News-Letter

Leaving in its wake the ossified magma of dream imagery, a gratuitous pile of corpses and enough premature aging to drop your dentures at, this past weekend marked the 11th annual Johns Hopkins Film Festival. As in recent years, the Film Society curated a festival grand in ambition and rich in scope, selections spanning its campiest and most excessively sincere ends. "Short and sweet" would appropriately describe the proceedings, and indeed this year's scheduling "faced a decrease in submissions," according to Film Society president Oren Mittman. Perhaps because of the dismal weather, Spring Fair, or general Hopkins apathy, attendance was limited to the devoted few.

Main events included a Thursday night screening of Matthew Barney's recent art-gasm Drawing Restraint 9, and Friday night's Zardoz, John Boorman's wildly dated 1974 sci-fi saga of love, immortality and post-Bond Connery. One of these movies featured a ship and one did not. Additionally, mind-altering substances would prove useless in understanding either on the first shot, though I can say with delightful certainty there is hope for someday comprehending the latter. While all the Vaseline and leg mutilations of Drawing Restraint 9 could only muster bewilderment, the utter confusion of Zardoz brought on laughter and drunken shouts. Attendance with regard to the rest of the weekend was relatively high at both of these screenings, especially on behalf of non-Hopkins students for Drawing Restraint 9 -- it's always good when something other than a foam party pops the Hopkins bubble every once in a while.

Saturday evening brought Funny Games, Michael Haneke's 1997 Austrian film (incidentally being remade this year), to the Shriver Hall screen. A worthy choice for its utterly realistic envisioning of the breaking down of unspoken societal contracts -- a sociopath's playground -- the consequential static pace, jagged action sequences and multiple anticlimaxes ultimately made for an awkward screening.

The Sunday evening showcase concluded the festival with two early 1990s experimental films by director Peggy Ahwesh, The Color of Love, running about 10 minutes and The Deadman, a bit longer at 35 minutes. The Deadman soldered together a choppy concoction of silent film title cards and intermittent speech, jukebox love songs and orgies and deadpan with black humor to deliver a difficult though oddly satisfying excursion of a wife set free to run naked through the local bar and forest following the death of her husband, whose fly-swarmed remains are all but forgotten. If a barbiturate-addled housewife passed out on the couch one afternoon watching Kern's Fingered, this would be her fever dream.

How does the Film Society decide what to show? Board members screen each submission, including student films, experimental shorts, independent feature lengths and often international entries, this year from Iceland, Israel and England. The festival marked the stateside premiere of the eerie The Magic Opera, from Liverpudlian director James Chalmers. Simply enough, the group then chooses "the ones that we would most want to watch," according to Mittman. "We also request films on the festival circuit that catch our eye." The Nightingale Princess was one of those requested. Beautifully shot and serenely scored, the 46-minute film directed by Christopher Dreisbach plays out like the fantasy world that engrosses the protagonist, to the point of seamless transitions in and out of animation. Had a half-skilled casting director been employed, you might have already known about it.

In the case of certain films shown this year, Mittman stated that the Film Society is sometimes expressly approached by directors or film co-ops offering to fund the cost of the reels. When the board members agree upon these submissions, it's absolutely fortuitous. 35 mm, the preferred approach of the Film Society, isn't cheap -- but what fine things are? "We show most on 35-mm film and project them on to the largest screen in Maryland, which is much more exciting than just watching something on DVD, which anyone can do at home," Film Society secretary Julia Zhou said.

The current board is composed entirely of juniors, meaning that this was the first festival they were responsible for organizing as a team. "This was our first time running it, so next year will be easier," Mittman said.

"We hope we will be able to continue our film series during the fall and spring semesters," Zhou said. "We also plan to cosponsor more events with other student groups, as we hope to draw a larger Hopkins audience and become more visible on campus."

For a deeper look into the film festival the News-Letter sent movie reviewers Simon Waxman and Matt Hansen to see Zardoz and Drawing Restraint 9, respectively. Here are their takes on these film festival standouts.

Zardoz

When a human body comes into contact with an electric circuit of appropriate amperage -- typically between 0.01 and 0.02 amperes -- something quite spectacular occurs. The body experiences muscular contractions and grips the source of current with increasing ferocity, subjecting itself to a hearty roasting. Sometimes, bad movies have a similar effect, demanding our attention not despite, but rather because of their extraordinary inadequacy.

Zardoz (1974), which was shown at this year's Hopkins Film Fesitval, is one such movie. It is a livewire and some of us just can't let go. It is stupid and ridiculous and all puffed up with gaudy intellectual plumage, but it is not unwatchable, and, according to the logic attending cinematic folly, must therefore be sought out with all the more intensity. But you don't really watch Zardoz in any active sense. You just kind of let it happen to you and marvel at the tenacity of the film crew that managed to bring it to screen even though they surely realized just how pointless the whole endeavor was.

What is most surprising about Zardoz is that the crew in question was led by writer/director/producer John Boorman, a guy with serious cinematic credentials. Before Zardoz, he directed the raw, high-tension masterpiece Deliverance. Post-Zardoz he retold the legend of King Arthur to great effect in Excalibur, one of the best fantasy movies of the `80s. He is also responsible for stellar productions like Point Blank (1967) and Hope and Glory, a decent 1987 film that wasn't as good as its several Oscar nominations would suggest.

So, how a talented screenwriter and director such as Boorman gave us Zardoz truly is a mystery. I'm guessing powerful psychedelics may have been at work. The movie actually seems to have some wits about it, but who cares when the main character Zed (Sean Connery, hahaha) steals the show with such lines as "I've seen men rape [pause] an old crippled woman [pause] in a wet ditch." Mmm, perfecto!

Of course, just because Zardoz is incoherent and senseless doesn't mean it isn't good for a hoot or two. Thanks to Connery's antics (and attire, composed of a red leather loincloth and bandolier), a cast of effeminate immortals plucked from the grounds of a crystal healing convention, and the least sexy orgies this side of Caligula, Zardoz, ultimately, does what many films cannot. It delivers.

-- Simon Waxman

Drawing Restraint 9

At first blush, the creators of Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) have some appealing credentials. Matthew Barney`s five-part Cremaster Cycle is a well-loved meditation on creativity and sexuality that features, among others, Norman Mailer and Ursula Andress. Björk was nominated for an Academy Award for her film Dancer in the Dark and has a highly regarded singing career. But then you realize: Barney's Cycle will never be exhibited outside of contemporary art museums because of its $100,000 per DVD price tag, and its premise is the filmic representation of spermatogenesis, and Björk's music has been characterized as atonal, challenging and sonically unappealing -- all pointing to the fact that Drawing Restraint 9 is not going to be a film for everyone.

Indeed, there are moments of painterly beauty in the long, meditative scenes and lingering camera work, and Barney's work on his past films has gifted him with a photographer's eye for light and a designer's grasp of setting. Björk, to her credit, shows a complete absorption in her graceful gestured acting, and fuses a Japanese lilt with her sometimes sweeping, always appropriate soundtrack. Though Drawing Restraint 9 feels slightly more contrived than some of Barney's more fluid past works, it nevertheless is just as pretty to look at, with his trademark gossamer, de-saturated footage aboard the actual Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru.

Yet even a beautiful movie aims to be more than a collection of appealing images, and it's here that the average viewer may struggle with the film. Clocking in at over two hours, with one two-minute block of spoken dialogue along its entire length, Drawing Restraint 9 avowedly attempts to explore the concept of limitation and transformation, but, at times, it's difficult not to feel that Barney and Björk's vision was the limitation of the audience's attention span. Playing "the Guests" aboard the whaling ship, Barney and Björk spend much of the film involved in an elaborate Shinto marriage ceremony which, while lovingly filmed and seemingly accurate, nevertheless seems interminably paced and not half as interesting as the gelatin-like substance that the whaling ship is infused with. Eventually -- and slowly -- the film reaches its bloody climax, where the prey of the whaling vessel are symbolically linked to "the Guests" themselves through a flurry of activity between Björk and Barney involving whale stripping knives. It's a very appropriate capstone for a film that asks as many questions as it will ever answer, and challenges its audience to look past contemporary art tropes to find individual themes that resonate with themselves. Whether the themes or the viscous goo will remain with the audience longer remains to be seen.

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