Nov. 16, 2005 - Issue #526: Sex, Lust & Love
Miranda and Sadie
Shorts by July and Benning showcase female side of avant-garde film
Few new directors achieve anything like the near-universal critical acclaim and popular success that Miranda July enjoyed with her 2005 feature-length debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know. It’s easy to see why July’s fragile sense of humour and DIY directorial style connected with audiences; what’s more difficult is figuring out how July was able to make the transition from her early experimental work to something that a general audience could enjoy.
The four films Metro Cinema is screening tonight (November 17) under the title Miranda July Shorts bear very little resemblance to Me and You and Everyone We Know—they’re more like the bewildering little films that July’s character in that film spent all her free time making. They’re plotless, draggily paced and plagued by terrible sound recording that obscures their already-opaque meaning even further, and yet in their quiet, homemade way, they all inspire a certain fascination.
Probably the most memorable of the bunch is The Amateurist, a quietly disturbing effort starring July as a blandly cheerful woman whose job apparently involves monitoring surveillance footage of a half-naked woman (also played by July) pacing the floor of a cell-like bedroom. The horror of the situation doesn’t seem to register with July’s character, however; perhaps as a psychological defence mechanism, the only thing she notices about the woman she’s watching is when her body’s posture resembles numbers or letters of the alphabet.
July also plays multiple roles in Atlanta: here, she’s a 12-year-old Olympic swimmer as well as her mother, whose blank-eyed platitudes about how her daughter “loves the water” and wants to “be the best she can be” disguise her monstrous competitiveness and her insistent need for her daughter’s love. It’s a fairly effective piece, if a bit one-dimensional in its contempt for Middle America. Also screening are the frustratingly disjointed Nest of Tens and the meditative Getting Stronger Every Day, a collection of sun-dappled domestic tableaux broken up by a man’s fragmented, wistful recollections of kiddie sci-fi fantasy films like Flight of the Navigator and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
If you feel like taking in a double feature, the Metro programmers are following up the Miranda July retrospective with Sadie Benning Shorts, a collection of work by another avant-garde female filmmaker with connections to the music industry. July’s two full-length albums and an EP on the Kill Rock Stars label are all, I have to confess, pretty much unlistenable; Benning, on the other hand, was one of the original members of the hipster fuzz-pop combo Le Tigre, but left the group to focus on filmmaking.
The story goes that Benning found her cinematic style at 16, when her father, experimental filmmaker James Benning, gave her a Pixelvision camera for Christmas. Although it was designed as a kids’ toy, grown-up directors quickly became enamoured of the crude, low-tech, black-and-white images it generated; it’s the perfect tool for capturing bleak urban neighbourhoods and the even bleaker emotional landscape of Benning’s gloomy teenaged heroines. Benning’s characters don’t even have human faces: the characters in The Judy Spots are played by crude puppets and the actors in Flat Is Beautiful are played by actors with cardboard masks over their heads. The effect is like a Lynda Barry cartoon come to life—the unruly hairstyle 12-year-old Taylor sports in Flat Is Beautiful is a slightly butcher version of the one Marlys wears in Ernie Pook’s Comeek.
Benning doesn’t have Barry’s vibrant sense of humour, but she does share Barry’s knack for using primitive, even ugly images to convey all the pain (and the tedium) of growing up lonely and female in America. V
Miranda July Shorts/ Sadie Benning Shorts
Metro Cinema • Thu, Nov 17 (8 and 9:15pm) • 425-9212
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