Platform

Sam Green Brings 'Utopia' to Sundance

Sundance was just days away when I found Sam Green deep in preparation for the live performance of his latest piece, Utopia in Four Movements. But even as he was ironing out the final kinks, he found a few minutes to walk me through the greatest dreams and worst nightmares of the 20th century, offering up the connections between an American exile in Cuba, the world’s largest shopping mall, which lies dormant in China, the history of Esperanto and the work of forensic anthropologists. In the years since The Weather Underground earned him an Oscar nomination, Green’s moved away from the traditional documentary format into more experimental narratives and offbeat shorts, such as lot 63, grave c, a melancholic look at the legacy of Altamont victim Meredith Hunter. His new work, a live-music infused, first-personal tour through a century of dashed hopes finds Green pushing boundaries of all sorts.

[Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in SF360’s Blogs. Green performed Utopia in Four Movements to adoring crowds at Sundance this past week. He added an epilogue to the story as the festival was closing.]

topics: activism, directors, diy, documentary, oscars, performance, sundance

Nao Bustamante: Mining "Silver and Gold" in Park City

Glen Helfand: The late, great underground filmmaker Jack Smith was all about the strange sway classic Hollywood movies, particularly obscure stars and low-budget but still opulent art direction, have had on our psyches. By extension, his works, like the horrifying, amazing 1963 Flaming Creatures, have had their own way of bewitching all manner of artists by crossing lines of gender, fantasy, and decorum and décor—a recipe that recently has fueled numerous academic conferences and performance festivals. You can see aspects of Smith in Warhol, and Cindy Sherman, David Lynch, Nan Goldin, George Kuchar, and Matthew Barney have all admitted their aesthetic debt to Smith.

[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]

topics: activism, actors, avant-garde, performance

Take Two

The fix is in: Yes Men take on the world

At the beginning of The Yes Men Fix the World, one of the titular duo nervously prepares for fraudulently representing Dow Chemical in front of a purported BBC World News audience of 300 million—telling “a really big lie which unfortunately is gonna wipe $2 billion off one company’s stock price.”

Now, why would anyone want to do that? Well, in this case to try shaming the corporation into properly addressing the 1984 gas leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, that cost thousands of lives. (Estimates including subsequent gas-related disease deaths run as high as 35,000.) It remains the worst industrial disaster in history. The original restitution sums and contamination cleanup efforts were pitifully inadequate; the area remains a health and environmental dead zone. Dow, which absorbed Union Carbide in 2003, claims it holds no responsibility for the tragedy or its lingering aftereffects.

topics: activism, directors, diy, documentary, performance, political film, reviews

In Production

Anne, Anne, Anne: McGuire comes alive

Anne McGuire finds the beauty in the strange, and the strangeness in the beautiful. That’s not perversity, people; that’s poetry. Working across an incredibly wide range of media, from structuralist art videos to witty works on paper, from re-edited disaster flicks to live musical performance, McGuire has built a distinctive body of work over the last two decades that’s simultaneously raw, delicate and direct. She’s a progenitor of a genre we might call vulnerable bemusement (which is assuredly not the same thing as bemused vulnerability). Eh, forget the labels and the mumbo-jumbo and take it straight from McGuire: “I always want to paint a beautiful and strange picture, possibly.”

The San Francisco artist claims the spotlight, literally, at this weekend’s debut Cinema by the Bay festival with a curtain-dropping rendition of The Anne McGuire Show Sunday night.

[Editor’s note: Cinema by the Bay opens Thursday, October 22. More in Thursday’s edition of SF360.org and SFFS.]

topics: actors, avant-garde, bay area, music, performance, san francisco film society

SFIFF52 Blogs: Dinosaurs, disease, delirium

No need to don your surgical masks, people. Dengue Fever’s altogether enchanting delirium—not to be confused with the tropical ailment caused by virus serotypes of the genus Flavivirus—is induced by the thoroughly contagious but otherwise benign Los Angeles–based Cambodian psychedelic rock band of the same name. It swept through a packed house at the Castro Theatre Tuesday night, where the six-member ensemble premiered their original score to The Lost World, the 1925 silent fantasy brought to celluloid life by pioneering animator Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion dinosaurs—along with guys in hairy suits and overbites, women refusing to marry until their men prove fearless in the jungle and famous all over London, and an obligatory supporting character blacked up Eddie Cantor–style in burnt cork. A lost world indeed. But the tale, based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, was a ripping one, anachronisms and all, carried aloft on an alternately moody and sizzling bed of feverish grooves and singer Ch’hom Nimol’s seductive vocals.

topics: animation, castro theatre, music, performance, san francisco international film festival, silent film

SFIFF52 Blogs: Rage against the machine

On May Day Eve, Travis Wilkerson and two members of death-folk outfit Los Duggans, Dylan Wilkerson and Miguel Hernandez, performed Proving Ground, probably the first multimedia Leninist rant to have ever graced the Sundance Kabuki, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Travis Wilkerson did the ranting and controlled the Kaptivator, a device intended for VJs that allows video clips to be sampled, looped and superimposed. Los Duggans provided musical backing on two guitars and the occasional banjo, with rolling folk melodies that seemed to propel Wilkerson’s exhortations forward. The piece had four distinct movements, opening and closing with Lenin’s theory, specifically his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and moving, just as Lenin would, from theory to practice in the middle two movements. In these movements, the dramatic center of the work, Wilkerson raged against the US bombing of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and compared the recent massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli Army to the Sand Creek Massacre of the 19th century, when a group of Colorado Territory militias lead by Colonel Chivington slaughtered a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho.

topics: avant-garde, performance, political film, san francisco international film festival, sundance kabuki

In Production

Walsh sets off on Rainer's parade

With the benefit of experience, Jack Walsh brings exceedingly reasonable expectations to his new project. "From the time you start something, it’s anywhere from five to seven years," he says. Walsh actually increases that estimate before we get off the phone, which is partly an indication that the economy is worsening by the minute.

The San Francisco filmmaker has embarked on Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer, a feature-length documentary about the groundbreaking choreographer and experimental filmmaker.

topics: actors, art, bay area, cinephiles, directors, diy, documentary, performance