Inaugural Northwestern University Film Festival

Block held its inaugural Northwestern University Film Festival May 25. Director Harold Ramis (“Groundhog Day”) opened the festival and discussed his Hollywood beginnings. Before breaking into film, he worked at Playboy magazine and Second City. The classic Animal House, which he co-wrote, helped establish his name and his continual sharp comedies have made him legendary.

The first 25 minutes of Richard Linklater’s forthcoming "A Scanner Darkly" followed a screening of the student films.

Congrats to the all the winners!

Best Animated Short, “Life Unraveled” (3 min.), Sarah Cortese
Best Documentary Short, “Uptown: Portrait of a Palace” (26 min.), John Pappas and Michael Bisberg
Best Experimental Short, “Waves” (3 min.), Rachel Kichler
Best Narrative Short, “One More Coffee” (9 min.), Adam Price and Kunal Savkur

Honorable Mention, Animated Short, “The Lesson of the Moth” (3 min.), Sarah Cortese
Honorable Mention, Documentary Short, “Rushed” (12 min.), Marcus Cohlan
Honorable Mention, Experimental Short, “Don’t Worry—I’m a Rap Star” (4 min.), Jackie Doherty, Rachel Wolther and Kristin Bongiovanni
Honorable Mention, Experimental Short, “Arrow of Time” (3 min.), Arturo Menchaca
Honorable Mention, Narrative Short, “A Cup of Coffee” (6 min.), Jung Hyun Lee and Bongsoo J. Koo
Honorable Mention, Narrative Short, “Vom-o-Rama” (4 min.), Rachel Wolther, Amy Hirschtick, and Jackie Doherty
Honorable Mention, Narrative Short, “Pleasant Valley High” (10 min.), Anthony Williams and Michael Gaertner

Steve James reveals his "War Tapes"

“These are guys who think about what they’re doing, they think about it and they struggle with it. They’re not idiots. Like us, they think about it, but they have to fight the war at the same time.”

Clutching a mic with his legs crossed, Steve James ("Hoop Dreams") sits in the front of Block Cinema’s theatre, fielding questions from students about his latest project, “The War Tapes" (http://thewartapes.com). Winner of best international documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival, the film is being praised for its bold take on the war in Iraq. The film reverses the standards of documentary filmmaking by giving the soldiers cameras to shoot their lives in a “diary format” for most of the film.

“The War Tapes” began when the New Hampshire National Guard offered director Deborah Scranton a chance to become embedded with its unit. A single mother, Scranton declined the offer but decided to give soldiers cameras so they could film their experiences.

Of the twelve men who volunteered to take cameras, five became heavily dedicated to the project, according to James, and Scranton communicated with the soldiers using Instant Messaging. James, who produced the film, said they ended up with 1,000 hours of footage, and they had the challenge of cutting it down to 94 minutes of film.

“We did try to be true to this experience,” James said, explaining that the only discontinuity in time involves a period when the soldiers went on leave.

Throughout the 94 minutes, the camera follows the diary of Sgt. Stephen Pink, 24, who joined the National Guard during his second year at Plymouth State; specialist Mike Moriarty, a 35-year-old father of a 4-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter who joined after 9/11; Sgt. Zack Bazzi, a Lebanese American who joined to see the world and spent time in Bosnia and Kosovo; Sgt. Duncan Domey, 32, who joined the guard in 2003 after leaving active duty; and Specialist Brandon Wilkins, who joined the Army after high school. Some footage also follows their families around as the soldiers are away from home.

With Sony mini-disc DVD cameras, these soldiers captured intensely personal footage that can be rather funny (“If we end up in a survival situation, you have permission to eat me”) or poignant (“This is the most helpless feeling you’ve ever had”; “It’s unfortunate for Iraqi civilians, but it’s going to be our safety before theirs”; “If I play the odds, one of us will be dead before the tour is over. It’s something I don’t like to think about.”
“Can we build a wall around the country and just leave?”).

“What we’re trying to do is say this film speaks to a wide-range of people...we’ve been amazed at how broad the appeal is,” James said.


“The War Tapes” premieres in Chicago July 7 at the Music Box Theatre.

Still Doing It

“Are you going to take notes for later on in life?”

A woman sitting behind me in the cinema asked me this as I took out my notepad and a pen.

“Um, maybe,” I shyly replied.

She was one of many kind, older women and men who packed Block (people were in the aisle) on May 10 for a screening of Deirdre Fishel’s documentary, Still Doing It: The Intimate Lives of Women Over 65.

“Whether you still do it or you like to still do it, we’re glad you’re here,” Kathy Berger of Evanston’s Reeltime, which co-sponsored the event, said.

Barbara Schock’s short 1998 film My Mother Dreams the Satan’s Disciples in New York preceded the documentary, and it was a pretty amusing movie. It’s written by Rex Pickett, who wrote the novel Sideways. The plot follows a recent widow, Marian, who ventures from South Dakota to visit her grown daughter in big, bad New York City. Marian is delicately emotional at this time in her life, so she packs her late husband’s picture carefully in her suitcase before getting on the plane. When she lands, her experiences aren’t exactly ideal: the cab driver charges too much, and she finds out her daughter, Paula, lives on the same street as the headquarters for the Satan’s Disciples. Paula is sweet, but works a lot, so Marian is left to discover New York by herself. She loads up on maps, but gregarious men with tattoos riding motorcycles loom outside. The rest of the plot takes a few twists, and there’s some ambiguity about what really happens, but it’s an amusing story nonetheless.

“Life wasn’t over for her,” one woman commented after the movie. “It was a new beginning. I think this movie shows that people can advance at all ages – enjoy life and not be afraid.”

After a few more minutes of discussion, the documentary began, and well, it was certainly interesting. The most amusing character was Harriet, a 75-year-old hippie with long blonde hair, a husky smoke-tinged voice and a rather potent sex-drive.
“I need it like food,” she says blatantly to the camera.

“I’m not getting what I need,” she continues. “I mean, I wish I weren’t so sexual.”

There’s also Ruth, 67, who’s still working and searching for a man, Frances, 87, who met her love at 80, and Betty, 73, who met her lover, 40 years her junior, on the Internet.

All these women still like to do it.

“I love this movie,” one woman proclaims after the screening. “I think we all have these thoughts, and it’s courageous and strong for these women to come forward to talk about how women feel.”

Understanding A Cinema of Physics and Perception

By Arturo Menchaca

Experimental films can be rather intimidating. The term “experimental” conveys a sense of bizarreness to the average moviegoer. When placed in the context of filmmaking, the word suggests strangeness, complexity, inaccessibility, and more negatively, pretension and “weird for the sake of weird.” Even if these stereotypes are not necessarily true (though in some cases they are), most people do not approach experimental films, often because the films are not readily available, but even more significantly, because most people are not sure how to.

This is where A Cinema of Physics and Perception hopes to intervene. By making these films available to our patrons, we hope to give those who have never seen them a chance to, and those who already have a chance to see them again, for these are indeed films that reward multiple viewings.

The films in A Cinema of Physics and Perception are some of the most aesthetically compelling, intellectually challenging, and thoroughly enjoyable films ever made, because they use image and sound not simply as a way of entertaining (and certainly not as a way of selling a product), but as a way of articulating an aesthetic idea. All of the films in the series operate in this manner, and are directly concerned with expressing ideas about the art of filmmaking. A film like Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, while containing only frames of black and white and a drone-like soundtrack, is an aesthetic study in minimalism and the perceptual effects of long-term exposure to drastic changes in light and slowly shifting, protracted music. It is also a focused exploration into the nature of film and medium specificity.

This series favors a textual approach, one concerned with science and aesthetics. By observing and perceiving these films and the way they were physically constructed, one can extract a great deal of knowledge and meaning, no matter how conceptually dense the film may seem. This model suggests viewing films from the universal standpoint of 1) physics and 2) human perception.

The way a film uses and examines light, sound, matter, energy, and spacetime are at the forefront, as are issues of how a viewer perceives the film via the senses. The filmmakers whose works are included in the series made films because they had an aesthetic idea to express, and film was the only medium with which they could articulate it. Their statements rely as much on the regulated pulse of the projector as on the way the viewer perceives the world through vision and audition.

These films focus on the conditions of the medium, on the way each film is uniquely constructed and perceived. The inscriptions light has made in the emulsion through photochemical interaction, the way a strip of film comprises many discrete, individual frames, the fact that each of these frames can be edited and spliced together, the countless ways an image can be manipulated via an optical printer, the creation of images without using a camera, the illusion of motion or depth, the way a viewer perceives the colors in an image, the frequencies and amplitudes of sound being heard, the way language is biologically detected and comprehended: all of these are fundamental concerns of the films in this series.

So while some of the films in this series may seem unintelligible at first, one can gain a better understanding of them by regarding them as works of art akin to music, paintings, or sculptures rather than the straightforward forms of entertainment that most dramatic narrative films typify. Careful reflection on the ways these films operate in relation to physics and human perception offers a sound starting point from which to appreciate their aesthetic purpose. It is my hope that this model will give even the most unfamiliar viewer a way not only to approach the films analytically, but also to enjoy them on a more basic level, as pleasurable experiences for the senses and the mind.

A Cinema of Physics and Perception runs at Block through June 2.

Welcome, Day for Night Bloggers!

Welcome to the first Day for Night magazine blog closely related to Northwestern University's Block Cinema. We're new to the whole blogging scene so we're open to any suggestions regarding how we should organize postings.

Our main focus will be any discussion related to the movies shown at Block, as well as articles for Day for Night. If you go to a film event on campus or just have something to say about film in general, this is an ideal forum for you.

So, write.