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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While I was on vacation (did you miss me? did you even realize I was gone?) David Lowery posted an interesting pair of videos on his blog: the first nine minutes of his feature St. Nick; and a webseries episode shot in 2007 that became a kind of video sketch for the opening of that film, albeit with a much older male lead. St. Nick, which won a prize at the AFI Dallas Film Festival and which I became a big fan of at SXSW earlier this year, screens in Seattle on July 24, and will have its New York premiere on August 28 at Rooftop Films.

Herewith, our semi-regular round-up of notable film events coming up in New York City:

MONDAY

It’s time for another installment of Flaherty NYC at Anthology Film Archives. This time out they’re showing work by Lee Wang and Laura Waddington, with a conversation moderated by Ariella Ben-Dov. 7:30 PM, Anthology FIlm Archives.

Also: Rooftop Films is showing a program of Wholphin shorts at Chelsea Market. The program is free, and includes free beer. 7pm.

TUESDAY

Legendary documentarian Richard Leacock will be at a special Stranger Than Fiction, to “present and discuss film clips that accompany the autobiography that he’s been writing for several years.” 8pm, IFC Center.

WEDNESDAY

Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams will be on hand for a Q & A after the premiere of Wendy and Lucy at Film Forum. 8pm.

THURSDAY

Nothing seems to be happening on Thursday. If you know otherwise, correct us in the comments.

FRIDAY

Back to Anthology, for a new episode of Catching up with the Kuchars, their recurring showcase of new and old work from brothers George and Mike. 7:30 pm.

Also: the Che roadshow begins at the Zeigfeld. With pretty printed programs!

A sampling of movie events happening around town this week:

• Flaherty NYC will present its second monthly program of non-fiction shorts tonight at Anthology Film Archives. The lineup includes two pieces by Sylvia Schedelbauer and two by Alison Kobayashi. Pamela Cohn, who will moderate a discussion after the screening, describes Kobayashi as a “very young, Tracey Ullman-esque performance artist” who “does everything by herself–makeup, wardrobe, shooting, editing.” More info on the program here.
• Also tonight: Rooftop Films is putting on a free showcase of animated shorts at Chelsea Market. I can’t find info on the specifics of the lineup, but the Rooftop website promises free beer. Here’s the lineup.
• David Redmon and Ashley Sabin are bringing one of my favorite non-fiction films of the year, Intimidad, to MoMA this Friday and next Wednesday. You can read my review of the film from SXSW here; more info at MoMA’s website.

Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance (which I reviewed at SXSW) has its New York premiere tonight at Rooftop Films in Williamsburg, before heading to IFC VOD later this summer and DVD later this year. The film was co-written by and stars Harvey Danger singer Sean Nelson, who has given Ann Powers a recap of how he’s spent the last ten years since his band’s one massive hit for her LA Times blog. “10 years ago (pretty much exactly), we had the number one song on KROQ, and sold out the Troubadour, The Roxy and The Viper Room during the summer,” he writes. “Next week we’ll play in front of 60 people [at LA's Largo]. And we’re happy.”

More from Nelson, including details on the “exaggeratedly autobiographical” nature of the character he plays in Brilliance and his recent experience singing with R.E.M., here. You can buy tickets to tonight’s screening (which actually will take place not on a rooft, but on the lawn outside a Williamsburg high school) at the Rooftop Films site. In addition to Brilliance, there will also be a happy hour, a performance from Drew and the Medicinal Pen, and an open bar afterparty at inner Greenpoint bar Matchless.

• AFTRA will announce the results of their guild’s ratification vote on a prospective contract with the AMPTP today. It’s said to be “widely anticipated the terms will be accepted,” despite SAG’s pressure on their overlapping union to vote no in order to get a new/more favorable deal.
• Robert Schwartz looks at three of New York’s outdoor summer film festivals, including Rooftop Films.
• William “Cruising” Friedkin will direct the Milan premiere of the opera based on An Inconvenient Truth.
• Kinky Boots, one of those newfangled British comedies where somebody saves something through the power of something that somebody else thinks is naughty, is going to become a Broadway musical.

• “I refused to sign the absurd online petition that was drafted to stop Uwe Boll from making more movies,” writes Alex Ross Perry at Tisch Film Review. “Not because I do not believe in the power of online petitioning to accomplish social change, but because of my genuine appreciation for the films of Uwe Boll.”
  
• The IndiePix Blog brings word of Rooftop Panorama, a three-day series of panels, screenings and parties hosted Rooftop Films and co-sponsored by IndiePix and Shooting People. It runs from June 12-14; Rooftop Films kicks off their summer screening series this Saturday with a free screening of At the Death House Door in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
• Speaking of the devil: At the Death House Door co-director Steve James has published an essay called “The Decline of the Longitudinal Doc” at IFC.com. “For me, longitudinal docs are the most deeply satisfying form. Spending years following a story is the ultimate act of filmmaking discovery, because you don’t know where the journey is leading, no matter how perceptive you think you are,” he writes. “If you spend years filming people, they will grow to be something more than just a ’subject.’”

Benh Zeitlin, the director of the much-beloved SXSW epic short Glory at Sea, is currently recuperating in upstate New York from the car accident that sidelined him on the way to his SXSW premiere. Although he was able to make it to the final screening of his film, Zeitlin was in the hospital for the rest of the festival and otherwise missed the SXSW experience entirely. So Rooftop Films (who co-funded Glory) have asked SXSW filmmakers who have the means to send Zeitlin a copy of their film on DVD. I know one or two SXSW filmmakers read this blog; please go to the Rooftop Films blog for more info.

Aaron Hillis sent me a screener of the film he co-directed, Fish Kill Flea, several months ago. I watched it on a Sunday afternoon, shortly after returning to Queens from a trip to suburban New Jersey, where my boyfriend and I sometimes go to raid forgotten thrift shops and record stores. On that trip, I had picked up a handful of obscure DVDs, including a circa-1936 mystery serial starring Bela Lugosi, a Japanese bootleg of El Topo, and the 2-disc release of Suki Hawley and Michael Galinksi’s first two films, Radiation and Half-Cocked. I watched Half-Cocked and Fish Kill Flea back-to-back, and took a chunk of notes considering one film in light of the other, which I never published. Fish Kill is making its New York premiere this weekend, so I thought I’d revisit those notes.

I knew very little about either film going in, but it turned out be an accidentally appropriate double feature. Both are anthropological documents in a way, speaking to the idea that subcultures need to be documented before the disappear; both films offer a scrapbook-like vision of scene that no longer exists. Fish Kill Flea is a more literal document, a quietly stylized portrait of the final days of flea market in upstate New York. Half-Cocked, though nominally a fiction film about a gang of kids who steal a van and pretend to be a band on tour in order to mask their getaway, clearly functions as a symbolic gesture of self-preservation on the part of the filmmakers, who were themselves touring indie rockers in the mid-90s.

At their core, both films are ultimately about a ragtag group of outsiders who try and fail to live outside the real-world realities of contemporary capitalism. Fish Kill Flea is an elegy, not just for this one flea market, but for the almost-completely-dead American phenomenon of small, self-contained economic systems. The era of small business, mom and pop, one-to-one transactions, independent salesmen leaving their fingerprints on their products and, by extension, their community–that’s all vanishing, to be replaced by homogenous big box superstores. In a series of man-on-the-street interviews in Fish Kill Flea, visitors to the soon-to-vanish flea market seem universally confused to hear what’s set to replace it. Even if the march of mainstream culture is a foregone conclusion, the question of why the community might need “another Home Depot” seems honestly bewildering.

When it comes to the inevitability of mass culture takeover, both films feel like wistful attempts to stop time. Fish Kill is strongest texturally in its montages of still images, in which the film literally functions as a scrapbook. The fact that these stills, in terms of sheer beauty and oddness, eclipse most of the moving imagery in film is fitting: the subject’s glory days exist only in still frames. The images could hardly be more evocative–I could imagine a whole film sprouting out of that one shot of the kid cowering from the monkey with the shotgun–but their relationship to the flea market’s current fix isn’t spelled out. The past is a pastiche, the present is a muddle, and we’re able to fill in the blanks with our own lived experience of late capitalism.

These are films about doomed micro-economies. Neither the DIY indie rocker nor the flea market vendor needs a lot of money to keep going, but that’s part of the problem: neither is able to produce or consume on a scale large enough to fit into contemporary capitalism. And the films themselves circulate within their own micro-economies: produced on shoestrings, exhibited largely at sub-mainstream venues, they’re endeavors entered into without hope of profit. As an audience member, I’m of course conscious of the fact that I’m only able to make these connections between the two films because I seek out the kinds of alternative economies–film festivals, suburban indie video stores–that both films both celebrate and exist within. (The fact that I’m fortunate enough to be able make a living making these connections is also amazing, and in fact part of the reason why I’m only writing about this now is that I was working for what is essentially the Home Depot of internet content at the time I saw these films, but that’s neither here nor there.)

At the end of the day, I’m really a capitalist: I like money, but I also passionately believe in free markets, to the extent that I want to see economies of every scale succeed. If you’re in the same boat and you’re in New York, do your part by going to see Fish Kill Flea this Saturday at Rooftop Films. For more information, check out the Fish Kill Flea website.