8MM FILMFES TIVA L Winners. show imagination, skill By DENNIS HARVEY Last weekend's 10th Annual Ann Ar- r 8mm Film Festival offered, as usual, a rude shock to any viewer who might have thought serious filmmaking begins and ends with films made for theatrical distribution. Indeed, most of the 28 shorts screened on Sunday's win- ner's-night program had enough adven- turousness and skill to make the vast majority of the commerical main- stream look comatose by comparison. These movies will probably be seen & less than one tenth the number of people that can be routinely counted on for even the least-attended Hollywood disaster. It's a sad fate, because even the least successful winners have an immediacy and excitement that few commercial projects capture; there are liberating senses of achievement within limited means, and of strong personal visions coming through. These filmmakers, at least, .do net have their creativity filtered through hired llaborators or the larger, financial burden of working with 16mm. PERHAPS THE festival's tour-de- force was Clinton Young's Fear, a daz- zling 16-minute pop art collage of tdtally incongrous elements; gleaming time-lapsed cityscapes; a Ken Russell- ish view of Hitler as a cultural super- star; Daliesque surrealism; recited beatnik-like poetry/lists; imaginatively ited movie footage ranging from The Wride of Frankenstein to Woody Allen's Sleeper; and slightly more conven- tional live-action sequences of weirdly, masked actors casually inhaling ether in someone's living room. This stunning, drugged-out vision, baffling and brilliant, had the same startling effect as Susan Pitt's com- mercially successful oddity Asparagus. Both films sprawl. fascinatingly across a half-dozen film techniques, and within itle more than a quarter of an hour ch achieves a kind of complexity that few feature-length projects, have touched. THE FILM awarded the largest prize by the festival judges was another e'xercise in purely visual experimen- tation, Bruce Hogeland's Interrup- tions. Hogeland used footage from the silent Phantom of the Opera and a variety of other sources, scratched directly on the film, and did more or *s anything else conceivable to put the viewer in a state of complete visual disorientation. The result was striking to the eye but perhaps a little too vapid to the mind; the images dazzled but there seemed no meaning or purpose behind them. .Another intriguing cipher was Kim- berly Arnold's Dream of the Busboy, a mini-Eraserhead tracing a seemingly vacuous young man through a variety of strange, vaguely sinister situations. e stark black-and-white images ereated an eerily schizoid, claustrophobic mood, aided by a soun- dtrack that combined the character's droning monologue with bizarre, prosey narration. Even more distur- bing was David Yosh's mesmerizing Dogs in the Road, a 12-minute procession of slowed-down, grainy, nightmarish images reminiscent in its twisted dreamlike quality of the Ger- man silent expressionistic films of the 1920's. Dean Wilson's Butt Funn was an acid- head .,fever dream that started amusingly with G.I. Joe dolls battling it out in Vietnam, then turned into a series of increasingly violent and whacked-out situations. Larry Brunk's Photon-Photoff offered, simply enough, two white parallel lines on a black background; the movement of the lin- es managed a hypnotic effect of con- stant acceleration. Robert Attanasio's Lensound won the Keith Clark Memorial Award, yet its central' idea was dangerously close to tiresome gimmickry-for three minutes, the camera itself is beaten on the lens by a microphone as it examines an ordinary street scene. Another offbeat but finally too limited project was Willard A. Small's Vaehon Overture, which was built entirely around the comic contrast between its admittedly arresting visuals (the frenzied performing of a barroom rock band) and music (a sedate classical piano piece). THE EVENING'S longest entry was also, unfortunately, one of its most tedious. Pascal Foley's Charlotte Beysser Bartholdi was often striking in its imagery, but at over 30 minutes it was practically mumbled off the screen by the bored audience. An exercise in pretentious obscurity whose deep meanings seemed to have sprung from high-school Sexual Symbolism 101, it somehow made ad its central theme a connection between the Statue of Liber- ty and menstrual blood. The film was stylistically interesting, but baffling and finally enervating. A large number of the festival win- ners were not at all involved with such heavy experimentation and complex technique. Elliot Robert Lincis' Mambo Mania offered genial home-movie slap- stick in its casually funny tale of subur- ban teenage horniness. Michael Paggie's brief but entertaining John Robert Drew simply examined a drunk in a neighborhood bar, while Douglas Wanberg spoofed Commercials with mock adve)rtisements for such produc- ts as radioactive burgers and the special-TV-offer record set "Quasimodo Presents Favorite Music Played by Bells." Marcy Muray's oddly lyrical Gloria offered the loony sight of dutiful housewives patiently dusting off weeds, fussily sweeping dirt off the sand and mopping up the ocean at the seaside. THE TWO PROGRAMS featured a number of agreeably silly one-joke satires. The Nathanson- McLaughlin-Wheeler The Unsychable Jolly Sound offered a droll summary of what one can and cannot do with lips. The s-m fantasy of Nilo Manfredini's The Order and the mock-porn of David Slee's Kitsch Encounters were on- target parodies with great punchlines. Another wild entry was'Dan Morgan's Have You Ever Thought?, a hilarious clay-animation look at all the wonderful things that happen to the body during the process of decomposition, complete with poetic accompaniment: "Your eyes sink in/your ears fall out/your hair turns to sauerkraut." The most amateurish of the winners was The Fan, too clearly a backyard project on the parts of Eric Solomon and Jim Chamberlin. Its passably amusing dumb-joke premise (an elec- tric fan with a mind of its own conspires to destroy four unsuspecting persons during a summer heat wave) and good punchlines were undermined by too much home-movie-ish clumsiness and laughable school-play line readings. "THREE PIXILLATION shorts showed quirky imagination and humor. They ranged from the near-brilliant (Denny Schumm's Hunger, a kind of sick classic in which a disgusting piece of slithering liver devours a helpless radish, only to be bloodily eaten up by an orange) to the very amusing Satur- day Night 'Can-Do' by Mark Zink, which has empty beer cans bopping in the basement to "Rock Around the Clock" while the chief drinker of the house sleeps upstairs) to the only mildly mausing (dog biscuits frolicking in a miniature city in John Kaufman's Sweet Bones). The only film of the night to feature conventional animation was James Middleton's delightful The Self-Made Man, a highly enjoyable hommage to old movies and music "based on 'My Life as a Sponge' by Anita Bryant." It mixed an inventive variety of techniques with cartooning reminiscent of the crude line-drawing early silent cartoons of Max Fleischer and other ar- tists, complete with iris-outs and a vin- tage jazz score. THE FESTIVAL'S most blatant and powerful political statement was of- fered by Francis Lestingi's Return to Hiroshima, an ambitious ten-minute orchestration, of photos showing the horrifying wreckage and disfigurement that the narrator encountered as one ofd the first to see the area after the drop- ping of the bomb. The film seems par- ticularly disturbing as a time when ins ternational relations seem once again so close to the edge. Among straight documentaries, the most outstanding was Rachel Rosen- thal's 20-minute Valentine, a poignant look at growing old and lonely through the eyes of a patron of a senior citizen center. Chip Sercombe's deliberately fragmented editing caught a feeling of cinema-verite excitement in a punk- rock performance by The Boners, whose lead singer is seen suspended above a gyrating audience, while wearing a nun's habit. Curiously, one of the larger prizes was awarded to Michael Kelly's The Early Man Museum, a funny but unexceptional look at the eccentric owner of a road- side prehistoric-relic museum. ONE OF THE most beautiful of the entries was Larry Behnke's superbly photographed Waterscapes, which managed to capture an aura of startling visual psychedelia through nothing more than shots of sunlight reflecting on moving water in various locations. Abrao Berman's bizarre Brazil suf- fered, if from nothing else, from the simple fact that it was entirely in Spanish, without explanation or sub- titles, and most of the audience couldn't understand what the hell the movie was about. This year's 8mm Film Festival was perhaps the best to date-some of the entries may have been artistic failures, but none suffered from a lack of imagination or energy. The winners of- fered plenty of proof that it's possible, even with the most limited equipment and resources, to create film works as sleek and impressive as any com- merical projects. The Michigan Daily-Tuesday, February 19, 1980-Page 7 eolpse [+ ~ '1' N r r dAna dNew reams NA PH 0 sCLUO 8Cv1O O DOCHERRY UNIRUMAW CHARLIE IHADEWED BLACK WEL Ticket s/$6 in advance : ON SALE NOW/MICR . UNION DO- For more information/ 763-2071 'pk11 f. FV Feb. 20-24 PowerCenter U-M Dept. of Theatre .Drama MEL WINKLER Directs a Play by STEVE CAR Wed.-Sat. at 8 Sunday at 2 Tickets at PTP ticket office Michigan League IrM-F 10-1 & 2-5 Master Charge & VISA on phone & - mail only. I #: PHONE: (313) 764-0450 with Special Guests: FIREFALL / 1' ~,,/1 Crisler Arena Ann Arbor MARCH 14 8pm , Tickets are 8.00 and 9.06 and are on sale now at the Michigan Union Box Office (11:30-5:30), Aura Sounde, Wherehouse Records, Huckleberry Party Store and 2Hudsons. Sorry, no checks. For more information call 763- 2071. A Major Events Presentation CEDAR POINT AMUSEMENT PARK, Sandusky, ' Ohio, will hold on-campus interviews for summer employment: Date: Thursday, February 28 Tsme: 9:00,,0.m.-5:00 .M. Over 3,400 positons. ovail able for a m: a' p wide variety of jobs. Dormitory or Place: Placement, Student Activities Building aaartmet stylhousinavailable. {- ~~~ GUCoct Career aning a PacemnT { t Office for information and appoint- ment. Spend d-summer in one of the finest resorts in the North. Authorities investigate scientist's death MORGANTOWN, W. Va. (AP) - Medical authorities are trying to determine what caused the death of a young scientist cited recently for his research on potential anti-cancer drugs. John Butterick, 34, died in his sleep Jan. 26. An autopsy showed there was heavy internal bleeding, but no one is sure what triggered it. "THERE ARE some intFiguing cir- imstances that can lead one's imagination to run wild if you let it," said Dr. Thomas Clark, county medical examiner. Last December, Butterick accepted an award from the National Foundation for Cancer Research for his work. He had been able to remove impurities from a drug that had shown promise in Believing that straight gin was dangerous, British naval surgeon Sir. T.O. Gimlette invented the "healthy cocktail"-the gimlet-by diluting gin with lime juice in 1890. v tests on cancer patients in Ireland. Butterick was a postdoctoral fellow at West Virginia University, working under Gabor Fodor, a chemistry professor. "He was a brilliant young man," Fodor said. He added, however, that Butterick was very stubborn, and refused to see a doctor when he first became ill. WHEN POLICE entered Butterick's apartment, they found the scientist in bed, and the apartment full of jars of chenicals. Fodor said he doesn't believe But- terick committed suicide. "He had no reason to," Fodor said. "He'd just made a lot of progress. He told the family these two years he spent here were the happiest of his life." r f I "'.0cINEMA 1.- 10$' PRESENTS SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (SERGEI PARAJANOV, 1964) SHADOWS is a robust, colorful panorama of the life of the Gutsuls, a small sect of people living in the Carpathian Mountains during the 19th century. All of the customs involving birth, marriage and death are woven into this episodic account of a young man who marries without love after the death of his true sweetheart. The fantastically rich material has been given a cinematic treatment that appears to have been influenced by the experimental film movement, by modern cinema-verite camera tech- niques, by the new wave and by the subtle use of composition and color in the Japanese cinema. "Brilliant. . . enchanting." (110 min) MLB 3 7:00 & 9:00 FREE Friday-PRESTON STURGES FILMS * Buy 2 drinks for the priceof one! I the Scheduled Events Winter Olympics S E on Every day *wide screen TV e pm- pmy 1 beverages t 504 and BEER _ '. .U -G 1% 1 V L UV~ v 1-- -.v - '