SIFF - 5/30/06

Films Today: 1
Running Total: 12

Sadly the long weekend is over, and its back to work and even worse only one or two movies a day. It will make these entries easier to write though. So today’s only showing is a Darkness Swallowed at NWFF. This is only 1.2 miles from work so I figured I would walk it. Unfortunately I did not take into account the fact that it was really hot and that the walk is all uphill from downtown. That’ll shed some pounds. So I sit down in line and a bit later Roya shows up from her afternoon films. About 20 minutes before start time, I go into my bag to get my ticket and to my horror discover that my entire stack of SIFF tickets is GONE. Completely gone. I was totally fucking freaking out, I mean aside from anything else this represents a significant amount of money. I suspected I had left them at work, but didn’t have time to go back and check. So first things first, I went in and discovered this showing was sold out, relegating me to the rush line. Fortunately this wasn’t a problem and I got in.

FYI I had this explained to me last year. The way seating works is they pull a percentage of seats for each screening out of circulation for passholders. Then they let the passholders in, then they let the regular folk in, then they count the seats and let in as many people from the rush line as they can. What generally happens is that not as many passholders show up as the number of seats they’ve reserved for them, so there’s usually spare seats at screenings. I have heard however that very rarely even passholders can get denied (if more passholders show up than seats are reserved for them.) The moral is, if its sold out show up early and you’ll almost always get in. This concludes SIFF Seating 101.

So anyways, I got in. First up was a short called Clouds which was just bad. Take a bunch of digital frames of clouds, zoom them around and back and forth to electronic music. Repeat for 8 minutes. This is not good filmmaking people.

The main course was a non-narrative / experimental film by Betzy Bromberg, who does these films in between doing the visual effects for James Cameron movies. I have a weird relationship with avant-garde cinema. In short I don’t really get it, although I have often questioned whether that is a failing of me or it or just a matter of taste. One thing I do know is that for me, in the case of non-narrative films, the more abtsract the better. For some reason when I see images on the screen and they are recognizable and straightforward, my brain expects a story. I have some preconceived notion of what film is and what I expect when I sit down in those chairs. However watching something like Brakhage is so completely different that those pre-conceptions break down and I can kind of look at it from a different angle. Its more like going to an art gallery. The fact that my response is based on pre-conception is one of the reasons I have often thought that maybe a lack of appreciation of a-g cinema is at least somewhat my problem, and so on occasion I have checked something out.

So, this film. There were mainly two types of imagery in it. First was the camera tightly focused in on what looked like sculptures made from various organic objects, and moving across them. You never get to see them from a wide enough view to really know what they are, but I definitely got the idea that they were sculpted and not found. The other main class of imagery was rushing water that appeared to be digitally manipulated in various ways. I enjoyed this class of imagery far more, it felt more interesting, rather than the camera just panning over something that was laid on a table. I think the organic element is something I enjoy (cf Malick, Tropical Malady.) The soundtrack was various types of electronic music, much of which I was actively irritated by. However some of it was actually pretty cool. One thing I noticed is that if the music was less annoying, I appreciated the film more (although this tended to coincide with the previously described water scenes so I’m not positive of a cause/effect there.) I have often wondered about my relationship to music in film, because I worry that by throwing in a few good songs I am easily manipulated into better feelings, and some of this may have been happening here. However there have also been times when I gained a greater appreaciation of a song I didn’t like much due to a particularly nice piece of filmmaking so it can go both ways. I never really fell into the movie, I spent most of it thinking about how I relate to films and music, and why I respond to avant-garde cinema the way I do, and other thoughts about my relationship to film and music. So from that angle it was a good experience, just you know expending some energy thinking about those things and how they fit into my life. I still don’t know what to make of most of this stuff though.

The one noteworthy aspect of this screening was that out of the 120 seats in the theatre, there were 30 walkouts! Thats a record for me. I assume it was mostly people who didn’t realize what kind of a film they were getting into. Some guy next to Roya sat through it for an hour then left with only 15 minutes left, I don’t know wtf is up with that.

Thats it! One movie!

EDIT: Yes, after the movie we rushed back to my work and found the stack of tickets sitting on my desk where I had left them. I had been looking through them to compare to Chris’ schedule to see what screenings we matched up with.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 9:05 am and is filed under Movies, SIFF 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.