Picking up (shorts).

You (unspecified, unknown, possibly nonexistent) devoted readers may have noticed that I completely failed to follow through with on-the-spot reporting from Sundance, following my initial post in January. I was truly excited about it! But not excited enough to forgo sleep or work to deliver what I'd promised.

Now that I have a little time I find, also, that I have a strange amount of recall of the things I wanted to write about, post-by-post-by-post. It was a unique trip that way - completely unexpectedly, it made a strong impression on me, and got my mind working in ways I was not accustomed to. Those grooves of thoughts seem still to be there.

So. We're going chronologically. The first films I saw in Park City were sets of shorts - one in the afternoon, as part of Slamdance, and one at midnight, a Sundance thing. I should mention that the Slamdance program included a film by produced by my good friend, Jacob Robinson, and so the fact that I preferred it may be due to personal allegiances.

Here's what I want to say about the two programs. It's a commonplace that shorts are the province of younger filmmakers, primarily because features cost too much. As self-contained works, shorts are very, very hard to pull off - you want to invest them with characters and ideas, and there's just no time. What I found interesting was that the Slamdance selections focused almost exclusively on character, whereas the Sundance shorts were more conceptual - and the former were, to my mind, more effective.

A rundown, if you're interested:

Slamdance:

• Gravity (Jacob's film): A married couple falling apart in isolation. From the director's bio (presumably self-written) "[Director Romanowsky] cares a lot about how things work, especially people"
• Animal Lover (the one with movie stars): Super-stylish, but fundamentally about frail men and somewhat frail women.
• Bird (the crowd favorite): Indescribable. A bird chooses a man. The man, reluctant, chooses the birds. The provided synopsis plumbs depths that are better left undisturbed. Really, the story just sings.
• Bunny Boy (the most gimmicky): The gimmick is the ending, purposefully disturbing. The leadup is about a boy, somewhat morbid, somewhat cruel, and used to being alone.

Sundance:

• Close: A couple fight. The difference between this and a film like Gravity is that here, they really are never not fighting. I'm all for showing people in extremis - but you only get mileage from it when you've seen them also at the center of who they think they are.
  
• Baby: A woman is pursued. She and we are terrorized.
  
• Stardust: Sorry, I really don't know what happens. I fell asleep. I think something blows up (a car?). I woke up and saw an explosion.
• Spring: A younger man is sort of terrorized by an older man, who could be/become his lover.
• I'm Having a Difficult Time Killing My Parents: Perhaps the most focused character here. The most self-actualizing. He doesn't do it.
• YEARBOOK: A series of interviews with high school students, documentary-style. One big idea behind them all.
• The Majestic Plastic Bag: Done in the style of a nature program, tracing the migration of a discarded plastic bag. No characters whatsoever (See!?!).
  

There is another way of thinking about the phenomenon I'm describing. In the Slamdance films, it seems to me like people are subjected to a stimulus and they react, in ways that are surprising or horrifying or endearing. At Sundance, it felt like the movies were more about about the stimulus. Not so much the reaction.

I would like to connect this to a more general sense that full-length movies have trouble telling simple stories these days. Action movies are, of course, dehumanizing, but even supposed small character films, it seems to me, are often about something massive that happens - a birth, a death, a small cataclysm. For some reason I keep thinking of Rear Window as an example of a film that doesn't get made today.

I would like to make this connection, but the truth is I know very little about movies, and see perhaps 5-10 new films a year. Which is probably worth bearing in mind if you're staying with me on this trip back to Sundance.

Love for Sale.

Anthology Film Archives is running a series on 1980's Hollywood Musicals, a category that includes Purple Rain as well as The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and may justify itself on that basis alone. Last night a friend and I went to see True Stories, David Byrne's film about a fictional town in Texas celebrating the state's Sesquicentennial, back in 1986. The tagline for the film is " A Completely Cool, Multi-Purpose Movie." It pretty much fits.

There are many reasons to see True Stories, amongst them: John Goodman's satiny voice and panda-bear physique, David Byrne's gnomic non-sequitur voiceover, which personally annoys me but many get a kick out of, and of course some terrific Talking Heads songs. But what struck me last night was how prescient the film was about the phase of innovation and development that the country was then entering, and that still obtains today. The movie focuses on the oddball personalities that one expects populate Byrne's imagination, but always in the background is Varicorp, a tech firm that might be standing in for Texas Instruments. One of my favorite scenes is a walk-and-talk in its white-paneled hallways (starting around 2:15), with a sincere and slightly smug IT professional talking about the creative potential of computers, a new kind of poetry. And then there's the dinner scene, which improbably morphs (around 2:00) into a kind of revelatory heralding of the new industrial model, out of Bell Labs and into people's garages. It speaks to the hope that we have for science and engineering to change our lives. It suggests businesses that transform the terms of employment from something financial to something spiritual. And it points out that when you get all of your nourishment from work, you no longer need your weekends.

And I think, "oh, so that's when that happened."

Preamble.

Before I start to write about Sundance I think it's appropriate to question why I'm writing about Sundance. I have, after all, let this page sit idle for over a year.

I should get one thing out of the way - there's a lot of self-indulgence here. Like, even more than in a typical blog. This envisioned series of posts is but one symptom of an entirely unearned wave of self-importance that surged over me from the moment I touched down at SLC. Others include a veritable tsunami of facebook (friend me!) activity - three status updates in three days, each one practically shouting "I'M AT SUNDANCE." I'm not blind to all this. I can picture the wee version of me reading over those somewhat breathless, graspingly elliptical notes and sighing, "Dude, we get it. You're about as subtle as the movie Homework" I hope, though, that it's not purely self regard behind this uncharacteristic oversharing. I also feel that there was some innocence in my excitement. I was a little giddy walking down the Main Street and overhearing other people talk about movie stars. I was thrilled to wake up at 6am and walk shivering to a tent, there to wait for an hour to maybe get entrance to a movie. Willing (eager!) to pay $15 to watch something I knew virtually nothing about -- that even the internet didn't know much about (occasionally this backfired - cf Homework). Engaged, for four days, in the entirely self-indulgent & precious (in all connotations) activity of observing things around me and observing my own reactions to them. I want to share what I can of those feelings and experiences. I like that version of me, and hope you do too. Because he's doing the writing for the next few days.

Pictures

I've uploaded some of the non-phone pictures from the trip in a Picasa album. Hope that you like them.

Pleeze stop

Yet another demonstration of the US's ability to export terrible advertising, preferably with some anti-didactic elements.

We and the village

We went, my brother and I, cycling on a narrow half-dirt road past the small grouped settlements that I guess you would call villages, here. We'd gotten our bikes at the gate of the resort, a pair of large wooden doors set in concrete walls that generally kept us in and the villages out during our stay, now coming to a close. The resort was something else, and I can't describe it without sounding admiring, which I'm not, or ungrateful, which I hope not to be. But for now it might do to think about countless staff in gleaming white shirts (so white, nothing in India is so white) serving Indians in real-not-knock-off-Gucci and Germans on yoga holiday. And me, of course, and my family.

I'd often wondered what people meant by villages in India. My only reference point was the small rural idyll terrorized by bandits in the movie Sholay, itself based on Sergio Leone's westerns, so that the place looked more Dakotaish than Desi. In Westchester, where I mostly grew up, there are towns and there are villages, though the distinction between the two seems partly size and partly real estate marketing. Mostly the latter.

In India the people I know who come from the villages are drivers and cooks, and I can't say, unfortunately, that I know them well.

We passed through the villages just before noon on a Sunday, when the children were out in their yards and many people were walking on the narrow road with nowhere, it seemed, to be. Some carried things hither and yon, women with large bundles on their heads. Children yelled in English as we passed, "Good morning, what is your name?" and repeated my reply, and told me theirs when I asked. There was washing by a small creek.

The houses were not all of one type, but ran from the ramshackle thin-walled tin-roofed through to sturdy multi-story and solidly middle class. I took no pictures of them. Already the cultural imperialism of the voyeurism of the expedition bothered me.

I did photograph this small place to gather and pray, though. The population of Kerala is about 20% Christian, tracing back to 52AD when Thomas the Apostle is held to have come a-calling. The churches I have seen here are beautifully colored, blue and yellow cropping up in the deep green jungle. This building, not a church, but a strange little site to show and sustain devotion, stands against the lake, which perhaps you can see. To me it seems (and this is strange, go figure) like a ruin-in-waiting, for anthropologists of the future to photograph, study, analyze and puzzle over after we are gone.

The state motto for Kerala, omnipresent as you drive through downtown Kochi, is "God's own country."

Where in the world

This is what I see, right now. Somewhere in here is a rumination on the nature of being always connected, even here, blissfully in the middle of nowhere. But I should probably put away my phone right now.
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