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For some time now I’ve been trying to attend one of Matt Barry’s screenings at Normals, but bar work isn’t too complementary for evening events. This month I decided to put in an advanced, non-negotiable night off for last Friday’s “Night of Experimental Film + Music + Animation” and join the dedicated dozen or so that can reliably turn out for underground cinema. It didn’t disappoint. Barry — wearing a Jonas Mekas t-shirt — thanked the audience for coming, and introduced the plan for the night: starting with some silent film “remixes” (images manipulated, retouched, reframed and retimed) where he and Nicky Otis Smith were to play experimental live scores along with the films, then Smith’s own film would play before an intermission, and afterwards we were to get the broader program of avant-garde shorts.
When the lights went down we were immediately greeted by a silent short of a dancing pig (Millard Mercury’s aptly named The Dancing Pig from 1907, remixed by Barry), with electric radiations from Smith on the guitar keeping the pig tapping. After that wrapped, Smith passed the guitar to Barry as his remix Electric Keaton (a diptych of El Hotel Electrico [1908] and Buster Keaton’s The Electric House [1922]) played on screen. This was followed by the most stunning of these silent film remixes, where Barry took Georges Méliès’ The Astronomer’s Dream(1898) and cooked the contrast as if the negative had been put through a 5-filter in a darkroom, rendering everything solid, greyless black-white blocks (blue and tan, in this case). The images formed a collage as the film started in the top-left corner of the screen, stopped, then created a second block to the right, starting and stopping again while making its way across the screen like words filling a page with glimpses of time. It heightens the intentional oneiricism of Méliès’ narrative, layering it with the retrospective strangeness of silent film images and the surreal snapshots of time that Barry imposes on the film.
still from Satur-19
Next up was the longest portion of the evening, the last teaser for Smith’s Satur-19 before he premieres the full anthology work at Mercury Theater from December 6-8th. The section he showed on Friday was the ending, replete with the frantic image overlays and brilliantly destroyed color palettes of the previous sections he’s presented, with the edition of a very late-Godardian series of broken title cards that I don’t recall from the priorly screened works. “Time waits for no one” (also the official title of the excerpt) and “Seduced & Abandoned” flash across the screen along with Smith’s memories, a denouement running through his filmed and imagined memory at the pace of Ulysses’ “Penelope.” The one bit of text ripping itself apart on screen that got to me was “You can do it if you want to” which had “2024” hiding behind it, a mantra that I feel has defined Smith’s artistic ethos overall, but especially his film work as of late.
After an intermission — and plenty of technical difficulties which, if anything, help maintain the genuine DIY charm of these kinds of events as opposed to a sterile perfection — we got treated to Jake Binstock’s Luck (2024) by, of course, Jake Binstock. This was one of the first experimental works he completed after moving back to Maryland from Austin, an archival collage where Binstock searches through old and repurposed images looking for himself in his new home of Baltimore, set to the nowhere music of Angelo Baldamenti’s “Dance of the Dream Man” from Twin Peaks. While being a piece set within a seasonal depression, Binstock’s humor still seeps in through the cracks. It was a good primer for the levity of Julia E. Cooke’s Ham Movie (2024), which is an animated movie about hams, set in a world of hams, with ham neighbors and ham friends — this is a movie I would recommend wholeheartedly.
We finish with more remix-music pairings, including one of the Phenakisto music set to Lumières brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), one of the most famous pieces of film for the urban legend that the film sent Parisian cafe-goers running as they thought a real train was about to burst through the screen. This becoming the tale of tales for Film 101 is actually a failure of understanding in early film criticism, because it was originally a metaphor penned by Maxim Gorky to describe the subjective feeling one gets when observing the Lumières’ novel invention. Serious discussion turns to whispers, and people forget where things come from and invent how they must’ve felt. But a key part to the experience of Barry’s remixing silent cinema and playing it with cutting edge music that could just as much have a home at a noise set serves to bring back the experientiality of silent film that is easily lost in academic or archaeological impulses — it breathes life back into it. The whole breadth of film history, from the world-historic early days to the contemporary, local avant-garde are hand-in-hand when Barry is hosting.
