LES FILM FESTIVAL
Rick Hamner
I doubt
many of the people who heard Baz Luhrman’s high-dollar, uptown production of La
Boheme wandered through much of Phil Hartmann’s low-rent bohemian circus, Howl
Festival, but there was much to ponder about art then and now, and what love
and squalor it all comes from. No small part of the week-long extravaganza was
the deceptively subdued Lower East Side Film Festival, a parade of projected
cultural documents that unexpectedly shaped up to be a great local film
festival.
Whereas
most film festivals have turned into showcases for upcoming releases, sneak
previews for local film buffs, all aspiring to prime time glory; this was more
a screening of home movies. And what would you expect from the first generation
of bohemians to have camcorders? Most of it was old material, video traces of
the going, the gone, and the almost forgotten, projected in basements, cramped
screening rooms and neighborhood parks. There was �layton Patterson’s Thompkins
Square Riot footage; evenings of tribute to Rafic and Gary Goldman; nights of
MNN cable-access produced Lower East Side Biography Project. Nick Zed did a
Cinema of Transgression night with cohorts from other bohemian enclaves. There
were two Shirley Jackson films, a little Jack Smith, and a Richard Hell curated
series, Scowlfest, of films that theoretically inspired the punk rockers in
some way. This included, yes, a Johnny Thunders-endorsed episode of the
Honeymooners.
The new stuff included Luis Fernandez De La Reguera’s
film about Rockets Redglare and Josh Pais’ documentary 7th Street. However, the
stunt that topped it all was an evening of five-minute videos made for the
festival by local talent such as Michael Almereyda, Steve Buscemi, Bill Morrison,
and Ilya Chaiken.
Maybe you
couldn’t pull that one off with style just anywhere, but most of the rest you
could, even if you had to raid the news archives of a local TV station. No
other film festival seems interested in this sort of thing but they ought to
be. They might not have turned their lives into art like the starving
bohemians, but they’ve got something to show for themselves. Face it, if the
house catches fire the stuff people will try to save is the scrapbook, the home
movie, and the diary. Definitely not the latest Academy Award winner. No one’s
ready for prime time, everyone’s seen the best minds of their generation
starving hysterical naked, and there’s naked lunch on the end of every fork.
They just don’t know it.
