven short films (including the above's The Vacuum Is Too Loud) curated by Detroit-based cultural producer and AFROTOPIA founder Ingrid LaFleur that frames the physical and emotional trauma the black body is subjugated to in colonized space. This constellation of films explores the manifestations of this trauma as well as efforts to engage in the disruption and systematic deconstruction of white supremacy. March 24, 9:15 pm "> Michigan Theater Screening Room
AAFF v. State of Michigan: Ten Years Later
Political | Panel DiscussionFormer AAFF executive director and artist Christen Lien (above) and award-winning filmmaker and essayist dream hampton will join Michigan ACLU legal director Michael J. Steinberg in a panel conversation to mark the 10-year anniversary of the landmark First Amendment case that AAFF won to protect artistic expression from the chilling effects of censorship. March 25, 11:30 am, free | North Quad Space 2435
ACTS & INTERMISSIONS
Political | Features in Competition
A new feature documentary by Abigail Child, ACTS & INTERMISSIONS uses the life, writings and ideas of anarchist, lecturer, and revolutionary Emma Goldman to anchor an investigation into the tensions between personal freedom and risk, labor and ownership, dogmatism and compromise. Deftly and freely weaving together footage and audio from Goldman’s life with historical as well as contemporary images, this film brings the questions that drove her work and advocacy to bear on our own fraught cultural moment. March 25, 12:30 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
America for Americans
Political | Films in Competition 9 | Black Diaspora | World Premiere
This film collage by Blair McClendon pulls together found footage of the grief, pain, joy, resistance and injustice that permeate contemporary Black life on the precipice, drawing on the voices of artists, victims and bystanders alike in the process. As the AAFF description asserts, “It is the presentation of a siege.” March 25, 12:45 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Nicco Pandolfi is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and a Public Library Associate at AADL.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017" A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Totally Out There/Classic AAFF: "The Pink Egg" & more
by christopherporter
The Pink Egg
Features in Competition | Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
If you're going to make a film that fits the aesthetic of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Luis Bunuel makes for a near-perfect starting point. Director Jim Trainor begins The Pink Egg with a quote from the celebrated surrealist: "You can find all of Shakespeare and De Sade in the lives of insects." That sentence offers a pithy declaration of artistic intent, and Trainor follows through, offering viewers a one-of-a-kind evocation of the animal world.
Employing boldly minimalistic and colorful sets that could double for an unhinged, low-budget children's program, Trainor casts humans clad in long-sleeved, hooded unitards to act out the mating rituals, lifecycles, and surprisingly human experiences of various wasps, bees, and insects. Alternately humorous, tragic, and inspiring, The Pink Egg remains a defiantly uncommercial picture due to the lack of dialogue, and the seemingly bizarre actions of the nameless characters. You may find yourself asking why some of the female characters paint pink and blue tubes with lotion, meant to represent seminal fluid, and why those tubes suddenly change color.
While watching Trainor's idiosyncratic approach, there are some previous works that come to mind. Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno series makes an obvious antecedent, but where that program focused specifically on the sexual habits of various animals, Trainor goes deeper. Rossellini wanted to educate, but Trainor would rather engage emotionally. Having worked primarily as an animator, Trainor breaks away from that discipline here by having people embody animals we usually disregard as pests. Projecting yourself into these creatures' lives becomes easier with a human face attached to them. Because of that artistic choice, viewers connect directly when the characters escape predators, protect their offspring, and find the right mate. Their goals and obstacles become more relatable, and so you feel a greater affinity for these animals. Just try not remembering how exhausting the life of a worker bee is the next time you swat one away.
The end credits provide a bibliography of nonfiction texts that Trainor, who also credits himself as "researcher," absorbed while prepping this ambitious project. That said, The Pink Egg is not a documentary. While it's true that the movie needs only a traditional David Attenborough voiceover explaining what you are watching, and the removal of some brief nudity, to make it palatable to a wider audience, making those adjustments would rob the film of its artistic merit. The Pink Egg does not preach, but it demands viewers make sense of what they are seeing on their own terms before researching the facts.
Considering the film's unconventional look, liberal use of fast-motion, and lack of exposition, Trainor deserves much credit for working up as much empathy as he does for his subjects. His intellectual cinematic approach utilizes purposefully distancing film techniques: all the sound has been added in post, the songs recall the ones in David Lynch's Eraserhead, and the special effects throw off your sense of scale. The overall effect occasionally recalls the work of director Shane Carruth, particularly the second half of Upstream Color, another movie that drew parallels between humans and animals.
One would be hard-pressed to think of a more perfect film to play at the Totally Out There/Classic AFF track than this, which is also making its world premiere. The only irony is that Trainor, who has made animals the center of much of his work, shows us what is "out there" may be more like us than we ever considered. March 22, 9:15 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
More Totally Out There/Classic AAFF films:
100 Years of Dada: Dada in Dialogue With the Present
Shorts Program | Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
Dada is one of those artistic movements that everybody feels comfortable referencing, but few people genuinely understand. Although that seems fitting for a style devoted to upending not just conventional concepts of art, but the belief that anything can be understood at all. This collection of eight shorts, culled from between 1924 and 2014, showcases how the Dada movement evolved over time, and features works from recognized masters like René Clair and Marcel Duchamp alongside projects from newer names like Mónica Savirón and Mirai Mizue. March 23, 7:30 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Pat Oleszko, live and in person
Shorts Program | Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
A performance artist comfortable in a variety of media, Pat Oleszko delivers a unique live experience followed by a half-dozen avant-garde shorts (included in "Films in Competition 6") including one from the University of Michigan's own Terri Sarris. March 24, 7 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Bliss
Shorts Program | Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
Directors Sofia Caetano, who will be in attendance when her film screens, and Elliot Sheedy have crafted a sci-fi religious-tinged comedy (included in "Films in Competition 6") about a god-like figure who sends a pair of teenagers into the Garden of Eden with a way to achieve the title condition. March 24, 7 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Kuro
Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
According to directors Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko, Kuro examines how the stories we use to make sense of our lives are not always under our control. The film centers on a woman who entertains her paraplegic boyfriend by making up outlandish stories based on incidents from their shared past. March 25, 5 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE
Totally Out There | Classic AAFF | Shorts in Competition
Loosely inspired by the 1926 Man Ray film Emak Bakia, Kathryn Ramey's ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE (included in "Films in Competition 13") utilizes unconventional techniques -- she created the five-minute work without a motion picture camera -- to juxtapose the everyday lives of people in stable countries with victims of military actions performed by the armed forces of those same countries. March 25, 9:30 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Perry Seibert is a movie lover, freelance writer, and founding member of the Detroit Film Critics Society. Follow him on twitter @Perrylovesfilm.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 | A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #629, #630 & #631
by christopherporter
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #629
Beijing journalist Lijia Zhang's debut novel Lotus is inspired by her grandmother's deathbed revelation that she was sold into prostitution at an early age.
Set in contemporary Shenzhen, China’s “City of Sins”, Lotus is one of the "ji" (Chinese word for chicken, a derogatory name for prostitutes) working at the Moonflower Massage Parlor. Originally from a impoverished village in northern China, she allows her family to think she waitresses in an upscale restaurant, sending her earnings home to support her family and to send her younger brother to university.
Knowing the shelf life of someone in her situation is finite, Lotus casts her eye among her regulars -- Funny Eye, Family Treasure -- hoping for a more permanent arrangement. In the meantime, she befriends Hu Binbing, a quiet and reclusive photojournalist who is hoping his documentary project on the lives of the "ji" will bring him the deserved recognition. But once his photographs of Lotus are published in a national magazine, his standing in the Communist party as well as their relationship is threatened.
"'A Newborn Calf Isn't Afraid of Tigers' is a typical chapter title in Lotus... Readers will find the entire text rich in Chinese proverbs, as well as folk wisdom of a more prosaic variety. Characters employ sage sayings in spoken form, as a kind of parlor game, and the author scatters aphorisms liberally throughout the narrative, with an effect that is both charming and thought-provoking....Some first novels, especially those birthed in creative writing classes, go heavy on self-consciously poetic language ...The images Zhang gives us, in contrast, are uncomplicated, concise and touching" (NPR)
"Pretty Woman but without all the glitz" (Library Journal).
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #630
The Woman Next Door, the U.S. debut of Yewande Omotoso is "an intimate, frequently hilarious look at the lives of two extraordinary women set in post-apartheid South Africa." (Booklist)
Nicknamed each other "Hortensia the Horrible" and "Marion the Vulture", these prickly octogenarians have been next-door neighbors for over two decades in Cape Town's upscale Katterijn community. Seeing beyond the obvious (one is black and one is white), they have a lot in common. Both are successful women with impressive careers. Opinionated, widowed and living alone, they both take a keen interest in community affairs, often the source of their friction.
When an unexpected event impacts both of their well-being, Hortensia and Marion are forced to take tiny steps toward civility. With conversations over time, each reflecting upon choices made, dreams deferred, and lost chances at connection, these proud, feisty women must decide whether to expend waning energy on their feud or call a truce.
Born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria, Omotoso won the South African Literary Award in 2011 for her debut novel, Bom Boy. In 2013 she was a finalist for the inaugural, pan-African Etisalat Fiction Prize. She lives in Johannesburg, where she has her own architectural practice. Listen to the NPR podcast with the author.
"Like Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, which also depicts the wisdom found in aging, this novel will have universal appeal." (Library Journal)
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #631
Borrowing the title from one of Dostoyevsky's famous novel, Elif Batuman's debut novel The Idiot * * * is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale, set in 1995, that "delightfully captures the hyperstimulation and absurdity of the first-year university experience." (Library Journal)
Selin Karada, daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard eager and open to new experiences. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, and is intrigued with email, newly available on campus. In Russian class, Selin is befriended by Svetlana, a cosmopolitan Serb and, almost by accident, begins exchanging email with Ivan, a senior from Hungary. With each email they exchange, her feelings for Ivan intensifies, even knowing that he has a serious girlfriend.
At the end of the school year, after spending two weeks in Paris with Svetlana, Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside to teach English, hoping to meet up with Ivan on weekends, where the unfamiliar language gives rise to a succession of seemingly random but mild misadventures with her various host families.
“Selin is delightful company. She’s smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious... Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.” (Kirkus Reviews)
Author Elif Batuman, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor. She is a graduate of Harvard College and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.
* * * = 3 starred reviews
Related:
➥ Fabulous Fiction Firsts, full archive
Blog Post
Integrated Identities: "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" at the Power Center
by christopherporter
When two ordinary, scribbled-on pieces of paper in an envelope magically morph into a miserable woman’s key to happiness -- and your heart pounds as you hawkishly, breathlessly watch the precarious letter being set down, picked up, walked around the stage, and handed off -- that’s the power of live theater.
But it takes pros to achieve that level of emotionally tense stage magic, and when it comes to interpreting Martin McDonagh’s work, there may be none on Earth that can match Ireland’s renowned Druid Theatre Company, which performed The Beauty Queen of Leenane March 9-11 at the Power Center, courtesy of University Musical Society.
In the play, 40-year-old Maureen (Aisling O’Sullivan) lives alone with her demanding, manipulative 70-year-old mother Mag (Marie Mullen). When handsome former neighbor Pato Dooley (Marty Rea) briefly returns from London, where he works in construction, Maureen gets what seems like her last chance at love and a different life.
McDonagh’s script feels both Shakespearean, with its misunderstandings and intercepted messages, and like Williams’ The Glass Menagerie turned inside out: instead of a mother pushing a reluctant daughter out into the world, a mother repeatedly sabotages a frustrated daughter’s attempts to leave. But one thing is constant between Glass and Beauty Queen: both daughters are pushed to embody their mothers’ self-image. And as we learn more about Maureen’s past struggles, and how she ended up living with Mag, the push-pull bond between them seems all the more toxic but inescapable.
Francis O’Connor’s set felt like an externalization of Maureen’s inner life. The run-down, hopeless charcoal gray of Maureen and Mag’s rural home fittingly manages to suck the color out of anything that might threaten to flicker with life. Even the books on a couple of low shelves lay in toppled, sloppy piles, like the newspapers that provide a makeshift TV stand. In this way, items that might otherwise spark inspiration or the imagination are rendered powerless within this stagnant, contained world.
James Ingalls' lighting design, meanwhile, deftly guided us through the story while simultaneously offering a glimpse of teasing hope, by way of the blue sky projected above O’Connor’s set. And the production’s costume design (also by O’Connor) delineated the characters’ sense of themselves in the world: Maureen’s dressed in baggy, drab sweaters and long skirts with boots (until she buys a new, staid-but-more-flattering black dress to attend a party); shifty Mag is dressed in dark layers that seem to have no beginning nor end; Pato stands apart -- as a visitor from the outside world -- by way of his crisp attire, and the way the clothes fit his body; and Pato’s message delivering brother Ray (Aaron Monaghan), whose bright red and white jacket visually indicate his vitality, and thus his incongruity in Mag and Maureen’s home.
Director Garry Hynes allowed the script’s most comic moments build and breathe so that when the dark moments come -- and let’s be honest, with Irish dark comedies, you know they’re coming -- the tonal shift is all the more harrowing and stark.
Druid’s terrific ensemble was more than up to the task of navigating these hairpin turns. Monaghan provided blustery comic relief as a spark plug of a man who’s consistently baffled by what happens within Mag and Maureen’s walls. Rea’s Pato, meanwhile, was a gentle man shut out from two worlds: he can’t stay in Ireland, where there’s no work, but he also feels painfully out of place in England; and Rea’s winning performance during an inevitably awkward “morning after” scene in the play, during which he makes slack-jawed Mag her breakfast, managed to be both hilarious and moving. Mullen -- who was artistically living out the play’s anxiety about the daughter becoming the mother since she won a Tony Award in 1998 playing Maureen in the Broadway production -- plays Mag as an unflappable, immovable object in a rocking chair. And her most revealing moments came as Maureen brags about something Mag knows to be untrue. Instead of quietly letting the moment pass, and thus seeing her plan through, Mag smirks and pokes at Maureen, physically unable to contain her glee at her daughter’s secret pain. O’Sullivan, finally, stands tall at the play’s center, playing Maureen as a bitter woman who’s wholly resigned herself to her awful, circumscribed fate until the hint of hope arrives from London in a suit.
It may be strange to confess that while watching The Beauty Queen of Leenane, I kept thinking of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. Not because of the nature of their mother-daughter relationship -- they seemed, late in life, far more functional then Maureen and Mag, not to mention more capable of joy -- but because their bond with each other always seemed far more intense and powerful than any they could possibly establish with anyone else.
Beauty Queen takes this notion to a darker end, of course, but the main principle remains: when our identity is deeply, inextricably integrated with another’s, that person takes a significant part of us with them when they go.
Jenn McKee is a former staff arts reporter for The Ann Arbor News, where she primarily covered theater and film events, and also wrote general features and occasional articles on books and music.
Blog Post
Small Towns, Universal Emotions: Nickolas Butler at Literati
by christopherporter
“I couldn’t write about something like the New York City social scene, because I know nothing about it,” said Nickolas Butler frankly at his reading at Literati on Wednesday, March 8. Butler’s third book, The Hearts of Men, has just been released and it shares a rural Wisconsin setting with his previous two books, Shotgun Lovesongs and Beneath the Bonfire.
Butler himself lives outside of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, with his family and is able to brilliantly capture rural Midwestern life in his work, as only someone who truly lives it would be able to do.
“In part, I write about these characters and this setting because that’s what I’m familiar with,” said Butler. “Although I have a very nice house and a very nice property, it’s just a little bit down the road until I’m in what is essentially rural poverty. I go into Cleghorn, which is the nearest town, and there’s literally one intersection and there’s a bar and a taxidermy shop.” He laughed a little. “You can go in [to the bar], and you and four of your buddies could drink as much as you possibly could and there’s no way that you could ever run a tab up in there that’s more than $65.”
A lot of people don’t see places like this. Unless you live there or grew up there, there are not many reasons that one might find themselves in rural Wisconsin or Minnesota or even Michigan, for that matter. But this is the environment that Butler shares with readers and the people he has chosen to capture in his writing. And by doing it as well as he does, these gritty, unglamorous people that inhabit these small, cold towns in his books are given a special sort of grace.
The Hearts of Men spans over 50 years and tells the story of two Boy Scouts who find themselves back at their childhood Scout camp after decades away. One is a troubled Vietnam vet, the other a successful business executive. Butler uses them to explore, he said, “how well one can uphold the morality of an ancient American institution like the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, 4-H, [and things like that over the course of a life.” These men grapple with tough ethical decisions and, like anyone, are shaped by the small, tender, and terrifying moments that come together to form a life.
Butler is a no-frills, plain-spoken sort, and he read right from the beginning of The Hearts of Men. The book opens with a young boy, Nelson, waking up at Boy Scout camp, going through the motions of starting a fire and lugging water. Butler was a Boy Scout and spent weeks at a time at summer camp, and he expertly evokes the feelings of camping in his writing: the thrill of peeing on a tree, the bone-permeating chill of the early morning, the increased difficulty of every task that would have been so easy to do in the comforts of one’s own home.
From there, the book moves into the story of Nelson’s 13th birthday party, to which all the boys in the neighborhood have been invited, but none show up. There is little sadder than a child waiting expectantly for others to arrive at their birthday and no one coming, and Butler captures the crushing disappointment of this very well. Nelson’s staunchly Midwestern parents attempt to remedy the situation in their own way -- his mother, comforting; his father, harsh -- but the only thing that can lessen the blow is the eventual, belated arrival of a single neighbor boy, who gifts Nelson with a homemade birchbark basket.
Butler stopped the reading here, leaving listeners to wonder if this neighbor would become a main character in the book or just a passing emblem, but leaving no doubt in our minds that The Hearts of Men will be as thoughtful and heart-wrenching as Butler’s previous books.
If you think the literature world can be pompous, Butler is a breath of fresh air. He enjoys writing, he’s good at it, and he writes what he knows about. One attendee at the talk asked him about his writing process. “I’ll sit on idea for years,” Butler said. “And then I notice that sometime soon I’m going to stop receiving publishing payments or royalty checks and I say, 'Well, I guess I should write another book.’”
He admits that he doesn’t run in literary circles. “I don’t have a lot of friends in the publishing world,” he said. “Actually, I don’t have a lot of friends.”
Maybe the royalty checks dried up recently for Butler because on Wednesday he revealed his next book is about the relationship between a grandparent and a grandchild. He’s also stewing on an idea for a book set on a coffee farm.
“I won’t be able to write that until I up and move my family to Panama to live on a coffee farm for a year or two though,” he said, chuckling. “I have to go experience it.”
Elizabeth Pearce is a Library Technician at the Ann Arbor District Library.
Blog Post
Ellipsis Theatre fought a plague throughout its house to produce Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night"
by christopherporter
Ellipsis Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night has been beset by a tragedy of the sort usually only seen performed on the stage of Shakespearean prose -- namely, a plague.
Many of the actors caught serious cases of the flu, to the point where the show did not go on during the first weekend of its run and was pushed back a full week. The night I saw the show, one actor (playing Sir Toby) had just joined the cast in the last three days and another actor who was playing Orsino was doubling for Sir Andrew since the original Sir Andrew had turned green just hours before.
Such extreme changes in performance schedules will almost certainly affect audience levels for the run, which is a shame; I strongly recommend that you go see Twelfth Night this upcoming weekend if you can, assuming that the cast has not all fainted into comas.
The direction by Joanna Hastings is very good, especially in two broad categories: she successfully places 12 people on the stage who all appear to at least passably understand what they’re saying (this is not often true of amateur actors in other Shakespearean productions that I’ve seen), and she has modernized the setting without resorting to stale or nonsensical gimmicks. (For an example of those gimmicks, I once saw a version of Macbeth where the witches were played by seven people and Macbeth was played by two more people, all were costumed in goth steampunk chic, and the director had not added anything of value to the play other than successfully casting as many actors and actresses as he could fit onto the stage.)
While there are many props used in this production of Twelfth Night, they all help to illuminate Shakespeare’s words and intent, or modify that intent to the modern palette. This fits with the mission of the Ellipsis Theatre, which is to bring old stories and theatrical traditions to life in new ways.
According to Hastings, she “chose a fictionalized version of New York for our setting, because the shipwreck and unconventional arrival of the twins in Illyria put us in mind of refugees coming to this country, being welcomed by the sight of the Statue of Liberty and what she stands for, and being integrated into the extraordinary and diverse society that a city like New York offers.” The set of a subway station is effective, the costumes are for the most part fantastic, and the posters and signs designed by Iris Hastings look professionally done.
Of the leads, there are quite a few stars -- Feste, played by Scott Screws who co-founded Ellipsis, is brilliant as the wise fool philosophizing and singing about the wisdom of tomfoolery and the folly of wisdom, here modernized into a homeless man sleeping in a subway station who sings for spare change. Shakespeare’s plays often dealt with philosophical ideas only tangentially related to the stories he was telling, and in the script of Twelfth Night he spent a great deal of time poking at the intelligence required by a fool to smartly entertain.
Markham Isler plays the role of Sir Toby with a mixture of puppy-like wonderment in his eyes and a voice like Latka from Taxi. The effect is adorable, especially when he has written an angry letter challenging a fellow suitor to a duel for a lady’s hand and spends the whole time mouthing the words of his letter to a stuffed elephant that he carries around as a security blanket. In contrast, Isler as Orsino is handsome, assured, and denies being easy caricatured.
New addition to the cast Sean Rodriguez Sharpe is excellent as Sir Toby, stumbling around in an alcoholic stupor cracking drunken jokes for most of the play, yet switching into a formidable foe instantaneously. The women leads Mouse Courtois and Krystle Dellihue as Viola and Olivia, respectively, are also capable actors, though they’re not given quite the same quality of material to work with. Of the smaller roles, most are acted well or passably, with standout performances from character actors Breon Canady (who deserves more stage time than her three roles allow) and Karl Sikkenga as Malvolio.
If I have one main criticism about this show, it’s the running time: Twelfth Night runs for a full 2 1/2 hours, and the last 20 minutes do drag a bit as the denouement is oh-so-painstakingly revealed. This is not a result of the acting or the direction, but merely the way Shakespeare wrote the ending.
Please don’t let this stop you from going to see it -- as Hastings said about the play, she chose Twelfth Night because of the “streak of sadness amongst the hilarity, the wisdom in the foolery, the multiple facets of love.”
This production succeeds at bringing these ideas to life, and is highly entertaining to boot.
Toby Tieger has directed, acted in, and written plays over the last 10 years, and sees theater as often as he can. He is a bookshelver/processor with the Ann Arbor District Library.
Ellipsis Theatre’s ”Twelfth Night” runs March 9-12 at Theatre Nova, 410 W Huron St, Ann Arbor. The Thursday through Saturday shows are at 8 pm; the Sunday performance is at 7 pm. For more information and tickets, visit the play’s Facebook Event page or email ellipsistheatreboxoffice@gmail.com. Ellipsis’ next show in May will be Bertolt Brecht's “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”
Blog Post
Multiple Personality Music: Lake Street Dive at the Michigan Theater
by christopherporter
“We’ve been in Ann Arbor before!” announced Rachael Price, lead singer of Lake Street Dive, at the band’s performance Wednesday night at the Michigan Theater. “We played The Ark way back when -- was anyone here at that show?” One or two members of the crowd hooted. “That seems about right,” said Price with a laugh. “Because that’s about the number of people who were at that show.”
Since then, Lake Street Dive’s star has risen rapidly. The four-member band filled the Michigan Theater, and Lake Street Dive has been touring almost constantly for the past year and a half, simultaneously promoting its acclaimed 2016 album, Side Pony, and bringing some of their overlooked older work back to the stage.
Named after a street of dive bars in guitarist and trumpeter Mike “McDuck” Olson’s hometown of Minneapolis, Lake Street Dive has been together since 2004, after meeting at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Price, Olson, upright bass player Bridget Kearney, and drummer Mike Calabrese all dabbled in other projects while working on Lake Street Dive’s first, self-titled album, released in 2010. Afterward, they mutually agreed to commit more strongly to the band and touring, and the foursome spent much of 2013 and 2014 on the road, especially after the release of its 2014 album, Bad Self Portraits, which earned them increasing fame. It seems now that with every tour stop, Lake Street Dive is able to fill bigger and bigger venues.
Although Price’s powerful jazz-influenced vocals are the first thing anyone will notice about the band, Lake Street Dive does an excellent job highlighting each member’s talents in live shows. Calabrese, Kearney, and Olson all performed solos on their respective instruments at various points throughout Wednesday’s show. Kearney’s extended solo on her upright bass, fingers flying up and down the larger-than-her instrument, was a particular crowd pleaser (although this Pulp reviewer could have done without multiple people shouting “slappin' de bass!” over the course of it).
A noteworthy addition to Lake Street Dive on this tour is electric keyboardist Akie Bermiss, which allowed the band to play some of its songs more robustly than was possible only as a quartet.
Now with three albums under its collective belt -- and increased confidence in playing older songs that many fans aren’t familiar with -- Lake Street Dive's repertoire has expanded significantly since its early years. The Michigan Theater concert was a mix of songs from all three albums. Still, the band kicked off the show with fan favorite “Bad Self Portraits” and worked in lots of its most popular songs, including the danceable “Side Pony” and “Rabid Animal.”
“You Go Down Smooth,” “Godawful Things,” and “Saving All My Sinning” all allowed Price to show off her wildly impressive vocals. Before playing “Mistakes,” off Bad Self Portraits, Price revealed that she had started writing the song in Ann Arbor. Kearney jumped in: “It was my birthday and my mom had baked me a cake and sent it along with us on tour. After our show in Ann Arbor, Rachael found herself standing out in the cold at the back of the van just eating my cake by the handful.” Price laughed ruefully. “And that’s the origin of the line, ‘Look at my mistakes,’” she said as the crowd cackled.
Lake Street Dive has delighted fans for years with jazzy covers of popular, older songs like the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” and Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl.” On this night, Lake Street Dive delved deep into the past to bring out its cover of Paul McCartney’s “Let Me Roll It,” off the band's 2012 EP of covers, Fun Machine. Price also taught the crowd the chorus of one of the band's early tunes, “My Speed,” so all could sing along with the final song of the encore.
One of the most fun things about seeing Lake Street Dive perform has always been how different each band member is and yet how cohesive and close-knit a unit they appear to be, both onstage and off. Frontwoman Price is often clad in something unique and glamorous; on Wednesday it was a pair of iridescent maroon leather overalls and sparkly platform shoes. Meanwhile, drummer Calabrese offers up the antithesis with a Springsteen-like sweat bandana, white T-shirt, and bare feet. Calabrese and Kearney invest their entire bodies into their instruments, along with extravagant facial expressions, and it's hard to tear your eyes away from them. Olson is almost comical in his opposition to all this -- audiences are lucky if he makes eye contact with them even once during a show, let alone cracks a smile. When introduced, his signature move is a slight wave and a subdued nod of the head, immediately turning his attention back to his trumpet or guitar.
Despite their differences in appearance and personality, the closeness that (ideally) comes with spending 15 years together is apparent among Lake Street Dive members. They’re friends first, bandmates second. In fact, they were planning what to do for Olson’s birthday before the Ann Arbor show. “I woke up to a text stream this morning,” said Kearney between songs. “Rachael had texted us saying, ‘It’s McDuck’s birthday tomorrow and even though he usually likes to be alone on his days off, I really think we should make an exception and plan a surprise for him since it’s a special day.’” She pauses. “The next text was from McDuck saying, “Um, I’m on this thread.’”
As the audience laughed, even Olson had to grin.
Elizabeth Pearce is a Library Technician at the Ann Arbor District Library.
Lake Street Dive continues its tour over the coming weeks, which began in Portland, Maine, and ends in Los Angeles at the end of March. The band will spend the summer playing various music festivals and jazz events. And perhaps Lake Street Dive will get a chance to break out that "Rich Girl" cover when it plays Aspen, Colorado, on September 1 with Hall & Oates.