Last Day: Avant Garde means Never Having to Say Your Sorry

"Avant Garde" is a French word meaning "doing what you're not supposed to do." Let's discuss this in Mothers Day terms. There was stuff your mom told you specifically not to do: don't yank the cat's tail, don't stick your finger in the outlet, etc. Then there was stuff your mom never dreamed you would do: like stick your cat's tail in the outlet. That's avant garde!

I'm going to get back to that, but first let's discuss food. As in - where did it go? Good weird food is an integral part of my vacations, but for this one there wasn't time. My diet was basically (1) raisin bran (2) film festival fare: cheese and crackers and wine (3) ceasar salads bought in the George Eastman House cafe and scarfed in the theatre. (Ceasar salads were my popcorn and jujubes).

I was going to get a garbage plate yesterday. Then I thought, "Oh crap, it's Mother's Day. Everyone's at the restaurant on Mother's Day." Then I thought yeah, well ... a garbage plate is not a Mother's Day brunch affair. (Maybe your mother would like that. I make no judgments.) Anyway, I thought yay! So I pinged www.garbageplate.com for Nick Tahoe's, the pre-eminent garbage plate restaurant ... and found they're closed on Sunday. Crap! So I ate raisin bran.

That's OK. I basically ate film for five days, and Sunday was Dessert Day. Stuff to cleanse the palette. The first film, "No Orchids for Miss Blandish" was extremely cool. It was a 1940's British Film Noir with British actors, British sets ... but set in New York with fake New York buildings and accents.

You can imagine how weird that'd be. House's Hugh Laurie is British (in case you didn't know), but his American accent works because his dialogue is very character-specific. (Plus he's really good at it.) Now take the language of Film Noir:

• "Shut up ya mugs!"
• "I need some dough!"
• "Listen, you!"

And stick that in a British actor's mouth. Friggin' hilarious!

But underneath, the story was captive and the characters were evil to the point of divinity. The movie was pretty roundly criticized for its amorality - there's a lot of barely disguised sex and violence here for 1948. It was a grand old time!

The second film, "Avant Gaming" is a product of its time just as much as No Orchids and needs some explanation. It's a series of short subjects culled from ... get this ... video games. Yep. And more to the point, they are video game mistakes. Have you ever played one and were walking around the virtual landscape when something weird happens: you walk through a wall, you end up on the other side of the street, a moving object like a bird gets stuck in the air, or whatever? To get there, you basically did things the programmers did not plan for. And as video games gets more visually sophisticated, these things happen more often.

String these occurrences together and you have avant garde cinema! The computer has created a surreal world with possibilities that are difficult to imagine by yourself. You can run these things together in a narrative, or use them for directly emotional transfer. One of the films, for example, was written by a filmmaker for his lover, who had committed suicide. He strung together images to form an afterlife - one where rain falls sideways and ethereal humans walk through grave sites and each other. It's hypnotic and lovely.

The last film of the festival, "Still Bill", is the exact opposite of avant garde. A documentary on the musician Bill Withers, "Still Bill" captures a very deliberately-lived life. This was a guy who worked menial jobs, learned to play guitar at age 28, recorded, became a huge international star, then gave it up ... not because he went crazy, but because "I just wanted to do something else."

Why not do a written bio? I think I figured it out. On film, you often see different sides of a person in any particular moment. There's a kind of parallelism that brings out hidden sides of a character. So in one scene, Bill is talking to a group of children with stuttering issues. A stutterer himself, Bill projects authority and strength to the kids ... at the same time a huge tear starts rolling down his cheek. See, as I explain it, it's impossible to meld those two images together. Words work serially - one after the other. Film does it effortlessly.

Some say film is for the lazy. It makes the sound and visual landscape for you, so you don't contribute anything in your mind. Of course, that's crap. You bring a lot of personal history to a movie - in essence, you always have a movie date! (Don't start making out with your personal history in the back row. That's just gross.) A good film will hook itself into that personal space, rearrange it a bit, dust off some corners. But you have to give it the layout of your mind. You have to show it around. You have to unlock the doors. You have to feed it lunch and promise to carry it around on your shoulders.

I compare notes with my new friend, Caroline. At a few points we saw the same movie at different times and got very different reactions. A few movies we vehemently disagreed on. But there's a language that film buffs seem to speak. It feels more silent, more terse, almost instinctual. We say, "you remember that scene where..." and don't even bother finishing the sentence. We just know.

I shake her hand and tell her I'll see her again next year. She says, "I hope so." Well, maybe the plot will unfold differently, but I think she can count on it.

Day 4: Mellodrama, Monogamy, The Screen Gems Logo

Admit it. This is the weirdest movie poster you've ever seen.

It's also hanging in one of the film theatres here - the Little 1 - and whenever I'm waiting for the movie to start, my attention wanders over there every 30 seconds. "Stop it!" I think. "Don't look!" But it's just so friggin' weird, and I can't help but love it.

In the morning, I took a quick sprint up to Syracuse to see Kathy. By mid-afternoon I was back in the movie theatre.

The first movie I saw was "Monogamy," and my guess is if you'll see any of the movies I'm describing here, this will be it. And you won't be disappointed. The movie centers around a newly-engaged couple. The guy, a wedding photographer, gets an off-hours job to shoot voyeuristic photos of a woman. He gets a little bit crazy in the process (there's obsession again! It's all over this festival), and we watch his relationship start to disintegrate. It's all handled with great humor, style, and a killer original soundtrack. And it feels a bit claustrophobic, which makes for a great relationship movie.

And while I'm here, I'm going to give my personal Best Actress award to Rashida Jones. (wow, what an honor). You probably know her from The Office and Parks and Recreation on TV. She's extremely good in "Monogamy." She works in the screwball comedy tradition, I suppose, but there's a kind of gravity to her performances. When she takes the world on her shoulders, you really feel it. I think she's going to have a great career, if not a big one. You heard it here first.

And now we come to "I Am Love." What does the word "melodrama" mean to you? Snidely Whiplash tying Nell to the railroad track? Me too. Actually I always thought the formulaic story made it a melodrama ... but in fact, it's the music that defines it. It's that barelhouse piano you hear when Snidely is tying her up.

"I Am Love" is real melodrama with a classical music score. And you know me - I hate classical. But the soundtrack here might change my mind. The music is by the modern American composer John Adams. What's cool is the minimalism in it. He wouldn't admit it, I'm sure, but he's got a James Brown vibe - find the groove, establish it, repeat it until your neighbor stares at 'cha. If you have the right groove, it becomes a living, breathing entity.

Granted, the plot isn't very compelling - a rich wife has an affair with a poor-but-talented chef - but they don't make too much of it. What they do make a lot of is ... food! Oh man, glorious stuff! Prawns on a bed of grilled ratatouille practically give the wife an orgasm. (A lesser blogger would say "I'll have what she's having." Good thing I'm above that). But the food shots are part of a larger plan to maul your senses. There are shots of insects on flowers that make you shiver. And all of it in the midst of this grand but slightly off-kilter music.

And the ending. WOW! If you've ever sat through the closing movie credits thinking, "I can't move. My mind is blown." you know what a cool feeling that is.

The last movie of the day, "The S From Hell," was really a bunch of short films commenting on popular culture. It was a mixed bag, but one of the segments on Screen Gems was very satisfying to me personally.

So you know the Screen Gems logo which appears at the end of Bewitched and the Flintstones, right? And that music that appears in the background? (If you don't know offhand, here's an example: http://www.milanofamily.org/scrngems/ScreenGemsColor.avi). Well that logo and music gave me nightmares as a kid. It was so creepy, it was worse than werewolves or the bogeyman or any of that crap. I still find it totally unsettling.

I thought I was the only one who felt that way. But no! It gave lots of kids the creeps! And in this segment, he talks to some of them (all grown up now, like me) and they describe their Screen Gems-induced nightmares in lurid detail. Then the film-maker actually stages and films some of those nightmares.

The next time you rattle off some half-arsed piece of work, think of this. The writer of that jingle (it's done on a Moog synthesizer, by the way) and designer of that logo rattled this off too. They probably finished it before a three-martini lunch. But look at the psychological damage it caused! Be careful, people! The mind is a weird thing.

Finding my psychological burden lighter, I walked up the street at midnight in the snow. (In May? Man. What a screwed up part of the country this is.) It was midnight, and I caught the last set of the Michael Stuart dance. Wicked salsa! My friend Kerri was instrumental in putting in together, and she milled around the place in a stylish black dress, the belle of the ball. (Those who know Kerri know how rare it is for her to wear dresses. And how wonderful it might look. And yup, it was all that!) About 2 AM the band packed up and I headed back to the hotel.

"Sunday," I say to myself, "I'm gonna take it easy." But that probably won't happen.

Day 3: Biking, Hypnosis, and Jail

I figured out why you go to film festivals. You go to discuss the question, "What the hell just happened?"

Friday night started with wine and cheese and more schmoozing over art at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center - like you see on the left. The artist, John Katzner, obviously has serious Attention Deficit Disorder. And I ran into Taylor, the Sound critic from two nights ago, who skipped Thursday night altogether from exhaustion.

So I had this theory. Every movie I saw was better than the program description led me to believe. I had two movies to pick from, one which sounded pretty good, and one that didn't sound good at all. The latter was "Women Without Men", based on the book about 4 women living in pre-Shah Iran who get together in an orchard. Blugggh! So I went to see it.

You can probably guess the rest. I actually cried at the end, which was kind of embarassing. It was as moving, lyrical, and visually arresting as any film I've seen in a long time. But when we all got of the theatre, we started talking and found something very strange had happened.

There's one scene with a Communist sympathizer fighting a shah's army soldier. One of the women, who has fallen in love with the communist, watches them battle. The communist plunges the knife into the soldier, and the soldier falls to the floor. The woman bends down very sadly, and places her hand on the fallen soldier's chest. But when we discussed it, half the people said, "No it was the Communist who falls to the floor." And the more we discussed it, the more we disagreed. But this wasn't a quick camera shot. It was at least two minutes long. The director had basically shown us what we wanted to believe ... and very convincingly.

I'm sure we could've rolled the movie again and figured it out, like a magic trick. But wow!


The second movie, "Cell 211" was a thriller from Spain. A guy (newly married, pregnant wife) comes in on his first day as prison guard, ... and with his luck, right on the day there's a prison riot. Hostages are taken, of which the prison guard is one. But he convinces them he's an inmate.

And from there, you can pretty much write the Hollywood screenplay right? Yeah well. That's not this movie at all. So you're thinking, "Oh yeah, so the new prison guard is really an escaped inmate or something." Nope. There's no gimmick. Everything unfolds right in front of you, and it's pretty un-straightforward in its straightforwardness.

No spoilers. Just watch the damn thing! It's gonna be out on DVD soon. And if subtitles turn you off just remember ... newspapers are just subtitles for life. And you don't hate newspapers, do you?

Oh, and if you want to see trailers for any of these films I'm describing, they're at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FCC55060B7CFFE4F.

Anyway, Friday was a sandwich with Kerri Vaughn as the bread, and the Film Festival as the filling. A lot of you know her - she's a former co-worker, my first dance teacher, and dear friend of mine. So we started the day with a bike ride down the Erie Canal, ate lunch at Alladin's in Pittsford, and came back in a little drizzly rain. After the films, I went to the Tango Cafe, of which she is the proprieter, and drank sangria, shot the breeze, and watched the salsa dancing until 2 AM.

And salsa lessons are now on my list of things-to-do. I dunno. Seems like the souvenirs I bring home from vacations are mostly to-do items. "Been There. Done That. Got 5 More Things To Do." Bliss!

Day 2: Grindhouse!

It was 1976 and I was just about a teenager. (And no, dinosaurs did not roam the earth back then.). I listened to the AM radio station in Sioux Falls SD - KISD - and during that summer, about every second commercial was for the movie The Pom Pom Girls. There was lots of giggling, some innuendo, and an authoritative voice at the end: "The Pom Pom Girls. A Crown International Picture. Rated R."

I had no idea what was going on. I was too young to get the innuendo. But I had had my first brush with exploitation pictures. Grindhouse!

The idea was making lots of money with very little capital. So grindhouse movie makers like Crown International would follow this formula:

1. Make up movie posters, and take 5 or 6 of them around asking "Which movie would you want to see?"
2. Hand the #1 pick to the screenwriter and say "Make a movie for this poster."
3. Raise capital by asking your connections in strip joints, casinos, or whatever. Offer the investors a bit part in the movie.
   
4. Film! Since the people aren't actors, film one line of dialogue at a time - give them line, say action, let them say it, say cut, do the next line.
   
5. Release it and watch the money roll in!

The classic Grindhouse era ended back in the mid-70's, but there's been a resurgence of interest. (Mostly from Quentin Tarrantino/Richard Rodriguez flick "Grindhouse" a few years back). So Day two of the 360/365 Film Festival was a Grindhouse extravaganza!

I saw a new documentary called "American Grindhouse" that captured the era quite nicely. Grindhouse is not an genre like Film Noir. It's more a state of mind ... whatever titilates you and gets you in theater is A-OK! Gore. T&A. Violence. Like a carnival barker, you have to up the ante to get people into your tent. So the documentary had a lot of ground to cover, and did it very well in 90 minutes. It's coming out later this year on cable and DVD - it's worth the rental if you like film history.

"Gone With The Pope" is a masterpiece of Grindhouse cinema ... in the same way "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is a masterpiece of Science Fiction. The back story is fascinating. The lounge singer Duke Mitchell wrote, produced and directed the entire thing, but left it unfinished, unedited and in the can. About 15 years after that, a couple of intrepid editors got ahold of it, and spent the next 15 years (in between paying gigs) cleaning it up and splicing it together. They had to work from scripts scrawled on cocktail napkins and backs of envelopes.

The result is a jaw-dropping WTF??? These four mafiosos are on a boat in the middle of the ocean and one says, "We're going to kidnap the pope." Say what????? They pay $50K to get an audience with the pope, pull a gun on him, shift him off to the back room. A guy says, "Take off your clothes, your Holiness." And they switch clothes, and somehow get the pope out of the Vatican and onto a boat.

And it's all serious! The audience was rolling in the aisles, and I was too. I'll probably see better movies at this film festival, but this will probably the most entertaining when all is said and done.

So, speaking of better, my favorite movie so far has to be L'Enfer. If there's a word for "the exact opposite of Grindhouse cinema", that would fit here. The back story here is fascinating too. The director, the famous French director Henri George Clouzot, basically had an unlimited bankroll to make a masterpiece. The story was about a young couple, and the husband becomes obsessively jealous when the wife starts hanging around the town womanizer.

Pretty standard stuff. But Clouzot was looking for a new language of cinema to tell the story. He invents new camera tricks, different ways to frame shots, innovative uses of color. He wants everything to be perfect and in service to the story. The deeper he gets in, the more he erases and starts over. Clouzot is obsessed. He drives his actors nuts, driving the male lead to a nervous breakdown, then has a heart attack himself.

And his experiments are pretty much all that survive of L'Enfer. There's film for about 30% of the story, virtually no soundtrack. So how do you splice together something watchable? Well ... you blend the fictional story with the back story. So L'Enfer is a documentary about making the film. It follows the obsessions of both Clouzot and the male lead of the fictional story. They both descend into madness, and the psychological turmoil in his own mind translates to some weird stuff printed on celluoloid.

As I watch movies, I often ask myself "What am I getting here that I can't get from a novel?" I think that's why French New Wave (of which this is a part) is so powerful. And they have it in spades in L'Enfer. There's a shot of a woman tied to railroad tracks and a train racing for her. Pretty standard movie thing. But something undefinable makes you feel the railroad steel against your head, the binding of the rope, the hot breath of the locomotive coming for you. It's more than sight or sound, it's emotion communicated on some subspace channel.

So I'm talking to this guy, Josh, who sits in the same seat for each screening - back row, chair against the wall. He goes on and on about why it's perfect. The theater curves inwards a little, so the back seat has a little extra space for you to swing your legs. The speaker is above you so the sound comes from "out of the sky". "This place is sacred to me," he says.

And I think ... OK, so we just saw a movie about how obsession drives you to madness and heart attacks. Have you learned nothing?

Of course not! We're humans! And we will keep on learning nothing for as long as it takes.

Day 1: Basquiat, Personal Meterologists, and Dirty Martinis

OK, so I didn't get to meet James Ivory or see his new film "The City of Your Final Destination". But opening night was a blast nonetheless!

In the afternoon, I dropped Grover off at the boarding place. They dragged out his chart and said, "Uh oh." So evidently Grover was not very well-behaved the last time he was there. Doesn't play well with others. "He settled down after about a week though," they said, trying to reassure themselves a little.

So Grover, if you're reading this, you better settle your butt down! Or the next time, I'll be dropping you off at the ASPCA.

I checked into the Strathallan at - the perfect HQ for this festival - the two venues are about a mile away from each other on East Avenue, and the Strathallan is smack dab in the middle. I got a suite with a balcony and a kitchenette, and it was dirt cheap! I immediately stocked up on my patented hangover cure - raisin brain, milk, and lots of Poland Spring Bottled Water. That came in handy.

It was around 6:10, and too late to get to the "City of Your Final Destination" screening, but the festival runs four screens pretty much nonstop. So I landed at the documentary "Basquiat: The Radiant Child." It friggin' blew my mind! I didn't know much about the artist Basquiat, but the culture he painted in - 80's New York City - is pretty familiar. His style is visually assaulting and post-modern before post-modern was all the rage. The film was centered around some pretty intimate interviews done in LA, and like all good documentaries, it leaves you to fill in the details in your own mind. Basquiat was a crazy genius-head, and to see that in raw form is pretty revolutionary in the history of the whole friggin' universe, if you think about it. If we had a camera on Van Gogh or John Milton or Mozart, what would we have seen?

Afterwards, I pattered my way up through the rain to the George Eastman House for the Opening Night soiree. Fueled with Cabernet and decked out in schmoozing clothes, I worked the room and found less industry types and more just-plain-film-buffs than I thought! They had all seen the Ivory screening, so they pretty universally loved it ... EXCEPT for Taylor. Taylor, who is a film archivist, said "I thought the sound production was pretty distracting." Negative nit-picking fall-de-roll! She and I are gonna be best buds by the end of the festival.

Anyway, I've learned two important things. First, the All Access Pass means your a deity! Staff in Film Festival t-shirts fall all over themselves to make sure you're well-stocked with goodies, and your glass of Cabernet is always full. To get into the Basquiat film, I pulled out the pass attached to a lanyard tucked inside my blazer and the woman said, "Don't hide it! Be proud!"

Second, the next person who says "The Birthplace of Film" is gonna get hit. I'm already tired of that phrase, and I'm not sure how much it means in a city where 54 of the 58 Kodak factories are now abandoned. Let's move on.

And move on I did, to the Strathallan bar. Being Cinco De Mayo, they had a special on ... Dirty Martinis. OK, they're not very socially hip at the Strathallan Bar. But the dirty martinis were to die for, and I had a few too many, so I'm kind of dying in my own way right now. Anyway so the guy next to me is a meterologist. And we're talking about the Lake Effect and all that business and finally he says, "Yeah, I'm Josh Nichols."

Josh Nichols???? Holy crap!!!!

So who is Josh Nichols? Well, every night I fall asleep to WRVO public access radio from Oswego. They do old time radio shows every night - you know, The Green Hornet, Gunsmoke, Suspense, etc. Anyway, every night at 10:07, right after NPR News and before the first show, I get the weather report from Josh Nichols. Basically Josh tells me whether I can ride my bike to work or not the next day. Josh is a constant for me. He's the last voice of authority I hear just about every day.

So I invite Josh up to my hotel room. "C'mon! It's not like you're not there every night with me!" I tell him. He thinks this is pretty funny, finishes his mile high drink of something-and-grapefruit soda, and we part ways. But now, sitting on the Strathallan balcony with a dirty martini headache, I think of what might've been.

Art, as I keep saying, is a device for living all the lives you don't get. But sometimes you get to live inside your art - you get to compose the life you want to live and live it immediately, like a jazz tune. It feels like that right now.

360/365 Film Festival: Take One ... *Clack!* ... Action!

I've been known to forget vacations. I'll be sitting at work programming and about 1:00 someone comes up to me and says, "Hey! Aren't you supposed to be on vacation?" They point at the Outlook calendar, and there it is.

After about 4 or 5 times, it dawns on me. If you're going to vacate, vacate fully. (You can quote me on that - it sounds profound for about 5 seconds, then icky.) Mind erasure should be non-trivial, well-planned, and worth contemplating beforehand.

So in January I see this ad for the Rochester 360/365 International Film Festival. Rochester is the birthplace of film, you know Kodak and all, so what could be a more natural venue? And I love Rochester anyway. So I sign up for my all access pass, book a room at the Strathallan, and gear up. "Live. Breathe. Film." Yeah I can do that! Except the film part. I leave that to professionals.

And there will be some professionals there! James Ivory for one, the director of The Remains of the Day and A Room With a View. (You know Merchant-Ivory, right?) A Room with a View was my friend Margot's favorite movie, and she insisted on going to Rome and recklessly falling in love with someone. These are the kind of things you dream about as a Vista volunteer, which we both were. The Remains of the Day, according to my wife Kathy is the quintessential "non-rom" flick - two people love each other and don't act on it. She accused me of liking non-rom's no matter whether they were good or not. Obviously if I bump into James Ivory, I'm going to talk with him about that. :-)

Thelma Schoonmaker, the oscar winning editor who has worked 40 years with Martin Scorsese, will be getting an award at the festival. The editor+director relationship can be pretty tight. My brother Jon is pals with Tim Squyres, the editor that works with Ang Lee, and fed me lots of back stories about this relationship. What you leave on the cutting room floor is as important as what you put in ... in other words, they're the Thelonious Monk of a film.

So I'm gonna schmooze and hobnob. I just bought a whole new hobnobbing ensemble, directed by my good friend Jessica and bankrolled by a low-interest mortgage refinancing. Now you might be thinking, "Craig is not a schmoozer. Craig is not a hob-nobber. I don't know exactly what those mean, but he isn't either of those!"

Well, here's the thing. I like people, and film buffs especially. I've got 5 days to meet them. If you have a better plan, I'd like to hear it.

Oh and speaking of vacating fully, I'm gonna eat a garbage plate. Later, y'all!