ARTS Tuesday, March 19, 1991 .The Michigan Daily Page 5 R.E.M. "Losing My Religion" video "Consider this the hint of the century," suggests R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe on "Losing My Reli- gion," the first single from the band's new album of renewed South- ern discomfort, Out of Time. And he's not kidding, either - Stipe has long been an obtuse, even perversely cryptic lyricist. But on this occa- sion, the occasional director has mercifully provided us with an inseparable counterpart video (A la Peter Gabriel's landmark "Shock The Monkey" vid) in which his remarkable attention to myth and history - particularly art history - offers clues to help us crack the code of his lyric. It's an achievement of great depth. And that's important, because the philosophical struggle to which Stipe testifies - reckoning with the transcendence of God - is the most confounding problem that one can hope to tackle. A melancholy blend of ringing mandolin contemplation and insis- tent rhythm, with somber, sympa- thetic strings attached, "Losing" has a struggling, earthbound sound - its chorus barely managing to rise up out of the verse - that reflects the frustrated, almost despondent ef- fort of Stipe's apologetic lyric. Stipe, in other words, still hasn't found what he's looking for. But the "Losing" video chal- lenges you, too, to experience his frustration. Stipe makes you work for his meaning by interspersing his own fidgety, fragile gesturing with fleeting mythological images, while the jarring, split-second editing demands repeated viewings. Given his fascination with the mortal enigmas of gravity and travel, it's actually not that surprising that Stipe should ultimately come to grapple with the historical presence of Christ - a figure who bridged the gap between heaven and earth. But knowing that many of his skeptical, too-hip-to-worship fans will be re- luctant to make the jump toward recognizing his identification with Jesus, Stipe nods with some irrefutable visual clues. Never one to give away an idea, though, he's made sure that every example is barely discernible. "Life is bigger than you, and you are not me/ The lengths that I will go to..." utters Stipe at the outset; at the moment he says the word "bigger," drummer Bill Berry flings his arms wide in a fleeting crucifix- ion gesture. And on the word "you," when Stipe sings, "I'm trying to keep up with you / But I don't think that I can do it," the previously wobbling camera suddenly focuses directly on guitarist Peter Buck - hands crossed and hair parted in the middle - whose somber poses against a burnished background throughout the video uncannily evoke the Anglo-Saxon Christ's de-V piction in any number of Flemisht Renaissance paintings. Knowing that many of his skeptical, too-hip- to-worship fans will be reluctant to make the jump toward recognizing his identification with Jesus, Stipe nods with some irrefutable visual clues As if to implore you even further, a bearded Leonardo-type character lip-synchs the words "Consider this" while pointing to a wound in the Christ - which is being probed by the finger of a turbaned Doubting Thomas. Stipe, though, is still at a loss for his own tangible evidence of the divine. The mental lengths that he will go to ("That was just a dream," exhorts Stipe, "Try - cry - fly - cry") show up in the form of wings - not just the Wings of German di- rector Wim Wenders' angels, but also the kind that were crafted for a flight to the sun by the mythologi- cal character Icarus (who ended up doing a crash-and-burn). At one point, Stipe hangs hoisted in front of a large white span, but then col- lapses, slumping down to the floor. The real wings belong to the Christ, but he strangely appears as a haggard, elderly character, inspired perhaps by the Gabriel Garcia Mar- quez short story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings." (Another influence might be the dream se- quence in Martin Scorsese's The Last Tempation of Christ.) Random images fall into place halfway through the video when the man - blinded by a glancing sun - tum- bles down from an upper heaven of brightly-colored, exquisitely-orna- mented ethnic gods and into the dim, brownish realm occupied by robed medieval types and modern Greek ar- r tisans, as well as the members of tR.E.M. He is scrutinized; ridiculed; stoned; tied to a tree; and then mourned. The video ends with Stipe sitting in sullen reflection. So why is "Losing My Religion" the hint of the century? Well, it is a big hint. But it also a hint about a century - ours - in which the il- lusion of certainty through technol- ogy has confused our perception of the spiritual. While the Greek arti- sans are forging new wings from a blueprint, Stipe broods in the shadow of a giant gyroscope; in an- other micro-second moment, a Soviet magistrate is watching a red flag wave over an anvil. If Stipe, too, is "losing" his religion, it may be because he literally is losing his means of approaching divinity in an organized manner. As the mythologian Joseph Campbell said: "He who thinks he knows God, doesn't know; and he who knows he doesn't know, knows." "Losing My Religion" is the moment where Michael Stipe drops the mask; after years of intellectual obscurantism, it's a stirring gesture of unsparing sincerity. In "Losing" his existential battle, Stipe is win- ning the right war. And that's a mouthful by anyone's standards. - Michael Paul Fischer Sabrina Scnmid remembers her childhood in Unce as if a Balloon, an entry in the 29th Ann Arbor Film Festival. AAFF be st i1 et sti iws by Mike Kuniavsky 0 w e think we're immune. We come from such cultural deserts as Southfield, Michigan or such cul- tural false-fronts as NYC and think that now that we've reached the oasis of Ann Arbor, we're "open-minded." But we're not. The "liberals" among us carry little mental notebooks of everything that's wrong and the "conservatives" carry little note- books of everything that's right (and not surprisingly, the two seem to coincide quite often.) Thus, every- thing seems to be - if tenuously - ordered and under control. But it's not. As with all intelli- gentsia, most of us have fallen into the idea recycler: whether we know it or not, we hear the same things over and over and over, with little variation, in different guises. Our idea pool wanes as it stagnates. We need - need - something to snap us out of it, something to filter out the bullshit and leave the AbsoPurem behind. The 29th Ann Arbor Film Festival may not be it, but in a world of wrong directions it seems to point closest to where we're supposed to be going. As the oldest such festival in the country - having gotten on the scene early and survived the lean years to recently reemerge as a re- spected venue - the AAFF is still a bastion of new ideas. The films that you are apt to see will not likely be masterworks of cinema (though those two megamasters of megafilm, Lucas and Spielberg, did enter their piddly early attempts at filmmaking back in the early '70s), but they will undoubtedly be original. See, the reason that I can guarantee originality is because of the very nature of independent film: to do what has been done before does not pay for even the cost of the film, let alone rent. 16mm films, such as in the festival, generally cost between $1000 and $25,000 to produce, so the independent filmmaker must find another way of approaching the deep pockets of sponsorship. The best way, the only way, really, is to approach a subject from a new perspective. Whether that's a new perspective on a mundane topic (say, copy machines), a new perspective on a lofty one (say, individuality), or both, the core idea is to look at reality from a new point of view. As you may well have realized while listening to the same lecture for the fifth time in two weeks or seeing the same news for the zillionth time today, new points of view are not something we get every day, and here we have a chance to get hundreds of them within a short timespan. As Funkadelic says, "Free your mind and your ass will follow." Ultimately, new ideas or not, the Film Festival also presents an op- portunity to be part of a cultural icon. As part of our continuously accelerating world, the Festival may be a very temporary phenomenon. As the 8mm Festival found out a couple of years ago, the medium of film is dying, and video just doesn't have the same impact on a big screen. As the price of film and film equipment rises and the proliferation of video (which, quality wise, is get- ting pretty darn good) continues, the number of independent films contin- ually shrinks. So this may be one of our last chances to participate in this unique phenomenon. Moreover, this year may be one of the best to go to the festival. When asked to characterize the en- tries this year, Vicki Honeyman (the Fest's director for the last couple of seasons) said that there were more experimental and animation pieces and fewer long, traditional pieces. Thus, it means that there will be more good stuff to choose from at every showing, and that every showing will free your mind just a little bit more. Oh, and remember the cardinal rule of festival going: No title, no go. THE 29TH ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL begins tonight at the Michigan Theater with a reception at 7:30 p.m. and the first showing at 8:30p.m. On Wednesday through Saturday there are shows at 7:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. and on Saturday there's an extra show at 1:00p.m. Winner's night (which everyone should attend) is Sunday, with showings at 5:00 p.m., 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. There will also be free showings of the judges' films Wednesday through Friday at 3:00 p.m. i - - . DAILY ARTS NEEDS WRITERS wi t .e Lacround n the..,area.. Folk Jazz Classical Music Dance Books Art teiepAne 63-O379 for More ijrmotion I I w I Mk i. ~jP Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (PG-13) Cyrano De Bergerac (PG) ANN ARbOR THEATERS 1 & 2 -5TH AVE. AT LIBERTY 761.9700 t Free 46 oz. Popcorn PRESENT THIS COUPON WITH PURCHASED ~ICKET THRU 3/28/91 Bert "Just Call Me Charlie" Hornback is back from Ireland for a brief visit. He'll be reading Yeats (a couple of days late) in the Terrace Room of the Michigan Union on Tuesday, March 19 at 8:00 p.m. There will be also be ballads and Irish Soda-Bread. As the Michigan Theater might say, "He's 75. He's from Canada. He eats blubber. He's got a lot on his mind." Born in an igloo, Inuit Pudlo Pudlat has migrated to Ann Arbor to find out if there might be a good market for Stucchi's in Northern Canada. While he's here, nko's COPIES with this couoon 8 1/? X 11, waite, seit serve or au ted oniv dhl expires 0/0111 the University Museum of Art will also celebrate his work with Pudlo: Thirty Years of Drawing. A film about Pudlat's drawings will be shown in Angell Hall Auditorium D on March 23 at 2:00 p.m., followed by a reception at the Museum at from 4:00 - 6:00p.m. Dance Faculty at EMU will do a joyful dance celebrating the perfect lay-up, the slam dunk and Lorenzo Neely's "really cute butt." The dancers/choreographers will perform March 21-23 at 8:00 p.m. in the Quirk Theater in glorious Ypsilanti. Tickets are $7, $5 (students), $3 (senior citizens and kiddies) and $25 (U-M students - they don't like us very much.) To LOUS celebrate their MIRACU- basketball victory, the m I EXPLORING OUR ;;~d .. _, EXPLORING OUR STRUGGLES presentation & discussion: African American and Asian American Relations Today: Sources of Conflict, Grounds For Cooperation TUESDAY, MARCH 19 7pm STOCKWELL RESIDENCE HALL LOUNGE (324 South Observatory) . , - . Qnn m