Film And Performance Art

In an effort to broaden my perspective on the arts, I've attended the annual Ann Arbor Film Festival off and on for many years. Support the local arts, right? This past month I attended one session in the weeklong festival. That's enough really. I just don't get a lot of this newfangled artsy stuff.

The session I attended featured a retrospective of the film-maker Bruce Conner, who frequently entered his experimental film clips to festivals like the one in Ann Arbor. Unfortunately, Bruce died this past year.

One of his films I saw contained about 20 minutes of stock footage showing the first atom bomb test in the Bikini atoll. The same bomb. The same explosion with the same mushroom cloud. Over and over. For 20 minutes total. The camera angle might be different. Sometimes the camera would linger on the image as the mushroom cloud rose and fell, or as a wave of atomic fog slowly enveloped the ships that were anchored in the atoll.

But there was no narration. No people. No color either as it was all in black and white. If this is art, this is some of the stuff I don't get. Another Conner film featured a nearly naked Marilyn Monroe look-alike who seemed to adlib for the camera like some sexy model. Though there was probably less than a minute's footage of her, the film looped that same footage over and again while the real Marilyn Monroe crooned a song that served as the background music. When the song was finished, it re-played from the beginning while the same footage played once more. This happened five times in all. I didn't get this film either but it was a little more bearable to watch.

Before the films all began, a performance artist by the name of Pat Oleszko did a little skit for the audience there at the Michigan Theatre. Dressed like a shiny, updated version of the tin man from the Wizard of Oz, Ms. Oleszko read a narrative about the traveler Gulliblur. Eventually, her narrative came to life in the form of a giant inflated creature of some sort, a rocket on a stick carried about the stage by an actor, finger puppets, and the deep, blue sea--which resembled a giant snake made up of bright blue bubble-wrap.

The energetic Ms. Oleszko eventually led the actors who played the sea off the stage and out into the audience where they bobbed like waves, while holding up ships, mermaids and other props. If there were a deeper meaning to all this, I didn't get it either though it was all very bright and colorful. So I got the art part in a way. Just not the performance part.

After I go see something like this, I like to come home and watch a good horror movie (or even a not-so-good horror movie). The killer or monster represents evil. The damsel in distress represents innocence. And the hero represents, well, the good guys. This I get and I don't even have to think about it.