Friday, April 27th, 2012
As if the storyteller wasn’t weird enough, Angela, Olivia
and I were about to embark on an even weirder journey to “contemporary, experimental
argentine film” at “El ver de los árboles”.
To me this sounded like the type of dreamy independent movie I was craving more
of after BAFICI, despite the fact that while I was watching them, I felt
disappointed. It wasn’t until a day or so after the movies that I truly
realized that I enjoyed them. And when we arrived to our destination, the flyer
seemed to indicate that that was exactly the type of movie we were about to
see.
There was an art exhibit to pass through while we waited for
the “theater” to prepare. I genuinely enjoyed the exhibit, which featured
complex tangles of wires that came to life as projected light passed over them.
Sometimes it looked like they were red hot with electricity, other times it
looked like something a little on the galactic side—like a shooting star that
kept going. It was absolutely captivating and I regretted not having my camera.
After the exhibit, we had high hopes for the art that was
about to unfold before our eyes on film. The first film was no more than a
minute long and showed just a few shots of a horse next to its mother, barely
moving, until finally at the end you could see it moving. Ok. Not really what I
was expecting, but 3 more to go. The next movie was supposed to be about a trip
to Pamplona in the 70s as told through a diary, so I imagined “The Sun Also
Rises” more or less taking place in the 70s. But again, the film wasn’t exactly
normal and while there was somewhat of a plot (a fighting couple trying to
recoup their love through this trip) so much was left unsaid. And unshown, as
many images were blotted out with some sort of film-dissolving acid or the
images reprojected on top of each other.
But that was nothing compared to the third film which was 20
minutes of dropping some type of acid onto the film that made it dissolve over
the scene of a little boy on the beach with his family. Literally. 20 minutes
of watching film dissolve. You know the expression “I’d rather watch paint dry”,
well I think this was the film equivalent of that. Additionally, there was an
even worse version of Boards of Canada playing in the background. I thought it
was never going to end. It was worse than the time I had to see Transformers 2 in theaters and kept hoping every fade to black was the end credits coming on). And even though she kept her head forward the whole
time, I could tell Angela was giving me a mental death glare.
The fourth film finally started and was more or less a movie
shot with very old film showing no more than a guy driving through what I presume
to be somewhere in the Buenos Aires province. Again, it was unnecessarily and
painfully long. And finally it ended and again, we couldn’t believe what we’d
just sat through.
I’m sure you’re thinking, Nikki, why on earth would you
choose to see this AND bring a friend to suffer, too!? Because the pamphlet
didn’t indicate any of this nonsense. Below are selections of the descriptions
of the films, so you can understand the romantic fantasies I’d imagined:
“Un viaje a
Pamplona en los 70. Detrás de los bellos relatos en los diarios de viaje, se esconde una historia
de amor y fastidio.” (A trip to Pamplona in the 70s. Hidden in the
beautiful tales of the travel journal is a story of love and upsets.)
“Un hombre
realiza un viaje en auto con un oscuro objetivo en el que intentará borrar los rastros que ha dejado.” (A
man goes on a road trip with the dark purpose to try and erase the faces of
those he has left behind.)
“Un
instante, el preciso momento en que cambia la luz y se percibe movimiento. El
acto de mirar. La transformación de los colores, de las formas de los modos de hacer.”
(An instant, the precise momento where the light changes and one sees
movement. The act of watching. The transformation of colors, of the forms of
the modes of being.)
See? Don’t those sound mystical? Now I know that “contemporary,
experimental” films really just mean a guy dropped some chemicals over film and
made a 20 minute movie about it then forced an innocent public to watch his
self indulgent art.
Yep. This. For 20 minutes, in addition to:
This. With music more horrible than this:
Once it was over, Angela and I were even more dumbfounded
than after the storytelling event. We couldn’t help but wonder, however,
what the point was. We tried to put ourselves in the directors shoes and really
ask ourselves, ok, what would be the purpose of making this movie and why would
we show it this way, in this form (for this amount of time…)? And really, I guess
that’s the point of art. And as I realized years ago, one can never say what is
and isn’t art (really, play the game with yourself and you’ll find that even a
dumpster is art in its own right). But there is such a thing as “too much art”
and these films were it. I challenge any hipster to watch "abc etc" by Sergio Subero and tell me they really, truly enjoyed all 20 minutes of it and can tell me why.
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