Event
NYUFF is Enough, part 1
If you're headed for the New York Underground Film Festival, one reporter wrote in her review of the 1997 event, you might want to make sure your stomach is empty, since that year, an audience member vomited on the theater floor in the middle of a show. In the previous edition, another spectator nearly O.D.-ed during a Q&A, and even more terrifyingly, the world-premiere screening of Jon Moritsugos Fame Whore began with the pristine print burning in the gate. Truth in advertising: in its earliest editions the New York Under- ground Film Festival called itself the most dangerous festival in America and trafficked in goodly amounts of trash and transgression to its loyal if grungy crowds. (Even its corporate sponsors were seedy: one commandeered pretty girls to hand out pouches of loose tobacco in the lobby.)
Thrill-seeking auds got what they came for in movies like Jacob Pander and Marne Lucass The Operation, which uses infrared motion-picture cameras to record hard-core sex, Koh Yamamotos frantic and bizarre self-portraits, or Tony Nittolis stop-motion tale of a ratty parrot jonesing for a cracker fix. Other films channeled riot-grrl anger (Jacobsons legendary I Was a Teenage Serial Killer) or documented Shepard Faireys earliest attempts at absurdist culture-jamming (Sticklers Andre the Giant Has A Posse). The attitude reflected a time when sex, shock and subversion marked the work of a generation of filmmakers rebelling against both the institutionalization of political correctness in its driest forms on one side, and the commercialization of independent film on the other; both tendencies appear to full effect in Robert Banks animated salvo X: The Baby Cinema, which takes Spike Lee to task for cashing in on the legacy of Malcolm X. Chillingly quiet, Seven Days Til Sunday points the way to the NYUFFs more subtly experimental future, providing viewers today with images of an unusually under-populated Brooklyn.
Ed Halter
1994: X: The Baby Cinema, Robert Banks, 16mm, 5 mins
1994: I Was a Teenage Serial Killer, Sarah Jacobson, 16mm, 27 min
1995: Andre the Giant Has A Posse, Helen Stickler, Video, 20 mins
1995: 4 Films in 5 Minutes, Skizz Cyzyk, 16mm, 6 mins
1995: The Operation, Jacob Pander and Marne Lucas, Infrared Video, 10 mins
1996: Slave #13 and New York Marathon, Koh Yamamoto, 16mm, 5 mins
1997: King of Porn, Jeff Krulik, Video, 7 mins
1997: Junky, Tony Nittoli, 16mm on video, 5 mins
1998: Seven Days Til Sunday, Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley, Super 8 on video, 10 mins
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LocationAnthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10002
United States
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