Over the course of this year’s Big Ears Festival, I watched 11 feature films and 19 shorts. Only 5 of the films—all features—had what you might recognize as a narrative. As far as the others — “What was it about?” is not a question that can be answered in a concrete way about them. Most of these films were abstract: slow drones of light and color, vintage digitally programmed imagery, experiments in three-dimensional projection, fragmented collage animation, and aimless explorations of physical bodies and physical spaces. Admittedly, I missed a few of the more traditional cinematic stories (and I wrote about two notable ones here), but I am struck by the sheer amount of abstraction at the fest; outside of Knoxville during Big Ears, I imagine that there are very few places in the world to see this much non-narrative cinema in such a short time.
Big Ears has always been a festival celebrating the world of abstract music, be it jazz, classical, electronic, or ambient. Their inaugural year, after all, featured performances by Philip Glass and Pauline Oliveros, pioneers of looping arpeggios and textural soundscapes. And while accessible indies like St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens, and The National drew crowds in the festival’s early days, the aesthetic of the festival has since shifted firmly into the realm of the avant-garde, giving headliner status to experimental heavyweights like William Basinski, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, and Meredith Monk. Pop sensibilities are a thing of the distant past for Big Ears music lineups–it’s present and future give greater credence to atmosphere.
The film side of things is still in the process of making that shift, however. The film lineup (introduced in 2015) has always been relatively off-the-beaten-path, but it has remained much more limited, with many past titles either being cult staples (Eraserhead) or films made by visiting musicians (Space is the Place, Heart of a Dog, Book of Days). Last year’s slate was both the most extensive and accessible ever, thanks to its retrospective for the late, great, and widely celebrated humanist filmmaker Jonathan Demme, whose crowdpleasers The Silence of the Lambs, Something Wild, Stop Making Sense, and Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids screened throughout the festival.
I don’t bring this up to make any sort of value judgement on accessible cinema vs. obtuse cinema as I think all parties involved would rightly say they want to celebrate both. Rather, it is revealing just how much of a sea change this year’s fest was for the weird stuff. There was exponentially more of it in 2018, largely due to the 3D program titled “Stereo Visions” curated by Public Cinema co-founder Darren Hughes and filmmaker Blake Williams, as well as the work of visiting collage artist Lewis Klahr. It was a true plunge into the deep end, in which 30-minutes of solid blue textures could hypnotize a packed house. As someone who has attended every Big Ears since they started screening films, this emphasis on abstract work is what feels most notable to me about 2018’s festival—so below I’ve given descriptions and reactions to six non-narrative features, as well as a few shorts worth putting on your radar.
Feature Films
Prototype (2017) by Blake Williams: This was scheduled as the opening event of the festival, so the theater was completely packed full of attendees who likely had no idea that they were in for an hour-long, dialogue-free, black-and-white, three-dimensional vortex of vague imagery. Directed by one of the festival’s curators, Prototype is supposedly a loose reimagining of the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas in the year 1900. This concept isn’t necessarily clear from the film itself, but I didn’t mind—the dark ambient soundscape and the slowly floating 3D waves made for a meditative sensory experience. A fitting opening for a weekend at Big Ears. [Grade: 4 / 5]
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) by Werner Herzog: This was a conventional enough documentary to air on History Channel, but meandering enough to feel like an art installation. Werner Herzog uses 3D cameras to capture the curvature of rock walls housing the oldest cave paintings ever discovered, all the while musing on the unfathomable human spirit and listening to experts explain their geologic research. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more of the latter than the former—but this uses 3D in a uniquely valuable way (examining images that aren’t naturally flat) and contains a speculative epilogue (about the possibility of alligators evolving past humans) that I won’t soon forget. [Grade: 3 / 5]
Sixty-Six (2015) by Lewis Klahr: Using colorful cutouts from mid-century comic books and newspapers with duotone textures, collage animator Lewis Klahr shuffles nameless figures around faux-California spaces. This feature-length film is made up of 12 shorts meant to be in conversation with each other, and seem to speak a coded language (complete with recurring dots that seem to function as punctuation). It seems many audience members appreciated the feeling of nostalgic loneliness that comes from looking at old material design, but I’ll be honest—I didn’t understand this (often completely silent) film at all, which made the experience of watching it pretty tedious. [Grade: 2 / 5]
Ulysses in the Subway (2017) by Ken Jacobs, Flo Jacobs, Marc Downie, and Paul Kaiser: An exercise in technical wizardry, Ulysses in the Subway takes a single hour-long field recording (of a ride on the New York subway) and uses an experimental algorithm to visualize the audio track as an incandescent 3D waveform. This sounds extremely dull to sit through, but the experience of watching it was electrifying. The waveform itself is mesmerizing, sometimes taking the shape of an ethereal star field and every so often breaking open into a cosmic abyss that magnetically pulls your eyes into the Z-axis afforded by 3D glasses. The isolated audio track presents many moments of beauty heightened by blindness as well—like the familiar melody of “Für Elise” emanating distantly from a busker’s steel-drum. [Grade: 4 / 5]
Goodbye to Language (2014) by Jean-Luc Godard: The most radical usage of 3D imagery in the festival was found in Goodbye to Language, which uses digital cinematography to crank up impossibly high-contrast color grades and 3D glasses to project completely different images into different eyes. Despite being a non-narrative film, Goodbye to Language does have characterization and emotion, as it presents a human relationship from the perspective of a dog. Godard has made a lot of cynical treatises on human civilization’s destructive/fascistic tendencies, and with those in mind, this feels like a romantic escape back into nature, transcending logic through the human eye. [Grade: 4 / 5]
Jackass 3D (2010) by Jeff Tremaine: My visceral aversion to the Jackass films has been well documented on a podcast I recorded with festival curator/filmmaker Blake Williams, who introduced the screening by inviting any viewers to vomit/urinate/defecate/give birth in the theater if they felt the urge. I feel alienated from this even further after watching it with a crowd willing to laugh at the studio logo for some reason, but I have to admit that the 3D effects here are sharp enough to give even simple gestures a larger-than-life vitality—notably, a scorpion being held out for the audience to lean back from. [Grade: 2.5 / 5]
Short Films
“Olympiad” (1973) by Lilian Schwartz: Lilian Schwartz was one of my major discoveries from Big Ears 2018. An early computer programmer turned digital animator, Lilian Schwartz “discovered” her films were in 3D with the release of ChromaDepth glasses in the 80s. Her films typically feature delightfully bleep-blooping electronic scores that really complete the DIY programmer aesthetic.
“Let Your Light Shine” (2013) by Jodie Mack: Jodie Mack is a Public Cinema / Big Ears favorite–she was even given a full shorts program a few years back. Her work is always playful and inquisitive, but “Let Your Light Shine” is one of her most fantastic works–simply by animating white lines on a black screen, Jodie Mack creates a joyfully kaleidoscopic experience through the use of Fireworks 3D glasses that turn all light sources into prisms.
“Twelve Tales Told” (2014) by Johann Lurf: This short is the execution of a simple gimmick: Lurf splices together the animated logo sequences of twelve different major studios (Disney, Universal, MGM, 20th Century Fox, etc.). Cycling through all twelve creates a powerful strobing effect out of familiar images and an arpeggiating anti-melody out of their accompanying audio. The experience of seeing this without warning was equal parts shocking and hysterical.
“Around is Around” (1953) by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart: Early animators for the National Film Board of Canada (better known for the stop-motion jazz piece “Begone Dull Care”) here experiment with 3D technology’s ability to show objects spinning. The 1953 film presages the lava lamp with it’s nebulous imagery and vivid colors, offering a nice bit of eye candy enhanced by stereoscopic technology.
“2012” (2012) by Takashi Makino: Remember when I said that this year’s Big Ears was the kind of festival where a packed house could be hypnotized by 30 minutes of solid blue textures? This is that film. I’m sure the effect could be conveyed in less time, but there is something mesmerizing about sitting for so long with cinematic equivalent of a Rothko painting or tape-loop ambience. Whether you have the patience for something like this or not, the experience of watching it is certainly a singular one.
The week before Big Ears 2018, festival curator Darren Hughes went on Knoxville’s WATE to promote the festival, and after concluding the interview (which included a clip of Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye To Language), Hughes tweeted: “I still can’t believe we’re getting away with this.” I kind of can’t believe it either, especially considering how much Big Ears continues to push boundaries of accessibility and comprehension. The sheer bravery of Big Ears programming is bound to befuddle many, but even when I feel distant from it, I’m continually grateful for its existence.
