The Los Angeles Film Festival honored CalArts with a program of student shorts. Mary Ann Skweres looks at the school’s history of launching new filmmakers.
In addition to independent features and documentaries, the Los Angeles Film Festival presented several short film programs during its run between June 22 and July 2. Most showcased the works of today’s emerging filmmakers. Screening at the Italian Cultural Institute in Westwood, CA, CalArts in Moving Pictures: A Mini Tribute, took a step back in time to pay tribute to the early animations and narrative films of CalArts alumni that have gone on to distinguish themselves in virtually every aspect of the cinematic and visual arts. The fourteen films presented in the overview were extracted from a larger retrospective of thirty-nine programs featuring over 200 filmmakers currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through August 13.
The CalArts screening was a mini history of film and technological innovation. The most enlightening aspect of the showcase was the decision to screen the films in chronological order – making advances in filmmaking techniques as well as the cultural commentary of the period when each film was made all the more apparent. For the emerging filmmaker looking for inspiration, the variety of subject matter, the use of various mediums and the creative license taken by these filmmakers exemplifies the wide range of options available and historically acceptable to independent films. Betzy Bromberg, the current director of The Program in Film and Video (formerly known as the Live-Action Program) at CalArts, whose own student film appears in the presentation commented, “The work gets stronger and stronger. It was a very different place [when she was a student]. The school has changed for the better.”
The screening began with the six-minute, 16mm experimental animation, Flesh Flows (1974), by landmark pioneering animator, Adam Beckett. Truly a seventies orgiastic acid trip, the pencil sketches erotically ebbed and flowed into animated orifices and protuberances, supported by a watery soundtrack.
And just when you thought that acid trip was over, on came the experimental film, Stasis (1978) by David Wilson (MFA 76, Experimental Animation), the creator, director and curator of the one-of-a-kind Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, CA. This 16 mm live-action film held the same shot of a flowing Texas creek for ten minutes.
Actually I’m not sure if the same shot was filmed for ten minutes or if a shorter shot was looped to play for ten minutes, but you probably get the picture.
Betzy Bromberg has been making experimental films since 1976. Her most recent film Divinity Gratis, premiered domestically at the Sundance Film Festival. Made in advance of a permanent move to California, her student film, Ciao Bella or Fuck Me Dead (1978), a black and white, 16mm portrait film of a lover tragically shot after the film was made, displayed a raunchy, gritty, exhibitionist New York City with a late seventies perspective.
As executive vice president of Pixar Studios and director of the computer-animated classics, Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2 and Cars, Academy Award-winning filmmaker John Lasseter (BFA 79, Character Animation) is one of CalArts most famous and successful graduates. Lasseter’s talent and sense of humor is apparent in his four-minute student film, Lady and the Lamp (1979). Revealing an aptitude for new technologies even then, Lasseter chose to shoot on video, unlike the other seventies films that screened which were made on 16mm.
The Academy Award-winning sound designer of The Matrix, Dane Davis, MPSE (BFA 81, Film and Video), also produced a film in 1979 when he was a student at CalArts. Not surprisingly, that seven-minute, 16 mm live-action film, Two-Part Invention, uses sound and music as major components in telling the story of a composer’s domestic life as musique concrete. Even before he founded Danetracks, his sound design and editing studio that has worked on numerous films, including The Matrix series, The Cave, 8 Mile and Dogtown and the Z-Boys, Davis began editing and designing sound for independent films out of a closet of the company he worked for during the day.
Henry Selick (MFA 77, Experimental Animation) directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and Monkeybone. He is currently working on a film version of Coraline, based on graphic novelist Neil Gaiman’s children’s book. The precursor to his commercial films, Seepage (1981) used cell animation and stop-motion puppetry.
Shot on video, How to Read Macho Mouse (1991) by Aaron Anish and Ruben Ortiz Torres (MFA 92) is a humorous deconstruction of speedy Gonzales, the Looney Tunes caricature of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, by one of the foremost Mexican-American multi-media installation artists.
If you’ve even wondered how Stephen Hillenburg (MFA 92, Experimental Animation) came up with the idea for SpongeBob SquarePants, the hit animated series for Nickolodeon and the highest-rated kids’ show on cable television in 2002, watch his 1993 16mm student film, Wormholes. He takes a fly’s-eye view of Relativityland with the same quirkiness with which he visits the bottom of the sea with SpongeBob.
Naomi Uman (MFA 98, Film and Video) premiered her 16mm film, Removed (1999), at the New York Film Festival. Using experimental techniques to affect the look of the film, the female body becomes an obscure object of desire. Uman’s thesis film, Leche, won the Golden Spire Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and has screened at festivals worldwide. In 2002 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Exemplifying the outer limits of what character can do, J.J. Villard’s animation 9 in a Chimney 10 on a Bed (2002), is a virtuoso animation about a girl making her way in a cruel and wondrous world set to the song “Que Cera, Cera”. Villard currently works at Dreamworks, but doesn’t know how he got the job. The artistic talent and out-there imagination exhibited in this 4-minute video, my personal favorite of the animations screened, is reason enough. During the 2004 Santa Barbara Film Festival, Villard’s short, Son of Satan, a foul-mouthed, grotesque and unnerving adaptation of an autobiographical Charles Bukowski tale, elicited an extreme emotional response – it was booed and there were calls for censorship (this happened in Phili and Boston, too). The film went on to screen at the Cannes Film Festival and won a top prize in Ottawa.
Powwow (2002) by Kristin Pepe follows the community of people in Los Angeles who attend powwows regularly. But instead of the usual documentary approach, Pepe takes an abstract look, manipulating images and colors to create a constantly evolving collage. Shooting on 16mm film, she used an optical printer to process the images frame-by-frame, adding up to forty layers, printing positive as negative, posterizing and relying on a complimentary color scheme to capture the charged emotions and vibrant energy of the events. This was done to great effect and amazingly without any sound.
Passages (2005) by Hyun-Min Lee (Experimental Animation) is a haunting beautiful video animation that tells the story of one woman as it traces her cycle of life, flowing through time alongside the changes of nature until when her life ends, it is not an ending but another beginning.
The Hesher (2006), a story about a guy always home alone and the disquieting things he does when he is home alone, is a live-action video by Scott Cummings. Due to the disturbing nature of the film, Cummings lost at least one friendship after the film screened.
The Orphans is 22-minute video shot on the DVX 100 at 24 P by recent grad, Cy Kuckenbaker. Inspired by Kuckenbaker’s stint as a Peace Corp volunteer, the film is based on a true story. It tells the poignant and humorous tale of two aging Lithuanian men on a journey to Berlin to honor the death wish of their childhood friend to visit his grave. The film was shot improvisationally without a script, following a step outline. One of the actors was a constant storyteller. Some of his anecdotes were incorporated into the film.
The variety of genres, as well as the artistic, technological and cultural diversity of these films, should be an encouragement to emerging filmmakers everywhere. Most importantly for any new filmmaker – and the hallmark of all these CalArts films – is to have a vision and to follow it. Happy filmmaking!
Mary Ann Skweres is an award-winning independent writer/director with over a dozen produced short films under her belt. A member of the Editor’s Guild, she has edited feature films, documentaries and shorts. She writes about the art and craft of filmmaking for magazines including Below the Line, Film and Video, VFX World and Animation World Network. Contact [email protected].
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