by Johanna, Ted Altman, Peter Miller, Devon Damonte, Erin Rosenthal, Peter & Raphael, and quite possibly others, 2002.
Starring god only knows who.
No rating.
In the city of Providence, there is one particular section that goes by the name of Olneyville. Though I’m not an expert in these matters, I would call Olneyville a ghetto. It’s the kind of place where all the businesses and all the churches that look like businesses have signs in English and Spanish*, where decrepit looking old men walk down the street muttering to themselves, where youths and adults alike look at you suspiciously (though that might have had more to do with Matthew’s ultra-stylish outfit and hair than anything else—that and the fact that we first drove in circles for quite a long time and then walked in circles for a longer time trying to find where we were going). Because of all this, when Matthew told me that he’d heard (from one of his mysterious sources) that Olneyville was "in," I was a bit suspicious. Sure, I liked it, but I like things like that. It doesn’t mean they’re in.
But when we finally found our destination, a place called The Dirt Palace that I’ll try to describe later on, I found out that those mysterious sources were right. The other people who had gathered to see the Twenty-Four Hour Movies (which means movies that were made in 24 hours or less, not movies that last 24 hours), and in fact the people who made them, all looked like the sort of people who would steal their wardrobes from Rivers Cuomo’s closet, but deny it because Weezer are too mainstream. They’d say they found their clothes, I don’t know, in a dumpster near the last club Quasi played at.
OK, now what to say about The Dirt Palace? On the outside, it looks like a non-descript storefront that isn’t so much boarded up as discreetly unoccupied. This non-descriptness and discreetness is a plus, since I’m not entirely sure that it’s an entirely legal institution. So you go up to the glass door on the street, and find a tiny little handwritten sign saying "go to side door." So you go to the side door and enter, plunging yourself into darkness. To your left is something resembling a hallway, so you head down that way, and after a second you find yourself in a largish room, with chairs and benches, dimly lit by tacky-but-ever-so-po-mo pink, like, flamingo lights. In the middle of the room are a bunch of film projectors and record players, and on one wall is a movie screen. Or, at least, this is the way it looked the day we went.
So Matthew and I went in, and, after some discussion, sat down. At first there were about ten or fifteen other people in the room, all of whom were intimidating because they all seemed to know each other. However, as time went on, the crowd grew to contain gigantic buckets of scads of people, ALL of whom still seemed to know one another. As the night wore on, Matthew and I got to wishing we’d known to bring beer, too.
That’s enough background, I guess. On to the films!
I liked them, for the most part. I didn’t love them as much as I could have, and I don’t think that the Dirt Palace people took as good advantage of the format they’d chosen for themselves (films made entirely around Olneyville in a day or less) as they could have. As Matthew pointed out, they’d made exactly the kind of movie you’d expect them to.
Ted Altman’s "The Race" opened the evening, and made me wonder if I had misunderstood the concept. It was maybe two or three minutes of old-looking car race footage, like from a cheesy 50’s race movie or something, with no soundtrack but the sounds of the engines. It was all in the super-saturated tones of Technicolor, and I liked it quite a lot, but I still don’t understand quite how it was filmed around Olneyville in one day or less. Oh well.
The majority (I think) of the films were maybe minute-long, very abstract things where jarring colors, shapes, and patterns would quiver, jump, and slide their ways across the screen, accompanied only by what sounded to my stricken ears like a thumb moving constantly across a turntable needle, only much, much louder. Most of these were what are apparently called (at the Dirt Palace, anyway) "spraypaint films," meaning that they were made with spraypaint. These were nice, in their way, though after the first couple I think I kind of got the point. To my untrained eyes, they mostly looked the same, and I kind of wish the Palatians had come up with a new idea. The first of these, Devon DaMonte’s "Buster Balls," was by far the best. Rather than spraypainted colors, this one used what looked like a clump of pubic hair and a bunch of cartoony blue spaghetti (though the spaghetti turned out to be someone’s hair, apparently, very close up), behaving in the way I described a second ago. Perhaps it was only my favorite because it was the first of these, but I did quite enjoy it.
Some of the films seemed almost verging on some sort of commentary, but none quite made it—or appeared to want to. For instance, as Matthew and I noticed as we were looking for the Palace, the light in the intersection right outside of it is not working properly (it’s flashing red one way and yellow the other way), and apparently it hadn’t been for days. So Johanna made a film of cars passing by that streetlight, queuing up and getting confused, pausing, going suddenly, narrowly avoiding crashes, all day, using that technique that I should know the name of that they use to film plants growing, only, y’know, over a shorter period of time. It was in a kind of black and yellowish which was particularly effective because it made the shadow of the streetlight on the ground stand out like nobody’s business. Peter Miller made an oddly poignant film, called "There is nothing...," that featured just type-written words appearing on a white background, talking about how there is nothing more beautiful than a woman in love with someone else....
There were a bunch of films that night, many more than I could ever talk about individually, so I’ll wrap up by talking briefly about my three favorites. Third place: Peter and Raphael’s "Bike-Rex," which made me laugh more than any of the others (aside from the second place one). It was almost from the point of view of a plastic toy horse (we followed over its right shoulder for, I believe, almost the whole film), as it, er, galloped around the place. Eventually it found a goofily attractive man riding his bike around and crashing it, overexaggeratedly and deliberately, over and over again. It escalated to the point where he crashed it into the Palace itself, and then into a toilet inside. Eventually the action moved to the roof, with that guy dancing around with the goofiest stuffed bunny ever. The film ended on a touching kiss between the horse (now in profile) and the bunny.
Second place: Ted Altman’s "Moments," easily the funniest of all the films. In what did not look like original footage, but I guess must have been, a woman sat nervously alone in a restaurant, while she, in voiceover, said things like, "It’s so hard. Waiting. Wondering if something’s wrong. Should you call? Should you leave? You know something happened, you just know. And then you learn the truth..." That sort of thing, intercut with a goofier looking and less attractive looking guy (than the one in Bike-Rex, that is) having the funniest accident with a ladder, ending up with—correct me if I’m wrong, Matthew—a broken nose. We see the woman running, dramatic and slow-mo, out of the restaurant. Helping the man into a car, while the voiceover triumphantly declares, "The doctors said he was going to be OK. He’s going to be OK." At this point, the film turns into an extended spraypaint film (one of the better ones, I think), with just one subtly undercut shot of what looked like someone wearing a business suit swimming underwater, accompanied by a suggestion of bubbles on the soundtrack.
First place: well, I’m not sure of the title (the program is a bit po-mo and incoherent) but it looks like it might be "The Soul Also Sole She’s The Apple Of My Eye Eye Eye Sell Or Die," though I kind of hope I’m mistaken, and I don’t know who made it. Anyway, there were two projectors going, one shooting into the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and the other into the upper left-hand corner, with a bit of overlap in the middle. The right-hand one started up first, showing pictures of glamorous (70’s-style) women, like, from magazines, only their eyes were moving about creepily. One after another, we’d get utterly still glamour shots of women with their eyes shifting from side to side, sometimes rolling up, sometimes dropping down. After a while (and I’m not sure if this was technical difficulties or the way it was supposed to be...I personally liked it this way) the left-hand projector started up, but didn’t show anything but just a square of light. Eventually it, too, started projecting similar (and often the same) images, at different times. On this one we also got the occasional picture of children, and one of an owl, in addition to the women, all with the eyes shifting about. It was beautiful and unsettling and creepy, and I loved it.
*Not that Spanish speakers are a sign of a ghetto. Jeepers, consider everything I say before you judge me.