Still from Transient Patrons

On Sunday, I stopped by 3rd Ward for some Urban Video Art at their (free) Moviehouse screenings. When I got there it was a pretty chill atmosphere with people milling about before the films while VJ Clay Franklin did his thing.

The opening film was Unfinished Business: Wash Away by Manuela Viera-Gallo, a short film which shows the filmmaker pouring bleach on different photos of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and its after affects as the dictator’s face is washed away in a beautiful swirl of color. Viera-Gallo described the film as a personal revenge on Pinochet, saying that, “With the making of this film, I washed his image from my history.”

The second film was Random Act of Kindness/Random Act of Exploitation by CK Swett, Victor Jeffreys II, and Russell Fong. In this film, the filmmakers found their subject, Tim, on Sixth Avenue, asking for $39 for a bus ride home to his father’s funeral. According to Swett, “I told him I’d give him the money if I could use him for my art project. I told him I’d buy him a suit for his father’s funeral as well. He agreed.”

I had extremely mixed feelings about this film. While I found it to be beautifully shot and edited, I think that it was conceptually flawed.

Swett says that his intention was to “make a human being an art project. And to explore what were the ramifications, morally and aesthetically.” Aesthetically, giving someone a shower and buying them a new set of clothes is very effective. Tim in dirty clothes becoming Tim showered and dressed in a suit is a good visual representation of a human as art project. But from the standpoint of examining the moral question I think that Swett misses an important point in his own actions, which should raise questions beyond those of morality.

There is a beautiful segment of the film in which the subject, Tim, is telling a story while undressing in preparation for a shower. Tim’s story is muted, covered over by swelling music; a perfect illustration of the way in which his voice is largely absent from the piece. Seeing Tim in a position of powerlessness (quite literally, as his words are edited out), exposed for me the real interesting dynamic surrounding the project, which is not a supposed blurring of the line between kindness and exploitation, but rather the entitled position from which the project was born. That Swett began with the assumption that he was in the (real or imagined) position to shower Tim with kindness, or to exploit him, leaves the larger social relationship that dominates their interactions unexplored.

So, while the film does a good job of creating a conversation outside of the film, as Swett intended, it never frames the situation in such a way that would naturally lead to the most salient point of conversation: the question of “what allows me to do this?” rather than, “should I have done this?”

Still, the film (which I believe is still in an early cut), is worth watching and definitely worth discussing.

The third film, Transient Patrons, is an entertaining project by John Bonafede in which he mixes performance art, film, and painting as he seeks patrons to donate their spit for his watercolor saliva paintings. While much more lighthearted than the other films, Transient Patrons does an excellent job of examining a theme which also ran through the first two films, that of the process of making art.

In the film, we see a disguised Bonafede collecting the saliva, then having the beard he was hiding behind shaved off (there was no time-lapse of him spending 3 months growing the beard, which might have been cool, though probably logistically impossible), and finally painting a series of watercolors of himself collecting spit, with the very spit he collected. The paintings are now on display in the lobby at 3rd Ward.

At least on this night, possibly due to the films shown, there was a pretty lively Q&A session after. Though Moviehouse projects a pretty informal atmosphere in general and with its emphasis on sharing impressions and ideas about the films with other audience members and the filmmakers, it seems like it provides an amazing forum for local filmmakers to show and talk about their work.

Moviehouse screens every 2nd Sunday. Doors open at 7pm, films start at 8.