Alejandro Adams‘ Canary screens in Brooklyn at Rooftop Films tonight. Since I interviewed him on this blog way back in February, right before his film premiered at Cinequest, Adams has become something of an uningorable mascot (and sometimes, thorn in the side) of online film culture — or, at least, the microcosm of film culture represented on Twitter. There he is, picking fights about the Dardennes brothers! There he is, challenging this reporter on her choice of avatar! There he is, always, at the center of the conflict, however virtual and/or minor that conflict may be. And now, Canary, a film that virtually no one has seen outside of three specialty festivals and the cineaste Twittersphere, gets a rave in the Village Voice, bumped up in the print edition right next to an assessment of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania pegged to the umpteenth revival of Jonas Mekas’ signature diary film. The placement in the paper says it all: from zero to avant-garde canon in under six months. But don’t blame Twitter — Adams’ online antics have a tendency to plant expectations that the films themselves subvert. You want to dismiss him as an attention whore, but the films frustrate that impulse. As one filmmaker wrote to me after watching Canary long after knowing of its maker via his Twitter agitations, “Goddammit.”
Seeing the Canary review next to the Mekas write-up on a physical page yesterday reminded me of something Adams had written in the long email exchange we had that led up to that February interview, which hadn’t made it into the published post. I went back into those emails and pulled out that quote, and a few other memorable outtakes, for your persual. The text below the jump may make more sense after a reading (or re-reading) of the initital published interview, but keep in mind that when Adams refers to “you,” he’s generally referring to me. If you’re in New York, you can (and should) buy tickets to tonight’s screening here.
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To win a pass to all five days worth of Migrating Forms screenings, see instructions at the bottom of the post, after the jump.
Around this time last year, I wrote a preview of the final installment of the New York Underground Film Festival, in which I quoted a memorial to the 15 year downtown institution published in the Village Voice by former festival organizer Ed Halter. Halter had painted a picture of an event that inspired protests and counterprotests, that hosted a raw meat fashion show, that was locally known as a peddler of “fucked-up shit” … and which eventually evolved into a showcase for the work of artsy-cool artists like Bill Brown, Miranda July and Deborah Stratman, who rarely had “fucked-up shit” on the agenda. Based on the portion of the program of the last NYUFF that I screened, I was disappointed that it seemed like the pendulum had swung too far away from the festival’s subversive roots. I wrote:
Times change, and whatever local transgressive spirit that might have fueled a downtown Manhattan arts event in the mid-90s has now been apparently fully squashed by the area’s total, generally dispiriting gentrification. I’ve seen several films on this year’s program, and I wouldn’t call any of them “fucked up”…And there’s a disappointing art school austerity to the fest’s closing night film, The Juche Idea, a textual coldness that belies the satire…
A year later, times have changed once again. Within a New York playing field leveled just a little by economic unrest, where underground screening series are popping up left and right to fill the gaps left by the demise of sometime institutions like the Pioneer Theater, the remains of the NYUFF have been refashioned into Migrating Forms, a 5 day festival beginning at Anthology Film Archives tomorrow night, devoted to showcasing “new experimental film and video.”
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Alejandro Adams‘ second feature, Canary, is a wildly ambitious and not particularly audience-friendly (in fact, you could almost call it audience-hostile) work of indie sci-fi with new-fangled digital aesthetics and old-fashioned Altman-esque dialogue patterns put to the service of an overwhelming and surprisingly fresh-feeling sense of dystopian dread. The film premieres at CineQuest on Sunday. I watched it on my MacBook while flying from New York to Los Angeles last week. Adams thinks it’s important that I mention that. He says, “I’m glad you watched it on an airplane…that is not merely a valid way to watch my film; that IS my film. I reject all other modes of consumption because they unmake what I made. What I made was for Karina Longworth on that flight from New York to Los Angeles.”
In an ongoing email conversation, I started out by asking Alejandro a variation of one of The 5 Questions We Ask Everybody; he took over from there, eventually pushing me to the point where I felt the need to invoke Heidegger, which I usually try really hard not to do. Canary’s screening schedule can be found here; there have also been some interesting conversations on the film’s blog.
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