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.