Big Sky Spider Film Festival Update

Spider Gangsters,

Fast times at Missoula High. Saw two more films today! YLT on Tuesday was best, but I'll tell you about one I saw today. The other one was like a half hour long and kind of a piece of shit, so I won't waste your time.

Yo La Tengo Presents The Sound of Science

Here is the deal: French filmmaker, critic, actor, etc. Jean Painlevé was fascinated by nature and said in his essay "Feet in the Water," published in 1935: "Wading around in water up to your ankles or navel, day and night, in all kinds of weather, even in areas where one is sure to find nothing, digging about everywhere for algae or octopus, getting hypnotized by a sinister pond where everything seems to promise marvels although nothing lives there. This is the ecstasy of any addict." He was cool and weird.

So, he made films. Painlevé did all this kooky (and revolutionary) underwater/through the side of a tank photography and made several short films about these different tide pool creatures: octopi, sea urchins, sea horses, spider crabs, et. al. The photography is stunning, but because he was sort of pseudo-Surrealist and, well, fucking French, it's a lot of mind-boggling close-ups of teeny tiny pieces of sea urchin spines I can't see in real life and/or footage of octopi banging. Each one also had wacky French narration with English subtitles, and its own score. 23 of these finished films were recently anthologized and entitled Science is Fiction.

What Yo La Tengo did is basically just turn down the volume on eight of these short films, create their own accompaniment for the footage, and string them together into one long piece. The final product is totally rad and I was veritably "tripping balls" during the whole thing. A lot of the time I couldn't fathom what I was actually looking at, and the rest of the time it was essentially underwater invertebrate porn, but it was great anyway; YLT does an neat job of deconstructing Painlevé's work and, in a way, modernizing it. The juxtaposition of the two arts is incredible, and I've not ever spent much time with the band before, but I guess I plan to now.


Black February

The first film I saw today was about a dude in New York, Butch Morris, who basically invented a new way of making music with traditional classical and jazz musicians, and he called it "Conduction." The idea is that one can conduct (that is, orchestrate) improvisation, and create an entirely new piece of music based simply on the musicians' ideas and feelings. He has a series of hand motions that mean a series of things (repeat, sustain, go back to that beginning part, etc.), and with just that, he can tame down the chaos of musicians playing whatever they feel and turn it into a solid groove.

"In an age when the term 'interactive' has come to mean 'between human and machine,'" Morris said, "It seems reasonable to hope that an acoustic medium of collective interpersonal intelligence could achieve a greater degree of cross-cultural dialogue and trans-social communication than it has to date."

The movie focuses on both the history of Morris's Conduction and the crazy set of concerts he did to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the art form in 2005: 44 shows in 28 days in a series called Black February. It paints Morris to be a somewhat unreachable artist; I could barely understand what he was trying to describe, but when his musicians and other composers or critics spoke of him, he and his passions both became more recognizable.

I wish they would have focused more on one element: Morris also used this conducting technique with choruses of people reading aloud. I couldn't tell if they were his musicians reading texts instead of playing their instruments (practicing recognition of the hand motions, for example) or an entirely different set of people doing entirely different art. Either way, it was sort of like a chorus of slam poets all reading different things at the same time, creating a whole new poem when they came together, and I was disappointed when that segment ended abruptly and was never revisited.

The other thing I think is interesting is that the original, more familiar definition of "conduction" is the transfer of heat energy through materials. The parallel of this conduction with Morris's conduction is an interesting idea, but not once did anyone bring it up. A thing to think about, and nobody thought about it.


Besides that, like I said, the other movie I saw today was more or less worthless, and I decided getting a Blizzard was more important. Moving on!