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Media Credit: Courtesy of UW-Madison MONGOLIAN PING PONG [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: Courtesy of UW-Madison THE NIGHT OF TRUTH [Click to enlarge]

It appears we've been spoiled by the Union Theatre's programming of eclectic, usually vivifying avant-garde films, not to mention Riverwest Film and Video's cornucopia of experimental nuggets or Woodland Pattern Book Center's sporadic film screenings. It's easy to forget, given such fertile offerings, that "experimental film" can be a dubious term, since the label is often attributed to any film or video that rebukes narrative, features handmade manipulation, or inflicts durational duress upon its audience - all of which have become preconceived shortcuts to avant-garde viability, and therefore contradict the boundary-pushing field of cinema experimentalism.

Jim and Joe's Experimental Shorts Program - the Wisconsin International Film Festival's program of recent avant-garde works - fits comfortably within experimental film's pre-established boundaries. The legacy established by visionary artists like Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Jonas Mekas, and the like is dutifully aped by the filmmakers on display here, despite the fact that the program features new work by Michael Snow, Kenneth Anger, and Naomi Uman, all of whom are semi-superstars in the avant-garde world. Indeed, the program begins with Anger's Mouse Heaven and Snow's SSHTOORRTY, both of which are magnificent letdowns. Mouse Heaven features a glibly postmodern collage of Mickey Mouse memorabilia and pop music through the ages, suggesting that cultural icons, when they escape from the ubiquitous public eye of the media, are relegated to a plastic graveyard of antique shops, collectors' shelves, and dusty attics. The recycling of heartless marketing as artistic object is hardly anything new, though - one need only think of Andy Warhol's Campbells Soup cans in order to make Anger's film moot.

SSHTOORRTY, meanwhile, superimposes two fragments of a melodramatic confrontation, making its sequence of events a self-conflicting jumble of text, image and sound. The subtitled dialogue is layered on top of itself, and the sequence of events is obliterated by the complete negation of linearity. It's a neat gimmick, but Snow repeats the short scene a dozen or so times, in order (I guess) to further refute the existence of the film as a self-contained narrative. Whatever made a 45-minute zoom across a single room so fascinating in Wavelength is nowhere to be found in SSHTOORRTY's durational redundancy; it hardly seems necessary that, in order to deconstruct the artifice of film, the audience must be subjected to a bland litmus test.

Naomi Uman's Hand Eye Coordination is a disappointing rehash of handmade self-reflexivity, featuring scratched celluloid that culminates in - but of course - footage of someone scratching onto celluloid. The abstract formalism of such handmade films is so self-referential to begin with that it hardly needs further visual articulation. Peter Tscherkassky's Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine fares vastly better along the same lines: Tscherkassky viciously manipulates footage from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly into an oppressive battlefield of (as the title suggests) light and sound, filmmaker and audience, black and white, movement and emptiness. (And I mean "battlefield"; if you thought Eli Wallach nearly getting his eyes gouged out in Leone's original was intense, wait until you see Tscherkassky's replication of it.) Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine creates an abundance of formal conflicts that, by including heads and tails markers and countdown footage, culminates in film's ultimate contradiction: between the real and illusory.

If the experimental shorts on display seemed disappointingly content in doing the same old thing (albeit with a more pronounced "fuck off" to their audience), the foreign films I saw during the festival's rainy weekend seemed similarly timid. Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures features two characters pioneering medicine and film throughout Brazil's desolate northeast terrain in 1942; they are plagued with war, betrayal, lust, and political persecution, yet all of these seem like afterthoughts to the film's dominant mood of morose solemnity, in which characters squinting into the harsh sunlight apparently connotes some kind of relevance. The quality of the photography is striking, but the mise-en-scene is sloppily composed, utilizing a handheld camera in an attempt to achieve spontaneity and realism, but instead stranding its characters with a lack of style and an overabundance of self-importance. The Night of Truth, by Fanta Regina Nacro, Burkina Faso's first female director, seems to refute the simplistic moralism of most movies regarding war, which basically argue that "war is bad" with lots of grisly but "important" violence inflicted upon attractive characters. The Night of Truth features the reunion of the Nayak and Bonande peoples in a fictional African nation after ten years of a violent political power struggle, and for a while it's fraught with a tense, barely-contained hostility which seems to suggest that peaceful reconciliation is not simply achieved by honorable intentions. (It's also aware that the provocation of violence is a necessary aspect to mass political revolution.) Yet its admirable complexity suddenly and awkwardly disappears with the final scene, a monologue directed towards a character's grave (yet aimed, of course, at the audience) which assures us that peace has been achieved after all, despite the film's numerous suggestions that such swift reconciliation is impossible.

Mongolian Ping Pong, which is slated for release in select theatres this summer, is considerably more successful since it never tries to inflate its own importance through solemn yet obvious moralizing - and consequently seems more "relevant" than its seemingly generic story would suggest. A trio of young friends in the grasslands of Mongolia find a ping pong ball floating on a stream and take it to be a glowing pearl, confused by its apparent uselessness. Told by a Western filmmaker, such a story could have been condescending or at least presumptuous, yet as told by Ning Hao, Mongolian Ping Pong reveals the gap between the encroachment of Western commercialism and a quickly-fading way of life that finds such material possessions unnecessary. It's a very funny, satisfying film, yet there's a truthful melancholy beneath its deceptive simplicity.

To my admitted surprise, the two best films I saw at the festival were made in America, although neither of them are likely to be released in a theatre near you. Hamilton, a 65-minute tone poem, has an elusive, almost nonexistent narrative and a sympathetic remove from its naturalistic characters; it's not immediately satisfying, but eventually you're overwhelmed by director Matthew Porterfield's honest, unflinching cinematographic eye. Hamilton feels, almost in spite of its low-key poetry, like it's exploring new cinematic terrain, although it borrows from such filmmakers as John Cassavetes and Terrence Malick.

The Murder of Fred Hampton was released in 1971 and documents the murder of Chicago's Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton by a largely corrupt police department. It's a fascinating rush of fury and injustice, as compelling in its early sequences of Black Panthers rallies and political philosophy as it is in its investigation into the murder committed by a police force terrified of becoming powerless. By the time Hampton's overwhelming words are splayed across the screen bullet-like at the film's end, the fierce personalities and equally fierce murders documented in The Murder of Fred Hampton transcend filmed representation and seem oppressively true - an increasingly and ironically rare occurrence for a documentary.

- Matt Levine

With the advent of television in the late 1940s, the cinema looked ready to go the way of the dinosaurs. With video and sound in their own living rooms, Americans had no need for the expensive theater and the trouble involved with taking the whole family out. To counteract dwindling ticket sales, producers looked for new ways to draw people to the big screen. They found the answer in Cinerama. Cinerama Adventure, a 2002 documentary by director David Strohmaier, follows the cinematic gimmick known as Cinerama from its origins during World War II to its near evaporation in the sixties. Essentially, Cinerama is the precursor to the modern IMAX theaters. Invented by Fred Waller and based on another invention of his used to train World War II gunners, Cinerama involves the use of three film reels running through three projectors onto three large screens that recreate the peripheral vision of a normal person. In essence, especially in the early 50s, Cinerama was considered an almost virtual-reality experience, and its early films exploited this with first person point-of-view shots of roller coaster rides and airplane flights. The end result was startling and helped bring people back to the theaters for a time. In fact, it was so influential that after the Russians saw it at the 1954 World's Fair (incidentally in the early years of the Cold War), they immediately developed their own Cinerama clone and accused the Americans of stealing their ideas. Just the same, a gimmick is a gimmick, and after ten years, with little contribution from mainstream Hollywood, Cinerama became an experience primarily for cult enthusiasts, now only existing in a handful of locations, including Seattle.

Like the Cinerama experience, this film is intriguing at first but lacks the appeal to remain so for its entire 97 minutes. After the process is explained, a few examples shown and its brief history outlined, I wanted the Cinerama experience to be over. It, however, refused to end. For film historians and anybody else who enjoys those things in our culture that become nothing more than bleeps in time - eight-track, anyone? - Cinerama Adventure will be of some interest. For anybody else, after reading this short synopsis, you've nothing else to look forward to by watching the film.

Who knew Luke Wilson could write? The Wendell Baker Story, written by Luke Wilson and co-directed by him and his brother Andrew, relates the misadventures of Wendell Baker (Luke Wilson), a dreamer with enough charm and wit to go through the Texas prison system with a smile on his face. Once out of prison, Wendell gets a job at a retirement home run by two crooked nurses (Owen Wilson and Eddie Griffin) and, along with getting his girlfriend Doreen (Eva Mendes) back, must expose the two villains for the crooks they are.

Without a doubt, the story is nothing we haven't heard a thousand times before. Nonetheless, it is not the plot that gives this movie its charisma; it's the characters. Whether two elderly, sex-starved men who hit on teenage gas station attendants or a grocery store owner (Will Farrell) with a propensity for knocking over his own products in fits of rage, the characters in The Wendell Baker Story all have unique personalities, however exaggerated, that fit together and create a world both recognizable and distinct, both humorous and absurd. Wendell's character is representative of the average Owen Wilson performance: wisecracking, smart-assed and ultimately lovable. Like his brother, Luke Wilson pulls this personality off without a hitch. With that said, interesting dynamics come into play when Luke and Owen appear onscreen together. Luke, as Wendell, takes on a more submissive, polite persona, allowing Owen, as the nefarious Neil King, to make jokes and act the grinning egotist. This isn't a fault by any means; in the context of the film it makes sense.

Unfortunately, not everything in The Wendell Baker Story does. Using Gothic coincidence, one of the characters in the film is suddenly revealed in the end to be a man in a position to give Wendell his dream job, a noticeably cheap way to motivate Wendell to change his conning ways and win back his lost love. All in all, Luke Wilson's first attempt at writing a screenplay is admirable and, as it set out to be, funny. The only major fault worth mentioning is its reliance on its trite discourse and the illogical ending. Those minor squabbles aside, The Wendell Baker Story is as charming and likable as its star.

- John Vanderhoef

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