Short films long on originality

Festival draws attention to experimental works

May 6, 2001

Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour

Unrated; some adult content

About 3 hours, 40 minutes

7:30 p.m. Monday

Detroit Film Theatre at the DIA

$6

313-833-3237

BY JOHN MONAGHAN
FREE PRESS SPECIAL WRITER

The title character in "The Hapless Antiquarian" is a black-cloaked figure straight out of Victorian melodrama. As a narrator relates a macabre story, each step preceded by a letter of the alphabet, the man dutifully performs one morbid task after another, strictly for laughs.

This 6 1/2-minute bit of whimsy from Ann Arbor's Anthony Penta, awash in sepia-toned yellow, captures the joy of browsing through a century-old photo-illustrated tome.

It also shows how the venerable Ann Arbor Film Festival, which proudly showcases 16mm experimental films from around the world, occasionally stumbles onto gems in its own backyard.

Obsessive behavior might be a common link among the 22 films in the "best of" package this year. Case in point: Tom Schroeder's "Bike Ride," which recounts a young romantic's 50-mile Minnesota road trip to visit a girlfriend who greets him with shallow indifference.

While "Bike Ride" employs kinetic white lines on a black background, other animated entries prove more elaborate -- and bizarre.

The clay-animated "Stanley," from Brit Suzie Templeton, is about an old man trapped in a loveless marriage and his strange infatuation with cabbage.

L.A.-based Maria Vasilkovsky's "Fur and Feathers" is about how opposites attract, with paint on glass creating a constantly morphing canvas.

Perhaps the most intriguing film in this year's lineup, "Hedwig Page, Seaside Librarian," by Nancy Andrews of Seal Harbor, Maine, is about a passion for cataloging and the sea. It's everything you love and hate about experimental films -- totally original, made in earnest but also sometimes ponderous (at 36 1/2 minutes, it's the longest film here).

In other parts of the civilized world, this festival tour plays over two nights. Now wise with experience, loyal DFT patrons discuss the upcoming program the same way athletes do a marathon, as making it through to the end may be based on stamina, proper clothes and what you eat beforehand.

Festival program director Vicki Honeyman has a knack for putting the movies in the most entertaining sequence possible. She appropriately begins with Paul Karlin's confessional "Why I Don't Go to the Movies," about a doomed romance based on a denouncement of cinema.

Honeyman throws her only curve ball by placing Peter Miller's 30-minute "The Internationale," a documentary ode to the famous protest song, so late in the program.

But she has saved one of the best for last -- "Nine Lives (The Eternal Moment of Now)," a feline fever dream from festival favorite Jay Rosenblatt. Though only a minute long, it's definitely worth waiting for, and no, you won't be judged too harshly if you're caught taking your own catnap along the way.