Sep. 24th, 2004

lacuna

Sep. 24th, 2004 06:17 pm
radfrac_archive_full: (robot love)
Wednesday I wasn't feeling much like going out, but Grumpy Bastard was off riding the range and couldn't be reached on the emergency weaselling out line.

A good thing, too. Otherwise I would have missed a car picnic. Potatoes and beets and chicken strips, in a roasting pan, all covered with a fresh dishtowel to keep it warm, sitting in the parking lot between the print shop and the repair garage. The urban experience, you know?

We didn't cook it on the engine or anything Surreal Gourmet like that. (That silver toaster-trailer. It looks cool, but can it really be any fun to cook in that tiny space, under all those lights? I bet the guest feels like a grub caught in a tinfoil-wrapped potato.)

The roster of films was solid festival fare. Screechy music, stock footage, arty juxtapositions (bug. angel. bug. angel. It was about his grandfather.)

One film began with a vast arctic horizon. "Look," I said, leaning in towards my companion, "There's Glenn Gould." But it turned out to be a demonstration film about exponents using the repeated image of a naked man bouncing a spring between his hands.

There was also a highly pretentious short scifi film with the characters talking in reverse and saying things like, "Youth and vitality leave the body in three ways," and "Now we are conjurors. We can bring anything into being." Possibly by making time run backward. I secretly loved it.

I forget the first two ways youth and vitality leave the body, but the third was "luminous seepage (a seepage of light)." Grumpy Bastard pointed out that this is what happens at a radiant fracture. An excellently scientific observation, and it improves the dirty joke no end.

There was also a quite good one with ants trying to follow an increasingly difficult dotted pen line. It would probably have been my favorite, except that the last film was THE GREATEST SHORT FILM EVER MADE.

And so, of course, almost indescribable. It was German, it was called "In", it combined live action and two different styles of computer animation, and beyond that, I'm gobsmacked. I sat there through it shaking my head, not in negation, but in delight.

It begins from the POV of someone hiding in a kind of wet edenic forest, with a man and a woman searching for them. Nice effect in that the hidden one keeps being overcome by terror, and when they are, the soundtrack fades out to a whine and the picture goes black.

The person is found, (I'm not sure exactly how this happens as a BIG HEAD was in my way) and we go over to this jarringly different sequence where two turquoise shapes act out what seemed to me to be a brilliantly funny evocation of the absurdity and mechanicality of reproduction. Ideas of consent, violence, biological imperative. Then the second style of animation takes over, and this more graphic sequence similarly seemed to be about the funniness and (even moreso) grotesqueness of being biological, the competition and interference of systems in the body (G.B.'s observation), the weird parasitical nature of pregnancy.

There's more intercutting between the three elements, including a brilliant chase scene through the forest where the camera keeps diving into these round puddles cut into the landscape and showing the flecked green underwater scene for a moment before rushing up into the air again. The first animation sort of infects the second, and it's all just incredibly wonderful in its absurdity and rightness. at the start, I didn't think I quite accepted their mix of live action and animation, but by the end they'd made it work.

We both agreed that the end made the movie seem more straightforwardly about violence than we'd expected, which was less satisfying than it could have been, and seemed odd with the gentleness of the middle sequence.

(I may not be remembering this entirely clearly, so, oh you who have seen it, feel free to correct me or elaborate.)

Then we bought a silk truffle bar for dessert and read the description of the movie in the guide, which bewildered both of us, since it announced that the film was about bioengineering. Which, after much mutual speculation, I can just barely see, but I like our reading better.

Then I discovered that G.B. had never read my Stay as You Are comics, so we retired to the lounge to read them.

* * *

Last night I slept something like 10-1/2 hours to make up for Wednesday, and today I did morning laundry, which made me feel like I was getting away with more efficiency than I was entitled to. [The end-of-sentence preposition thing is a LATIN RULE. A Latin rule! It makes no sense in English! Get over it!]

--rf

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