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Indie kids, fireworks and pickle parties

>> Film Pop offers a grab bag of music-flavoured movie offerings

While it may be an offshoot of Pop Montreal (or its “buddy,” according to official press notes), Film Pop, now in its third year, has come into its own as one of the city’s more interesting, and certainly more spirited film festivals, especially in light of the seemingly endless series of fiascos that have haunted the city’s film fest scene for years.

Despite its connection to the larger festival, Film Pop isn’t strictly a “music on film” event, although it does have its share of music docs, and most of the other stuff has at least some sort of musical bent.

Take Mutual Appreciation, probably the fest’s highest-profile pic (it’s become a critical darling in the States) a black-and-white sorta-comedy directed by Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha), about an indie rocker (Justin Rice) who moves to Williamsburg to start a band. It’s totally charming and low-key, funny and emotionally complicated, and highly recommended.

Also in the “deadpan dramas about indie kids” genre are Aaron Katz’s Dance Party USA and Mike Ott’s Analog Days. The teens of Dance Party are somewhat sullen and disaffected and sexually active, while the community college students of Analog Days are... well... they’re kind of sullen themselves, but the movie is a little more abstract, an elliptical year in the life drenched in a nice indie rock soundtrack by Derek Fudesco of Pretty Girls Make Graves.

Space junk

Analog in spirit, but on the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum, is a movie like Jim Finn’s Interkosmos. A fake documentary about a purported 1970s East German space mission to colonize the moons of the solar system’s gas giants, Interkosmos uses tons of found and archival footage, including lots of public domain NASA stuff shot from orbit. A weird, funny and hypnotic movie full of great Soviet-bloc kitsch. Even weirder and funnier, though, may be Interkosmos’s opening act, the totally insane and “abso-ludicrous” short Krunnk Shuttle. A video-toastered collage of old PSAs featuring Gary Coleman, Mr. T and our own Corey Haim, Krunnk Shuttle sort of defies description, though its exhortation to “Be Somebody!” is definitely inspiring.

Smoked meat and simcha

On the local front, you might know director Ezra Soiferman from his doc about breakfast joint Cosmos, Man of Grease, and he pays similar tribute to a Montreal food establishment, this one sadly defunct, in Posthumous Pickle Party, a doc set in the late great Simcha’s grocery store. Owner Simcha Leibovich passed away earlier this year, as did Main mainstay sculptor Stanley Lewis, who appears in the film (and to whose memory this year’s Pop Montreal is dedicated). That plays alongside Birth of the Smoked Meat (again: food and St-Laurent street) and Montreal Stories: 1971.

Jeff Solylo’s East of Euclid is another black-and-white entry, this one from Winnipeg. Set in the ’Peg of the early 1970s, the film’s somehow about pierogies, hockey, gambling and reporters, and features sweeping shots of the city via clever use of miniatures. It’s a great-looking, stylish little movie. Hailing from further afield but still with a Canuck connection is Oliver Rihs’s film Schwarze Schafe (Black Sheep), which takes place over a day in Berlin and features music by erstwhile Montrealer King Khan.

Moving on to the more overtly musical, Tai Uhlmann’s doc For the Love of Dolly is an hour-long look at devoted Dolly Parton fans. That screens with the loveable Heavy Metal Jr., a short doc about a pre-teen Scottish heavy metal band and the ambitious dad who manages them (and the loving mom who does their wardrobe). This one’s a treat.

Demolition derby

The Burn to Shine series highlights individual cities, featuring performances by rock bands in buildings slated for demolition. Showing at Film Pop is the Portland installment, with appearances by the Gossip, the late, great Sleater-Kinney, the Shins and more. Series director Christoph Green will be in the house to talk about it all afterwards.

One of the fest’s definite must-not-misses is Deco Dawson’s Dumb Angel: Live, in which the Winnipeg filmmaker recreates his short of the same title—a 10-minute drum solo from wunderkind Anders Erickson—live. With fireworks! Could be crazy, folks!

Finally, the closing night gala should be worth seeing—besides the Wet Gate Collective (see sidebar), it also marks the premiere of Making Music With the National Film Board of Canada, a new program where local filmmakers and musicians team up. You’ll see shorts from the Besnard Lakes and Stacey deWolfe, SoCalled and Ben Steiger Levine, Dandi Wind and John Londono, and Dishwasher and Sinbad Richardson.

For screening info and more see filmpop.popmontreal.com

Looper troopers

>> The “cinema jazz” of San Francisco’s film-projector trio Wet Gate

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“A word has different meanings, depending on how it’s used in relation to other words,” says Steven Dye, one-third of San Francisco’s Wet Gate, wizards of light, sound and motion. “In and of itself, it’s just a thing, but it’s how it’s used in context.”

The same goes for moving pictures, whether it’s the grainy old educational clips or the handcrafted abstract strips with which the trio create, and in fact improvise to a degree, a luminous collage of loops and layers, entirely by way of creaky old 16mm projectors.

“If you add a sound or musical element to that,” Dye continues, “to my mind, that’s sort of the invisible binder. We’re still very visually dominated, so the sound coming in is a way to convey meaning invisibly.”

While they do perform with projectors in cinemas, Wet Gate regard themselves as much a music project as anything. Their loops are chosen with rhythmic and tonal qualities in mind, and the three aren’t uncomfortable with the neologism “cinema jazz.”

“We know each other so well,” says Peter Conheim—with Owen O’Toole, the balance of Wet Gate’s triumvirate, “and know each other’s work so well, and we’ve created this thing completely from scratch together, so how we’re most musical, most a band, is how we naturally react to one another. Except that instead of riffing with a normal instrument, we’re riffing with a projector off the other people.”

Given their use of loops, degraded copies and derangement of the projection itself, another relevant musical touchstone is dub. “We do use mirrors,” says Dye, “and splitting the image, so there are some parallels there.”

“I like this idea of dub,” adds Conheim, “because the mirror—a deliberately cut-up and broken mirror—takes the image and breaks it apart into little pieces which we can spread around the screen. In effect, that’s like the dub tape-loop delay, making a beat disappear off into the ether in a bunch of little pieces.”

The results of their repetition, juxtaposition and manipulation span the emotional spectrum, including plenty of humour. “A lot of the material itself is, from our perspective, patently absurd,” says Dye.

“A lot of our initial reaction, when we put a new loop on,” adds Conheim, “is laughter, which often comes from taking that source material out of context. It is true that we don’t emphasize that kitsch value of the footage in the way that is very easy to do.”

There will no doubt be a certain degree of comedy in watching Dye, Conheim and O’Toole struggle to maintain some order among their endless spools of film when they do their thing at Film Pop this weekend. Rest assured, they won’t be locked away in the hermit hole at the back.

“Bringing the projectionist out of the booth and to the stage was a critical early idea of Wet Gate,” notes Conheim, “in that the projectionist always has final cut in the movie theatre. It’s an old expression, but it’s true. This way, the audience confronts the idea that the person operating that machine is actually in control of the image they’re seeing, beyond just hitting a start button, like in a shopping-mall cinema setting. It’s nice to be able to explain that the human interaction with the material and the machine is more than just hitting a button.

“We love to share the simple, simple wonderment of how these machines work. We love these machines—we’re projector hounds!”

Wet Gate play as part of Film Pop’s closing night gala at the Associaçao Portuguesa (4170 St-Urbain),
Sunday, Oct. 8, 7p.m., $12

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