Flashback: March 9 at the Green Gallery

I have been meaning to write this blog, because it was so fun to go somewhere the modern equivalent of what we see in class was going on.

The Winter Field Trip at the Green Gallery was nice. It made me think about the kind of community that used to exist in larger theaters. There was a group of maybe 25 people all gathered together for hot chocolate, several shorts, and a running video installation of various artists. It is in a third floor commercial space. I have been there for screenings before. It is always changing and it's never quite clear if someone is living in the space or not. So it has a living room kind of feel, along with that "we're all in a punk band" so you're not sure who all of this stuff belongs to.

There were two films that really stuck with me. The first was the very first, a great 16mm color short called "Hearts Breaking in Slow Motion," by Matthew Stenerson. It was just so simple and lovely. A close up traveling shot of a woman, her hair in the wind, and another close up traveling shot of two men on a snow mobile. The film speed was the key to the emotional content of the piece and it was so perfect.

The other was a video "Hautology" by Wes Cline. There's some mention of Nathan Leopold in the program note. I don't know anything about who he is, and as far as the work went, I really didn't care. The haunting that went on in the Illinois wetland was so wonderfully expressed in video that it was inescapable by the end.

For the most part, all of the shorts in the program made such wonderful use of simple singular moving image elements, that almost every one of them was a little jewel. It made me very happy. It may have been the atmosphere, with the hot chocolate and the sweet young curator introducing the films over an over involved mother in tow, but who cares. Often it is the environment that makes films better, like seeing a movie in 70mm at the Egyptian in Los Angeles. Sure, Blade Runner is a great movie, but seeing it that way, with my Dad made it a great experience, just like seeing these shorts in a little gallery up the street curated by a fellow student's sister (and her parents) did as well.