Rooftop Shots
Friday, September 12th, 2003
8:30 - Live music by Parts + Labor [details below]
9:00 - Short films fired from the Rooftop.
11:00 - Live music by Vic Thrill [details below]
Plus pseudo-Closing Night party*.
Shorts so sharp they're shots.
It seems our closing night show always takes on an air of danger. The films often wind up being dark, foreboding; even the animated caveman comedies and surreal romantic revelries deal with desperation and death. Most of these films will make you laugh, it's true, but they're black comedies, with humor based on technological, physical and emotional alienation. Maybe we're just being maudlin, reading into things too much as the summer ends and we realize it will be eight months before we have the pleasure of doing another short film show on a roof, but the laughs here are directed at the fissures in society.
Maybe we show so many dark films on the last night of the Summer Series because these are the films that were too intense, too scary, too disturbingly heartbreaking to fit into other programs. It's only now, when there's only one show left to fill, that the eerie power of these movies can no longer be withheld. But we have to show you these films. You have to see this tragic computer mouse come to life; you can't miss the disturbed little girl with her rat on the breakfast table; look, listen: you will be entranced by the tortured anxieties of Condoleeza Rice. It may be difficult, but you have to see this show. It's haunting, it's funny, it's tragic poetic and important.
As we try to define short films as a genre unto themselves in the world of motion pictures, as we attempt to categorize films not by their duration but by their impact, we find that the "shorts so sharp they're shots" hurt when they hit you. The reality of these surreal films; the side-splitting humor of these tragedies; the raw, raging emotions in these quiet, still films—these movies will shock and amaze. Shots are fired, from dank underground TV studios in Chicago, from the wasteland of Iraq, and from the shape-shifting rooftops of Brazil. Shots are fired, and you turn to look right at them.
THE FILMS: Heavy Kell McGregor (5:10)
Last spring, you may have read, an experienced rock-climber became trapped when his right arm was pinned down by a fallen boulder. In excruciating pain, he waited two days, hoping for help. On the third day, out of water and food, the climber knew his only chance at survival was to sever his arm. Using a pocketknife, he sawed through his numbed elbow, then walked several miles to a road, where he was rescued. In this animated film, a pre-lingual caveman cries out for the invention of the pocketknife. This is a funny film.
Re: The Operation Paul Chan (27:30)
A fascinating collection of imagined letters, memoirs and to-do-lists representing the startling innermost thoughts of current U.S. Government officials. Each cabinet member is introduced with a robotic, computer-animated portrait in which they sport cuts, bruises and deformations, as though what we are about to see and hear comes from a deep cavern of the soul which acknowledges its own battered debasement. Haunting voice-overs, eerie surveillance footage and snapshots of desecrated landscapes and off-kilter muscle-flexing poseurs, all hint at psychological strains a band of plundering pirates might feel, where sexual repressions, petty jealousies and power grabs result in mass slaughter and destruction.
ESC Eric Fleishchauer (9:00)
In this stop-motion animation, a computer mouse wanders a technological wasteland, rich with the complex details of ominous motherboard ruins, haywire circuitry and marauding microchip monsters. The mouse, which seems so cold and alien at first, takes on the innocence and valor of a comic book hero, in a humanizing love story of mouse vs. machine.
>Interactive Jim Munroe (6:00) nomediakings.org
Two guys go about their daily lives with each other while immersed in a computer role-playing game they store in their minds. The breezy way the game-master repeats, with precision, complex scenarios represents the strange cultural phenomena in which technophiles become immersed in both the game and the medium. The subtle writing and excellent performances also suggest a romance between the two men, despite the heterosexual "save-the-girl" narrative of the game.
Caterpillar Gabriella Dentamaro (7:00)
In this sad and poignant drama, a young girl deals with her family secrets by making secrets of her own.
Estranged Todd Downing (14:00)
A film, based on a tale by radio storyteller Joe Frank, about a lonely transvestite and the man she obsessively calls on the phone. Because we never see the man on the phone, the relationship is difficult to gauge: is he an ex-lover turned straight, a semi-ashamed relative? Though her requests seem fake, her desperation is clearly real.
Security Anthem Kent Lambert (3:30)
A series people, holdovers of the mid-80's mall culture, tell a disjointed tale in which everything from knives to carrots takes on an aura of threat. Lambert's (Condensed Movie #1, 7/11/03) clever, abrupt editing weaves an anthem of anxiety and destruction.
A Ilusao Gabi Greeb (3:00)
The magic of rooftops.
THE MUSIC:
8:30—When Parts + Labor played at Rooftop Films in 2002, they set up a pen filled with remote-controlled cars. The remotes to these cars were adjusted so that the shifting frequencies which make the cars crash and roll would be broadcast through the band's amplified keyboard, feedback crashing and rolling with the drums and guitar. When some neighborhood kids saw the cars, the band was more than happy to hand over the remotes and jam with the kids. But just because they're nice to kids doesn't mean Parts + Labor's aggressive post-rock won't thrill the adults, too.
11:00—Vic Thrill—Interstellar dirty gospel rock for partying. victhrill.com
11:00-Late—Pseudo-Closing Night Party. (Originally, September 12th was the final night of the Summer Series. Because of the blackout in August, the show that was supposed to take place on August 15th has been re-scheduled for September 19th. We will party now, anyway, and again next week. A denouement-sort of party.)
