April 22-28, 2004

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Chelsea Girls (Fri., April 23, 8 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art & Design, 20th and Race sts., www.voicenet.com/ ~jschwart)

Let's Get Tested (Fri., April 23, 10:15 p.m., St. Charles Borromeo Church Roller Skating Rink, 20th and Christian sts., $6.50, including skate rental) If you stepped out for a bathroom break during Secret Cinema's 1998 screening of Chelsea Girls (not unlikely during a three-and-a-half-hour movie) you would encountered a substantial crowd gathered just outside the doors to Moore's auditorium, catching up on gossip, stepping out for a smoke or just grabbing a gulp of fresh air. Without suggesting that it's appropriate to stroll in and out at will -- especially since I did as much to local filmmaker Andrew McElhinney, an avowed Chelsea Girls fan who will introduce Friday's screening, and got something of a scolding -- the fact that some people treat Andy Warhol's magnum opus as more of a happening than a hermetic film is not out of character with the film itself. Composed of 12 reels, each set (though not necessarily filmed) in a different room of Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel, the film promised moviegoers an unprecedented opportunity to hang out with Warhol's cast of Factory regulars: Edie Sedgwick, Brigid Berlin, Gerard Malanga, Nico, Mary Woronov, Ingrid Superstar, Ondine and more. With its on-camera drug use and meandering improvised dialogue, the film must have seemed to 1966 audiences like an unprecedented glimpse into a new reality -- or a cinematic validation of a reality they already knew.

Chelsea Girls is most notable for the unique manner of its exhibition: Though the 12 reels are meant to be screened side by side, in pairs, there's no fixed order in which to show them, which in the most basic terms, means that the title Chelsea Girls applies not to a fixed succession of images, but a range of possibilities. In theory, you never know what you're going to see -- and even if the reels are shown in the same configuration, there's no guarantee your attention will fall on the same side of the screen at the same moments. Though I have to confess that I find the posturing and stoned monologues of the film's cast to be a lot more interesting in theory than at lengthy practice, there's something inherently hypnotic about the rhythms of a slow-moving film, which might induce a trance of the kind Warhol was supposed to have entered when he watched even longer-form works like Empire.

The prospect of post-screening roller skating should keep anyone from going into a trance at Small Change's latest film event, an evening of short films called "Let's Get Tested," curated by Astria Suparak, whose credentials include programming for the Whitney and New York Underground Film Festival. Like a lot of gallery-bound shorts, many of the program's entries are heavy on concept and light on craft: Alex Villar's "Temporary Occupations," described as part of a "long-term investigation and articulation of potential spaces of dissent in the urban landscape" turns out to consist of home-video-looking footage of a man scaling ornamental fences, pressing himself into cracks between buildings, and so forth. Gabriel Fowler's "Hit on the Head with 1000 Anvils," which gathers up the star-shaped explosions from dozens of Looney Toons, might have some cumulative effect as a repeating loop, but as a 45-second snippet, it's barely a half-thought. Jim Munroe's "My Trip to Liberty City" begins with a clever premise, replaying a game of Grand Theft Auto as a vacation travelogue, but runs out of variations long before its 9-minute length elapses. Overall, there's disappointingly little to look at, as if the labor of creating and assembling images paled beside the devising of the concepts behind them. (If you want to get the most out of the shorts, read the descriptions at www.astriasuparak.com/letsgettested.htm beforehand, since several just don't work unless they've been explained first.) The exception, and really the sole one, is Mike Olenick's "Son of Samsonite," wisely saved for last. Olenick's 10-minute short marries evocative imagery to competing text narratives on the top and bottom of the screen. Across the top, a CNN-style "crawl" combines real-life disasters like the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 with memories of a failed romantic relationship, while subtitles along the bottom recycle fragments from pop songs. (Not surprisingly, songs by The Smiths turn up with great regularity.) With two text sources competing with the filmed image (often a male figure with his face obscured), there's too much to take, but at this point in the program, the abundance of things worth looking at is a godsend. Like Chelsea Girls, you can imagine it being a different work every time you watch it.