Underground Film’s Rich History: Bringing The Past Alive Online
Underground film is all around us online. It’s just buried in the nooks and crannies of the Internet, which is, of course, why it’s thought of being underground. For example, you can find underground films listed in the Internet Movie Database, but you won’t find trivia questions or quotes or pictures of them listed on the homepage. Wikipedia has entries for underground films and filmmakers — some I’ve written myself — but how would you know how to find them unless you already knew about them to search for their names?
This is why I think it’s important to build up an underground film loop in 2010. The more we can make each other visible and provide valuable information on the oddball and the obscure, the more chances underground films will float by casual, Internet-surfing audiences.
And audiences who are new to underground film may become interested in the form’s history. But, that’s where things become problematic. Underground film has never had its history adequately covered online in a cohesive fashion, by any one website or multiple. Oh, one can piece together a history and find examples to watch of older underground films — “old” meaning 5 or 50 years ago — if one knows how to run proper searches, but putting those pieces together to form a big picture is difficult.
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Cinefamily: Stan Brakhage With Lee Ranaldo Soundtrack And More
March 10
8:00 & 10:15 p.m.
The Silent Movie Theater
611 N Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Hosted by: The Cinefamily
Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, along with fellow musicians Ulrich Krieger and Alan Licht, will be performing an improvised set during a screening of the classic Stan Brakhage experimental film Text of Light. Plus, there will be a screening of Huckleberry Lain’s animated film Parallel, which will be accompanied by a live performance by the electronic band Languis.
The Text of Light, like the majority of Brakhage’s work, is, of course, a silent film — a meditation of vision focused on the light and images fractured through a glass ashtray. Although Brakhage used sound in some of his very early films and in some later ones, he mostly believed that cinema should be purely visual experience and shunned soundtracks.
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Full Film Online: The Livelong Day
Embedded above is a simply amazing and fascinating documentary by filmmaker David Fenster called The Livelong Day, about model train enthusiasts. It runs about 20 minutes long and is an intimate, revealing portrait of an obsessive, lifelong-commitment hobby, but with real care given to understanding what draws these men to its lifestyle.
2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival: Official Lineup
The 48th annual Ann Arbor Film Festival is another exciting celebration of underground film past and present, featuring two retrospectives of two master filmmakers and dozens of short films and features from some of the most gifted talents working today.
For the retrospectives, first, Kenneth Anger will be in attendance at the festival for two programs of his classic work, including Fireworks and Scorpio Rising. Plus, for the first Anger screening, the filmmaker will be joined on-stage by film critic Dennis Lim for a discussion of his work and career. The second retrospective is of the work of the late Chick Strand, who sadly passed away in 2009. Strand’s Angel Blue Sweet Wings (1966) will actually open the entire festival, then there will be two retrospective screenings of her work, the first of which will be presented by film scholar Irina Leimbacher.
The rest of the AAFF lineup reads like a who’s who in the modern underground film scene. The first “film” I suggest everyone check out is the music video Anonanimal by Chicago animator Lisa Barcy, who who has created an absolutely beautiful stop-motion animation piece for the song by Andrew Bird. Also on the animation side is the new entry in Bill Plympton’s super-successful “dog” series: Horn Dog. Then, there’s two animated films by the always awesome Martha Colburn: Myth Labs and Triumph of the Wild.
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