Wisconsin Film Festival 2007 lives on: El Topo, Chalk, and Song and Solitude
With the Wisconsin Film Festival a good month and change behind us it is still generating conversation along the boardwalks of the Internet. Many of the films that made an appearance at the festival have begun opening to larger audiences or have been released on DVD (see a full list of rentable film fest films here).
Austin's collaborative blog - Austinist - recently interviewed Chalk director Mike Akel who had some nice words about our festival:
Recently, we were the opening night film for the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison for almost 1,200 people. The Madison moviegoers were extremely hospitable.
Watching Nathaniel Dorsky's short film Song and Solitude inspired a lengthy examination on the state of avant-garde film making by Joe Berres over at the blog for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
I was having a conversation today in which I was recounting a transcendent experience watching Nathaniel Dorsky’s incredible Song and Solitude at the Wisconsin Film Festival. Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the state of avant-garde (experimental, etc., call it what you will) film.
Kill the Snark returns to the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky now that there is a box set of DVDs on the market for the long out-of-print films El Topo and The Holy Mountian. He conducts a thorough examination of the Jodorowsky including a reflection on his first encounter with the filmmaker:
I first encountered the 1970 Mexican film El Topo the same way a lot of people did who were too young to catch the film in its theater run; I encountered it in the library, or publicity stills of it anyway, as excerpted in the book Midnight Movies. This black-and-white cult film survey called El Topo the "first midnight movie," and so now we all say that it was, besting Rocky Horror by a few years. The images from that book stick in my mind so strongly that when I watch El Topo now, I still find myself disconcerted to see them moving. And with what life and energy! The legless man perched on the back of the armless man, staring forward resolutely as a single unit...the diapered tyrant writhing on the floor in his beehive-shaped fort...the nude hippy girl with the boyish physique holding a black umbrella while she wades in a desert oasis...and that umbrella hanging over the head of the black-clad master gunfighter, who rides on a horse through the desert with his naked son, leaving behind a framed picture of the boy's mother, half-buried in the sand. This last image has become so famous that it's now as synonymous with surrealist cinema as Dali and Bunuel slitting open an eye.
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