For more than three decades, the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival has brought much of the best current, mostly short avant-garde work to Chicago, and this year’s edition is no different, with four installations and nine shorts programs screening through Sunday at Defibrillator Gallery. The best examples of this type of cinema confound expectation, elude fixed categories, and challenge and provoke viewers. “What the hell was that?” might be an apt response to Jake Barningham’s Pink Horses, Blue Oceans I (Saturday March 5, 4 PM), a work of haunting fragility in which the outline of a horse hovers before us in different forms, seeming at times like a cave painting and at times like a video illusion. An image of a sheet of paper combined with pixilated grids of light patterns gets at the peculiarly divided aspect of digital video, that it can represent fragments of the world but in a highly artificial and impermanent manner.
Objects also take over in Jodie Mack’s Something Between Us (Thursday March 3, 7 PM). Known as an animator, Mack takes an artist’s approach to photographed objects in this “choreographed motion study” of costume jewelry. One has to admire the nuttiness of a film that shows baubles cavorting on a lawn, or rotating in darkness, or that revels in the prismatic patterns they generate—as if we were viewing some alternate universe in which fake jewels have the intentionality to become performers, creating forests of rhythmically vibrating light.
Perhaps I just didn’t get Dan Paz’s Lunch Poems (Fri 3/4, 9 PM). A woman tries to operate a flight simulator a few times but at first steers her plane off the runway; there’s a long imageless section with sounds of military training on the soundtrack; onscreen titles such as so you’re white and I’m blue seem more random than poetic; and there are repeated references to RuPaul, queerness, and drag balls. A festival like this is a minefield for any critic, or any viewer for that matter, because work that tries new things can be hard to evaluate. If a piece makes no sense at all, you may just be looking at it from the wrong angle. But learning there may be another angle is what it’s all about. v
Thu 3/3-Sun 3/6 Defibrillator Gallery 1463 W. Chicago 773-293-1447onioncity.org $5, festival pass $25
