Never mind that the description on the flyer, as “the season’s most exploratory programming initiative,” makes it sound like a lonely bureaucrat’s long lost talking point. In fact, Other Cinema’s quasi-annual New Experimental Works showcase packs so much bewitching, perplexing, WTF’ing, un-boring cinematic fringery into a single evening that it might even counteract a whole month’s worth of over-serious multiplex Oscar bait.
“It’s an explosion of work!” Other Cinema overlord Craig Baldwin said the other day while rummaging for preview DVD samples among the video decks, coffee mugs and scribbled notes to self hyper-cluttering his beautifully chaotic Valencia Street lair. “There’s too much on this show! I really can’t keep up with it!”
That’s sort of how it feels to watch former local Martha Colburn’s Myth Labs, a brief, throbbing, cut-out-animation history of America which begins with pilgrims spilling bags of meth from their bibles and takes it frenziedly from there. And this is only one of the evening’s highlights.
There’s also the jittery lyricism of Salise Hughes’s Shiny Things, which affectingly cross cuts cops and robbers with a particularly haunting arrangement of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” via multi-layered, selectively erased footage from the mid-fifties genre films Violent Saturday and Pete Kelly’s Blues, plus a dash of abstract-yet-iconic imagery from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue thrown in for good measure. If this strangely resonating film speaks to a broader theme of the overall program, it’s by emphasizing the sense that there really is a lot going on here.
And if the self-described “paramedia ecologist” Gerry Fialka’s Jammerz seems to try a little too name-droppingly hard to celebrate the virtues of culture jamming, from the perspective of an aging white dude with a noggin full of pharmaceutical and scholastic residue, well, then you probably need to just loosen up.
