Onion soup

Chicago's experimental film festival offers a balance of the stately and the schizophrenic.

An experimental film festival comes fraught with a certain amount of baggage: Packaged in large quantities, the truly experimental risks being diluted with the amateurish. But the carefully curated Onion City Film Festival, now in its 20th edition, boasts a potent lineup. This year, you can find new films by old masters (Bruce Conner, with the surprisingly nature-attuned “Easter Morning,” and Ken Jacobs, whose “Hanky Panky January 1902” will show as an installation) alongside handmade video experiments—all of it selected with a keen eye toward conceptual rigor.

Some of the best work has been programmed into the opening night, which boasts a certain deceptive simplicity. Phil Solomon’s highlight “Last Days in a Lonely Place” mixes color-drained footage from Grand Theft Auto with narration from film noirs, most recognizably Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). Edited with an eye for bombed-out gloom, the film creates nexuses between past and future, the video of today and the film of yesteryear, narrative and nonnarative to form an insinuating, transfixing web.

Another film that collapses boundaries between the real and the surreal is Pedro Costa’s “The Rabbit Hunters”—a 23-minute semisequel to his epic Colossal Youth (2006), which played to large crowds at the Siskel last fall. Costa’s recent films have spun fictional narratives from lengthy, documentary observation of real subjects—specifically, the residents of the now-demolished Fontainhas neighborhood in Lisbon.

While Colossal Youth contrasted the late shantytown with the sterility of the Casal Boba housing projects that replaced it, “Rabbit Hunters” sends hero Ventura away from the blinding-white walls of the new apartments and back to nature for a rabbit hunt; Costa conveys all of this elliptically, with a patient ear for his characters’ anecdotes. A small, contextless piece of an ongoing project, the film represents a challenging but innovative brand of cinema as oral tradition.

But the revelation of opening night is Jeanne Liotta’s “Observando el Cielo,” compiled from seven years of time-lapse photography of mainly nighttime skies. In a manner that recalls Michael Snow’s “Wavelength,” a spinning radio dial provides much of the soundtrack, vacillating from one end of the spectrum to the other. This is a film about appreciating the beauty of the cosmos—fluidly assembled to create a simultaneous sense of total oneness and utter disconnection. Projected for the press on DVD, the film will look terrific in its original 16mm, according to festival programmer Patrick Friel (an occasional Time Out Chicago contributor).

Closer to earth, and showing in the first of several group shows, Deimantas Narkevicius’s “Revisiting Solaris” stages the as-yet-unfilmed last chapter of Stanislaw Lem’s novel using the actor from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 version. Notable for its success in creating a semblance of the original’s art direction on a small budget, it plays games with subtitles, rendering the protagonist’s thoughts interchangeable with his spoken words. Sometimes the titles appear when nothing is said; at other times words are mouthed but nothing is heard.

Animator Lewis Klahr turns to digital video with “Antigenic Drift,” an intriguing mash-up of body diagrams, ominous scoring and audio recordings from airports, among other things. Elsewhere, the emphasis is on film structure: Vincent Grenier’s small but clever “Armoire” makes canny use of a video frame to delimit a bird’s flight. In “Black and White Trypps Number Four,” Ben Russell—who will have a program devoted to his films—turns an old Richard Pryor routine into a multispeed mindfuck.

In another case of looking at something familiar until it becomes foreign, Jake Barningham’s “reSHOOTING” plays the most famous shot from Edwin S. Porter’s “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) over and over, with different kinds of distortions. Eriko Sonoda’s “Garden/ing” repeatedly shows what appears to be a pan of someone’s living room, but each iteration is slightly different—in a fun house of mirrors, the actual room gets confused with photographs of the same space. Another self-replicating loop, Fred Worden’s “The After Life” brilliantly records activity in a mall from a mostly fixed vantage point, making use of superimposition to suggest customers’ comings and goings (and imbuing the shopping experience with a sense of ghostliness). As a movie that makes a mall seem like alien terrain, it might well constitute the festival’s mission statement.

The Onion City Film Festival runs Thursday 19–Sunday 22 at various venues. See chicagofilmmakers.org for complete listings.

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