Aurora Picture Show

Overwhelmed by a year-end studio movie deluge, film editor Roxanne Bogucka took time out to visit Houston's Aurora Picture Show, an art and film space partly supported by a grant from the City of Houston through the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County. She saw very different two shows EXPERIMENTAL CHICAGO in December and KID FLIX in January and spoke with their curators.

On Saturday, December 2, 2000, I went to an Aurora Picture Show program exploring the richness and diversity of experimental film and video from Chicago (review follows). After the show, I caught up with Aurora Picture Show’s executive director Andrea Grover and the show’s curator, Patrick Friel, of Chicago Filmmakers.

RB: Andrea, I guess I wanted to talk to you first a little bit about the Aurora Picture Show and how it got started and how it keeps going.

AG: Okay. Well, it really got started after a friend of mine found this space, which is an old church... built in 1924 and the idea for the picture show completely evolved from the space. So, I didn't have any notions of starting something like this until I found this space and the space dictated what it would become and of course I had an interest in film and video. My background is in visual arts and I just had, I found after doing the first couple of shows that curating and programming was really more of a direction I wanted to go in and also, there was this niche that needed to be filled in Houston, that there were no other places showing short works, works that were made in economy, experimental works, artist-made works, performative works, that sort of thing. These things traditionally have fewer venues and they're harder to program and even within festivals they often are pieces that precede a longer piece, a feature-length piece. So anyway I guess finding the space and the realization of a need for this sort of thing. Also I think that people, at least our audience is tired of certain experiences that are mediated by technology, like being alone online or being alone all day at a computer at work and I think this is kind of more of a return to a community experience, the fact that it is an old church is inviting and familiar for most people, and like the Q-and-A's afterward, you're not just left out in the cold, you're not left to wonder, you know, what have I just seen or why have I just seen it... you don't feel manipulated or if you do, you can ask questions about it, that sort of thing, so I think all of those elements led to the Aurora beginning and also lasting as long as it has.

RB: And so, y'all own this space now. How did that come about and how, financially, how does the Aurora Picture Show keep going?

AG: Believe it or not, yes, I own the space and Aurora Picture Show is now a corporation, so Aurora pays for the space every time that it's used, but I live here the rest of the time. Basically Aurora Picture Show pays for everything except me. (laughs). So, we pay all of the filmmakers and videomakers we show here. We pay the curators. We fly them in. We feed them, and right now, we have one grant, we have other grants that we applied for and this grant that we have is from the Cultural Arts Council in Houston, in Harris County, and then we have an incredibly strong patron base. I mean, we have people that, just after the first show were giving us a substantial amount of donations and contributions to help us stay afloat. We just have, it's a very small organization, it's very intimate and every single person who comes here, even friends of mine who are completely broke dig into their pockets and pull out five dollars, and if I say, "Don't worry about it", they'll say, you know, "I want you to be here next week."

RB: It sounds like a good base. About how many shows do you have per season, I mean is there sort of you know, standard schedule?

AG: We do two to three programs per month, so what is that, 24 to 36 programs a year.

RB: Okay. And the program that you had today, is Experimental Chicago and we have the curator Patrick Friel. Patrick Friel, curator of the Experimental Chicago Show and program director for Chicago Film Makers. What does a program director do?

PF: My responsibilities are to select the film and video programming we present at Chicago Film Makers and do all of the sort of necessary collateral, organizational details for that, you know, writing descriptions and making sure our schedule gets printed and making sure the schedules get distributed, all the sort of nuts-and-bolts things that follow from that, making sure the technical aspects are working correctly. But sort of the main thing is as the film programmer for the organization, as the film and video series we run.

RB: So you select the films, so people are submitting films constantly to Chicago Film Makers, or you are going out and drumming up films for the programs?

PF: Most of the work I program is work that I solicited, either new work by filmmakers or videomakers I am already familiar with or work I am not familiar with that I’ve either seen or read about, showing at other venues or festivals around the country, asking for recommendations from other programmers around the country. Some of the work I show is unsolicited submissions but I tend to not get a lot of that, and most of it tends to be work that we're not really... it's not really the kind of work that we show, it's much more sort of narrative-based, or much more documentary, in a very conventional sense. We do show a lot of documentary work, but it's either sort of progressive, sort of political-social issue documentary work or documentary work that is sort of challenging in some kind of formal way rather than sort of the standard PBS-style documentary.

RB: Okay, I noticed you were talking about narrative there. I was looking at these films because I don't have a formal film school or art school background and I was trying to figure out as I looked at tonight's program what exactly experimental film might be, from looking at these several films and it seemed to me it would be non-narrative, is that sort of a formal definition, or is experimental film this thing today and another thing Tuesday or what?

PF: That's sort of a good question that nobody has really been able to adequately come up with a good answer for. I sort of like to steal a phrase from the Supreme Court from years ago. Experimental film is, I know it when I see it, sort of a pornography experimental film, and I think that the reason nobody has been able to come up with an adequate definition of what experimental film is is because it’s really varied and really diverse and there are experimental films that are narrative works, but they're doing things within the context of the narrative that are very different or very unusual or very unconventional from normal narrative film.

RB: What would be an example of something like that?

PF: An example of something like that would be perhaps many of the films from kind of the mid-period of Andy Warhol's career, where he was using screenplays written by somebody else, casting actors in roles, and these were films that had, you know, theoretically some kind of story line or at least sort of narrative structure to them, and by casting sort of non-actors in the acting roles, you have sort of very wooden performances, very stilted performances. He shot the films himself, which is sort of now becoming sort of a known fact. People for a long time thought he didn't shoot any of his own films, but in fact he shot practically everything himself. So... but he wasn't a professional cameraman so there were all kinds of mistakes that happened in the shooting. He left all of those in deliberately. He was doing sort of very crazy things with his camera, sort of zooming in very fast, in and out very fast, for no reason whatsoever, and so he's really playing with a lot of aspects of the film medium and of conventional storytelling devices. You know, most narrative films have good actors in them, or at least they hope they do. He doesn't care about that. And so he's taking narrative conventions and properties and either ignoring them or challenging them in some way or doing away with them, but at the core, you’ve still got a narrative film, so he's experimenting all around the narrative.

RB: Um, I guess because of my educational background maybe, I tend to think of an experiment as something that you do to, with some purpose, it answers some question, you know what I'm thinking about, that sort of... so one wonders... and taking into account that even negative information is still information, what would be the point of these experiments?

PF: You're hitting on the two main unanswerable questions of experimental film. What is it, and what do you call it. Experimental film has the connotation, you do experiments to try and come to some kind of answer or solution or solving some kind of problem. It's something that is part of a process. It isn't a finished work in some way and you know, that's not the connotation this work should have, so “experimenta” isn't exactly right. “Avant garde” isn't exactly right. You know, there’ve been all kinds of labels and names used for sort of experimental film broadly and particular sub-genres of it over the years and all of them are inadequate. And I think many people at this point sort of throw their hands up and say “there's no way to resolve this, you know, we're just going to stick with experimental film or avant garde film. Most people know what we're talking about, and you know, we're going to leave it at that.” So, yeah those are sort of the two big questions that don't seem to have answers.

RB: Okay, well I noticed when I was watching some of these films and also I had just gone to the CinemaTexas International Short Film Festival just recently and so I've seen a lot of short films lately... A lot of these films kind of strike me like jazz compositions in a way, especially, I really liked this film on the program “Hobgoblins of Little Minds,” I liked that a lot, but it also, as much as I was enjoying it, it raised in my mind a question that someone in the audience asked at the Q&A. Like certain jazz improvisational pieces, that are going on, how do you know when you're done? You know, and you had said you're not a filmmaker (to Patrick), are you a filmmaker (to Andrea)?

AG: I've made a film but I don't consider myself a filmmaker.

RB: (to Patrick) And this is not a conversation you've had with the filmmakers, presumably about how they come to these decisions?

PF: Not really, I talked to them about other aspects of these particular works or their work in general but it's not something that has ever really been sort of a conscious question in my mind. You know, sort of how do you know it's done... it's sort of done when it's done. And the film or videomaker, they're an artist, you know, how do you know when your painting is finished? How do you know if this composition should have another section of theme and variation at the end of it for another ten minutes?

RB: If you're doing a painting and it's a representational-type thing or you have a composition and you're telling the story, like, here's Peter and here's The Wolf and here's all the animals and stuff like that, you have kind of an end product in mind, so would it be reasonable to say that, using the terminology “experimental film,” that maybe there's not an end product in mind?

PF: I find in a lot of cases there isn't one and I wouldn't say that’s because they're experimenting, I would say it's because they are artists, sort of working within a process and “exploring” perhaps would be a better word rather than experimentin. And, again it's sort of a very individual thing, you know. Certain film and videomakers wake up in the middle of the night and they know exactly what they want to make and they set out and they make it and it's what they thought they were going to do initially and it's done. And others have some sort of vague idea or notion or theme or sort of formal issue that they're interested in and just start working and the project sort of slowly evolves and changes as they're going along and at some point they stand back and look at it and realize that, you know, hey, it's finished, there it is. So it's a very individual, intuitive kind of thing, I think, for most experimental film and videomakers.

RB: Okay, can you say if there's anything particular that binds these 12 selections, we had in tonight's program, is there some common link that binds these that you chose toward tonight's show?

PF: Apart from the fact that they're all works that I like, I think there were sort of watching the program again it really struck me more than when I was sort of putting the show together. I think there's sort of two kinds of themes that cross paths throughout the work and not all of the 12 pieces exhibit both of these. But one of them is the idea of exploring or examining or critiquing or tearing apart or tearing down different kinds of narrative or genre conventions or principles in differing ways across the pieces. And for the most part the video pieces were doing that, although not exclusively. And the other sort of main thread running throughout the show is the idea of, kind of, texture and achieving different kinds of texture on the screen. A lot of the film pieces are doing this through hand-processing or scratching of the film. With David Gatton's film, optical printing, sort of really looking for different kinds of textural looks and feels on the screen.

RB: I would like to talk about David Gatton's film, “What the Water Said, nos. 1-3.” David Gatton took unexposed lengths of film and placed them in a crab cake and then threw it into the Atlantic Ocean, and what the result that we see was created by water and waves and sand, and various and sundry other things that brushed across the film stock. What interested me in particular about it is that usually when you're seeing film and it's progressing through the projector, you're moving in a certain direction in time, well that's not always true, but that's the sort of standard and here it seems to me what you're watching is something that happened then and back before then, because if there's crabs in there or sand, it goes forward, it goes backward. You can't tell when any of these things happen in time and I thought that was pretty interesting. But you asked a lot of the people in the audience about “What the water said.” How many times have you shown this film and what sort of response does it typically get?

PF: I've probably shown it six or eight times in a variety of different contexts, both in Chicago and around the country, and it's a challenging work. It's the most challenging film in the program I think and some people understandably have a very hard time with it and don't like it. Others do find some kind of way to enter into the film and the difficulty, especially with the sound, as one gentleman in our audience tonight was talking about, the sound is very aggressive and violent. It's you know, sort of like a noise piece. It's hard on the ears and it's supposed to be played loud, so I understand when people don't like it, but I have had some very good responses to it. A number of people came up to the show after tonight saying they really enjoyed the piece, and as I said in the question-and-answer period today, I think that's one of the strengths of the experimental film and video scene, is that there's a really sort of broad range of work being made and if people take even a little bit of time to seek out the work and give it a fair viewing, knowing that they're not going to like everything and it's fine if they don't like everything, then... I think that's one of the strengths of this kind of film making, it can accommodate a wide variety of people and their tastes and their interests and backgrounds and it doesn't have to be all things to everybody.

RB: Okay. Where does the Experimental Chicago Program go next?

PF: I'm not sure. I am hoping to show it in Milwaukee and Buffalo, New York. And I talked to people from there but I don't have anything confirmed yet. I'm sort of slowly taking it different places and in slightly different configurations. It's changed a little bit over the last two years, as I find time that I can put into it. It's not part of my day job with Chicago Film Makers. It's something I'm doing as an independent curator, and finding other venues or institutions that are willing to program a show like this, apart from being somewhat challenging work, it's also a tough sell to get an audience to come to a show of work from a specific city when that's sort of the organizing theme behind it, you know it's work from Chicago, or it’s work from San Francisco, rather than some other, more audience-friendly type of thematic concept.

RB: How does being an independent curator work and then you put this together, and you have to sell it, how do people like you hook up? How do you and Andrea hook up, for example? Is there some sort of, presumably, a community, but how does that work?

PF: There is kind of an extended community. There aren't many venues around the country showing experimental work. And sooner or later, programmers at one venue meet the programmers at another venue or we all pay attention to what each other is showing and if Andrea is showing something I haven't heard of, it sounds really interesting, I will call her or email her and say, “you know, what is this, where did you get it? Is it any good?” So we do tend to keep in touch that way. And more recently there is an Internet email discussion group for experimental film that a number of film curators and other experimental film buffs and aficionados and fans and filmmakers subscribe to, so a lot of people stay in touch that way as well. I post our series on there and Andrea posts her series on there, so it's sort of informational in that respect and people looking for recommendations or suggestions, sort of voicing opinions about work and issues. So it's a really nice development in the last few years.

RB: That's great. Thank you both very much.

Experimental Chicago

Bound together only by the fact that they came from Chicago and that curator Patrick Friel liked them, the Experimental Chicago show required that you bring a lot to the party (read: not for the faint-hearted). Some selections seemed to have much in common with a play I’ve just read about—“Art” by Yasmina Reza. Apparently in this play, comfortably-well-off guy buys a $50,000 canvas that’s white on white in white, prompting practical-minded-buddy guy to ask, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” while one-the-fence guy mediates between the pair.

Nevertheless, there was much to savor in this challenging program. While I often had that the-emperor-is-starkers feeling, there were moments of genuine entertainment, and even a life-affirming revelation.

First the revelation—Carolyn Faber’s 16mm film “Iota.” Faber writes that “Iota” “is about what exists inside a moment in time. It has to do with everyday minutiae that we are prone to (dis)miss both physically and cinematically.” Couldn’t be more true. As I watched the six minutes of images, little snatches of mundanity made me wish to see more. But then, why should I get to? We pass it all on a sidewalk and we get a tantalizing glimpse, but that’s not the full story. So what are the full stories? There are so many full stories in which we’re fated to be those characters who shuffle offstage without ever knowing what the whole deal was about. A jewel such as Faber’s film makes me able to recommend an evening of experimental film to everyone. She has made a meditation on the sinfulness of being jaded. Faber’s prosaic images seem to tell us that, with so much around us, the world is what we make of it, and it’s unseemly to dwell on what we’re missing. Or to borrow a more elegant phrasing, “You get what everyone gets, you get a lifetime.”

Maia Cybelle Carpenter’s “The Shape of the Gaze” dwells on several self-described butch subjects. Then what happens, happens. Some women challenged her camera. Others were merely observed. I read this one as more an exercise in anthropomorphism than acting, with some subjects attempting to seduce of the camera, and some engaging in frank sexual speculation, treating the camera as a potential partner. It was a long seven minutes.

For sheer visual interest, I highly recommend “Hobgoblins of Little Minds” (Gregg Biermann) and “Gone Over” (Christopher Bravo). “Hobgoblins” is eight minutes of constantly shifting format that makes you adjust your viewing repeatedly, sort of like what free jazz might look like if you could draw it. “Gone Over” had a look-and-feel of some German abstract film from the 1920s, except it used a computer to generate several permutations of geometric images. As squares, rectangles, dots, circles, and lines changed their tones underneath a flicker effect, I experienced a groovy retinal memory phenomenon (like an acid flashback every few frames) that made this film even more enjoyable.

The conversation piece of the program was unquestionably David Gatten’s “What the Water Said, No. 1-3.” Depending of course on viewers’ tastes and tolerances, this was a stunningly original piece of filmmaking or pure shite. I thought it was shite. Gatten skipped the camera entirely, housed his film stock in crab cages, and tossed it directly into the ocean. Right there, for me, he loses his claim to the title “filmmaker.” Perhaps “film user” would be appropriate. Anyway, the film stock washes around in the briny Atlantic, being scratched up by sand, shells, and stones, clawed by crabs, and generally recording sea life in a way never before projected onto theater screens. Okay, props for the never-before-experienced-in-theaters element of “What the Water Said.” Interesting idea, and what were you smoking? And I could probably even recommend this film as a curiosity if it hadn’t been 14 minutes long. What you see during this quarter of an hour is black or blue background, with random gouged-out and scratched-in clear places. What you hear is extremely loud static, pop and hiss at sonic boom level. If you work hard, you can keep your mind occupied while watching this film. I was rather surprised by the large sections of perfectly parallel lines, wondering what could have caused them. And I tried very hard to identify differences in images from the different seasons and times in which Gatten immersed his film stock. But mostly, I wondered when it was going to end and wished that I still smoked so I could get up and go outside. There’s definitely not a lot out there like “What the Water Said.” For that reason alone, you should check it out. But two minutes of it is probably more than enough.

On Saturday, Jan. 13, 2001, I attended the Kid Flix show (review follows) at Aurora, a collection of short films chosen by fifth graders at Travis Elementary School in Houston. After the show, while audiencemembers went to the front of the hall to create some fast animations of their own, I had a chance to speak with Marian Luntz, curator of film and video at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Zoe Kanan, Luntz’s daughter and one of the curators of the program.

RB: Zoe, I noticed it looked like from this listing there were 13 films in the show and I wanted to know how many films in all did you have to watch to narrow it down to these?

ZK: Let’s see, we watched about 30.

ML: About 30.

ZK: Yeah, in all, and we narrowed it down, with three sessions in my classroom at Travis Elementary and there were also a lot of other children that didn’t show up today.

RB: Okay, did you say it was three sessions of film watching to narrow this down?

ZK: Yeah.

RB: So about over how long, during the course of a month or just a week?

ZK: Like, ah, let’s see.....

ML: I’d say three weeks, because we had a couple sessions after school, before Christmas and then one session here.

RB: Did kids volunteer for this or were they selected to be on the selection team or what?

ML: A lot of them volunteered to be in it and we just assumed some of our friends would probably want to be in it, so basically, I thought it would be easier to just limit it to the two classes, Zoe’s two teachers that are team teachers, so we sent a letter home with the students and there were probably about 50 students in both of those classes combined and told them when the sessions were going to be and anyone who wanted to show up could participate.

RB: So this is a first-time thing for Travis Elementary?

ML: Yes.

RB: It’s a very exciting program. (to Marian) I was wondering, I mean you’re a curator of film and video, so you’ve watched a lot of short films. Zoe, had you watched a lot of short films before?

ZK: Yeah, when I was much younger, I used to always go to my mom’s films, go on the stage and say hello.

RB: That sounds great. Do you want to make your own movies?

ZK: Yeah, I think when I get a little older, like in middle school and high school, I’ll take a movie class.

RB: Would you want to make live-action or would you want to make animations or are you open to anything?

ZK: I would be open to anything.

RB: Okay, great. What was your favorite movie on this program and why?

ZK: I have two, “Dinner for Two,” because my friends and I, we watched that movie a lot and we thought it was quite funny and we called the bug "sheep-bug" because it kind of looks like a sheep. And my other favorite was "My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts," because it was quite humorous too and we liked how the grandmother messed up the Nazi’s outfits, it was quite funny.

RB: I liked those films a lot too. I was wondering, Marian, if you could tell me, I noticed most of the films seem to say National Film Board of Canada or Wildlife Fund. Where do you find, how did you come the films for the kids to choose from?

ML: That’s a really good point. I think it was just the opportunity that we had, on fairly short notice to give a number of films to preview. And we contacted a distributor, Bullfrog Films, in the New York area and they happened to have a lot of short films produced by the National Film Board of Canada, which does a lot of funding for short films and has a great tradition. And then there were a lot with environmental themes, like the World Wildlife Fund and a few of the other ones, and so it just was kind of the contacts that we’d made at the time, and there were a few other short films that I had seen in other contexts that we brought in. And what I would really be interested in, ideally, is to have films from around the world, maybe have some classic films like “The Red Balloon,” and to have some digitally made films to go through the new technology and to have some live-action films, more live action, not just animation.

RB: That’s great. Well, is this going to happen next year in fifth or sixth grade at Travis? Is it going to be an ongoing program?

ML: (as a student exits the Picture Show) Well, a future Travis fifth grader is leaving right now. Travis goes through fifth grade and they go on to sixth grade, and it might be that we would continue it in middle school. I was very pleased with the kids’ input and with their insights, and surprised by some of their choices, and the differences in the girls’ and boys’ tastes, and I thought it was a great dynamic. This sort of sets up a program that we’re going to start in the Museum of Fine Arts, we’re going to do a once-a-month Family Flix program and I’m thinking of maybe involving students in the selection of those films.

RB: It sounds great. It was a wonderful show and congratulations to you both for your involvement and thank you very much for the interview.

ML: Well thank you. Thanks for talking with us.

ZK: Thank you very much.

Kid Flix Family Film Program

Since the majority of the short films available to the Travis Elementary curators came from the World Wildlife Fund, it’s no surprise that the program has a pronounced environmentalism theme, with peace and justice running a close second. The WWF films included commercials, most of which must have played outside of the United States, judging from their “we have met the enemy and he is us” attitude.

In the anti-pave-the-planet claymation “Handle With Care” (by Alexis Bowler and Sandy Hunt), a smiling Earth studded with trees is transformed into a coughing, gagging orb festooned with skyscrapers and fossil-fueled vehicles. As buildings shrink into the surface and trees spring up once more, Earth gets her smile back. In the highly moralistic, anti-consumerist “Equilibrium,” (by Sarah Cavan) we view a balance scale. In one of the scale’s pans sits a grabby human. His acquisitiveness fills his pan with stacks of coins until he sinks and is unable to reach items in the other pan, items like trees, birds, flowers, water. He must reduce his possession so that his pan can rise and put him in the proper balance with the natural world. Most telling was “The Solution,” (by The Animation Workshop) in which all humans are duped into leaving the planet.

“Dinner for Two,” (Janet Perlman) a film on playing well with others, showcases two disputacious reptilian creatures and one tasty bug. This primer on conflict resolution gets it point across humorously, with a great jazz score and cute but not poisonously saccharine animation.

“Cell Animation” (Nick Hilligoss) is a six-minute cartoon on the price sometimes paid for one’s art. The protagonist, a crayon-happy chap who creates entire universes on every available surface around him, is taken up and imprisoned for vandalism. Though his sentence forbids him anything that might be used as art material, he nevertheless manages to express himself, drawing a new world into which he escapes. Or does he?

The runaway hit of the program was Torill Kove’s “My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts.” This wonderful animation covers the history and origin of the Norwegian monarchy, laundry, World War II, and Kove family history in 10 action-packed minutes, to the droll accompaniment of Kove’s flat, understated narration. Go to the site and view this highly recommended short film.

—Roxanne Bogucka