July 15-21, 2004

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Films of the Big Nothing (Thu.-Wed., July 15-21) ICA's citywide Big Nothing event crams most of its films into the next week, beginning with the new music ensemble Relâche accompanying Réné Clair's Entr'acte (1924). Even fans might feel they've played Erik Satie's score enough; the group seems to agree, since this time they're "performing" the score in absentia: Eight speakers will stand in for Relâche's eight members during two days of continuous ICA screenings (Thu.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.). With cameos by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Clair's anarchic short is like a candy-coated Un Chien Andalou, a surrealist romp that never quite attacks the viewer's perceptions.

Speaking of Luis Buñuel (and we were, kind of), I-House's two days of nothing-related films begin with 1962's The Exterminating Angel (Fri., 8 p.m.). The second film of Buñuel's celebrated late period, Angel turns a high-class dinner party into an existential death camp, as the guests find that, no matter how hard they try, they cannot muster the will to leave. (Shades of the Robinson Crusoe Buñuel filmed eight years previous, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie to come.) Over and above its coolly vicious social satire — the guests' bizarre conundrum suggests, among other things, that they would rather starve than make the first move — The Exterminating Angel slyly comments on the limitations of narrative art. The entrance to the room in which the guests are trapped, as if by an invisible wall, resembles nothing so much as a proscenium arch, their failure of will above all a failure of imagination. The edges of the screen become a prison, to an extent equaled only by Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Perhaps that explains the aggressive non sequitur which ends the film: Freedom's just another word for nothing to explain.

Saturday's films embrace nothingness more directly: FluxFilm program rounds up short films by such Fluxus aficionados as Yoko Ono, John Cale and Nam June Paik; Paul Shartis' N:O:T:H:I:N:G and Tony Conrad's The Flicker are "flicker films" which downplay imagery in favor of oscillating light and dark frames which are bound to induce a hypnotic effect. Even Nothing must come to an end, and how better than with Sleep, Andy Warhol's six-hour portrait of a man doing just that. The outdoor screening (dusk, Wed., July 21), with music by DJ Dan Buskirk, is presented by filmmaker Andrew Repasky McElhinney, who introduced Secret Cinema's screening of Warhol's three-hour Chelsea Girls by telling the audience they were "cowards" if they didn't sit through every last minute. No telling what he'll think if you don't show up this time.