STUMPF SPECIAL!: Hollywood Underground Film Festival!

- By Bryan Stumpf

Currently living in Los Angeles, I’m bombarded daily with endless marketing for the “the next big blockbuster.” Every other street corner is plastered with posters for the latest test-marketed pablum — the more banal the better. Even the edgiest offerings seem stripped of any punk aesthetic.

So it was with elation and a raised fist that I discovered efforts to establish the first annual Hollywood Underground Film Festival, securing a space for true outsider filmmaking, deep in the heart of Tinseltown. Intended as a trial run with hopes of the event growing in prominence, fest partners Underground Film Journal, American Cinematheque, and Jumpcut Cafe reserved the Spielberg Theater at the Egyptian Theatre for one night only, on February 21st, to showcase a diverse selection of the finest in punk cinema.

It was a promising start, with a sold out theatre and an appearance by special guest Kenneth Anger, the king of underground, experimental filmmaking. To have your inaugural fest blessed by Anger is a truly auspicious beginning. Master of Ceremonies Elric Kane, owner of LA’s filmmaker mecca Jumpcut Cafe, introduced Anger to the audience, then had him slice a length of celluloid — a perfect ribbon-cutting for an underground film fest, almost channeling Un Chien Andalou’s infamous razor to the retina.

Following the celluloid-cutting, there was a brief Q&A with Anger and film curator David Del Valle, covering Anger’s beginnings as a child actor, his trailblazing film “Fireworks,” and his infamous Hollywood Babylon books. Even in his late 80s, Anger is still making films. As the Q&A came to a close, Elric announced they’d be giving out awards at the end of the evening - awards named in honor of Anger. While AMPAS had the Oscars, the HUFF would have Angers.

And so began the screening of the selected shorts. The night’s first film vying for an Anger was Up the Valley and Beyond, directed by Todd Rosken. Up the Valley was a smart idea — a biopic of legendary cult filmmaker Russ Meyer early in his life, revealing the flashpoint of his interest in filmmaking, or more specifically, his fascination with immortalizing large breasts on celluloid. Rosken shows Russ’s early days as a World War II soldier, returning home to be a glamour magazine photographer. Of course, as Meyer (Jim Parrack) shoots more and more gorgeous LA women, he becomes obsessed with photographing them nude. Meyer meets his muse in Eve Turner (Sarah Jones), and the rest of the short is Russ wooing Eve out of her shirt and into his bed. Rosken captures 50s Hollywood well, yet it falls short of the kind of titillation most people will expect in a Russ Meyer biopic.

The next film Half Life, directed by April Simmons, was completely non-narrative with seemingly disconnected sequences of children in nature. The cinematography was mesmerizing, and Simmons deliciously solidifies the evocative-over-concrete aesthetic that is to be expected in experimental filmmaking. And it was all over in under ten minutes. The other non-narrative, hallucinogenic films at the fest - Lana Turner Overdrive, directed by Michael Frost, and Red Luck directed by Mike Olenick - both overstayed their welcome. Simmons smartly stops Half Life at seven minutes, yet Overdrive and Luck, while both beautifully hypnotic, seem to go on and on…and on. In Lana, Frost throws snippets from Turner’s films into a kaleidoscope, creating a dreamy carousel of images, but six minutes around the carousel - half Lana’s total running time - would’ve been plenty. And Olenick’s Luck proved deserving of its recent win at Slamdance for Best Experimental Short, with its impressive production value, syrupy cinematography, crisp sound mixing, and spellbinding interweaving of story threads and themes. But when the crumpled piece of tinfoil floats across the frame - the short’s interstitial - for fourteenth time, you’ll believe there’s such a thing as too much Luck.

Yet there are worse sins in experimental filmmaking than dragging your running time past the point of tedium — like the sin of being quirky simply for quirky sake. Under this category fell Fishfucker, directed by Brandon Daley & Dennis Johnson, and Moving, directed by Marc Horowitz. While Fishfucker had a straight narrative, it superficially focuses on overly quirky characters and, as you might guess by the title, weird for weird sake sexual habits. Lots a uncomfortable laughter from the audience with this one. And Horowitz’s Moving really isn’t much more than watching abstract art pieces interact with each other. Two furry abstract art pieces are anthropomorphized with voices, wit, and a desire to chisel away at an immobile abstract art piece. Though Horowitz undeniably put some production value into Moving, it was thankfully under five minutes.

Proving that a non-narrative experimental short can have political resonance, I rather enjoyed Reckoning 3, directed by Kent Lambert. With images culled from online multiplayer “shooter” games, Reckoning 3 is both a mix-media collage and tone poem, analyzing the dissociative experience of communicating with strangers through headset microphones while killing all in sight. I liked the attempt at a serious social critique, but don’t expect any hard stance about violence in entertainment and its effects on society.

For me and most of the audience, it seemed the winners of the night were the comedy shorts. Crow Hand!!! directed by Brian Lonano was an audience favorite. While it remains unclear why a man’s hand becomes a crow, it’s quite a sight to behold. Lots of humor, gore, and cleverness packed in this very short short. Carr Cavender’s I’m Doyle Spitz! had a perfectly brisk pace and lots of dark humor. As a professional killer tries to perform a hit, he keeps getting interrupted, and things get exponentially Monty Python silly. Also relishing in the silly, Jackson Stewart’s Sex Boss, which bended more towards Broken Lizard than Monty Python. On the first day of a job, an intern (Graham Skipper) discovers his boss (Jesse Merlin) has very odd ways of winnowing down his lackeys. Through a series of odd and depraved humiliations, the intern becomes, in effect, the lone survivor. Stewart keenly bounces from laugh to laugh, keeping an Improv energy to the pace, and smartly allows the talented Merlin to chew (nay devour) scenery.
Though some might consider these three comedies “not serious enough” for a fest celebrating the experimental, I found them to be a perfect antidote for the evening’s more pretentious, over- stylized offerings.

To my surprise, one of my favorites of the fest was the slick grind house flick, Sheila Scorned, directed by Mara Tasker. While enduring the Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez double feature Deathproof and Planet Terror, I discovered I prefer my grind house flicks short and sweet. Filmmakers’ efforts to maintain a grind house grunge can grow distracting after ninety minutes. But fifteen minutes with Sheila was perfect. When stripper Sheila (Laine Rettmer) inadvertently messes up a drug deal, she must seduce and kick ass to escape the clutches of a criminal mastermind. While Tasker shellacs every scene with a thick and vivid neo-noir sheen, Rettmer proves to be one tough, compelling, and sexy broad. I was won over by newcomer Tasker’s confidence, in a subgenre typically field marshaled by frat boy fanboys.

The shorts collection culminated with the film that won the fest’s first Anger award — Moments, Excerpt #7, directed by John & Clu Gulager. Once again, the Gulagers proved to be the consummate movie-loving family, in an echelon of their own, even in a city filled with movie- loving families. Before the fest, I had chance to speak with Clu. While I was praising Clu on his expansive filmography, he expressed genuine interest in my own filmmaking endeavors. He listened intently as I told him about my films Annulment and Ghost Walks. He asked questions about the stories behind each film, and heaped earnest praise on me for actually making these films happen. He didn’t even mention that we would soon be watching one of his films on the big screen.

Much deserving of an Anger, Moments, Excerpt #7 had everything a Hollywood underground film should have: rawness, beauty, nakedness, shock value, taboo-breaking, and grace. More importantly, it seemed built from scratch by a tight-knit family of collaborators (in this case, a literal family) united by their own unique, independent, anti-establishment spirit.

There was more to the Hollywood Underground Film Festival than the shorts collection - there would also be a feature film, Betamax, screened afterwards. We were told the Betamax filmmakers were shooting scenes for tonight’s cut earlier that day. Musing on this, Master of Ceremonies Elric said, “You can’t get more punk than that.”

However, the demands of my establishment day job required that I skip Betamax and get home at a “decent” hour. So I walked home, down Sunset Boulevard, past giant golden Oscar statuettes, hoping that the HUFF inspired, and will continue to inspire, filmmakers to never let the spirit of Anger subside.

LINKS

http://hollywoodundergroundfilm.com/

https://twitter.com/hollywooduff

https://www.facebook.com/HollywoodundergroundFilm

http://geeknation.com/podcast/killer-pov/

TRAILERS

Sheila Scorned trailer: https://vimeo.com/108189071

Up the Valley and Beyond trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhconN8xGVo

Crow Hand trailer: https://vimeo.com/118906204

Red Luck trailer: https://vimeo.com/86064085