Filmmakers and films

HUFF 2010
The Fifth Annual Hamilton Underground Film Festival
Welcome to the 5th Annual Hamilton Underground Film Festival, an independent showcase of off-centre films from off-centre locations. Founded in 2005 previous incarnations of this event have featured simultaneous presentations of the festival in Hamilton, New Zealand and Cataluña, Spain in 2008. Last year, the controversial Kiwi director David Blyth introduced his film TRANSFIGURED NIGHTS (2007) at HUFF. The film depicts masked men cross-dressing as fetish identities to enact role playing fantasies on the internet. The soundtrack for TRANSFIGURED NIGHTS, as well as many other of Blyth’s films, was composed by this year’s HUFF guest - musician, film and installation artist Jed Town.
Town began making films with Sarah Fort and Mike Brookfield in 1980 as backdrops for their live music performances as Fetus Productions. Fetus later evolved into an intermedia collective operating in various incarnations in New Zealand, Australia, and Japan through the 1980s. They made a video titled INTENSIVE CARE UNIT from this activity. This series of short films, related to music videos, at times incorporated multiple viewpoints of landscape scenes, superimposition, close ups, distorted images of human bodies acting in concert with each other, appropriated surgical footage, and graphic abstract images all set to musical soundtracks. Fetus’ music releases included FETUS PRODUCT (1981), SELF MANIPULATION (1983), FETALMANIA (1983), ENVIRONMENTAL (1984), PERFECT PRODUCT (1984), LUMINOUS TRAILS (1985) and INTENSIVE CARE UNIT (1989).
INTENSIVE CARE UNIT was later abbreviated to ICU when Town ventured into electronic techno music and visuals with Gus Ferguson in London between 1987 and 1995. Town and Ferguson incorporated images from twelve slide projectors and 16mm film in their performances.
Fetus’ work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Artspace, Auckland in 2002. Town’s DVD installation work CLOUDSCAPES OF AOTEAROA (2006) was exhibited at the Moving Image Centre in Auckland in 2006. Last year Town’s installation SECRETS FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR (2009), filmed underwater at Matauri Bay, was also presented at the Moving Image Centre.
In addition to creating the music for the documentary TOKI DOES NEW YORK, in which he appeared, Town also composed soundtracks for the feature film HUGH AND HEKE (2009), as well as for several David Blyth films including, OUR OLDEST SOLDIER (2002), BOUND FOR PLEASURE (2002), TRANSFIGURED NIGHTS (2007) and WOUND (2010).

HUFF 2010
Programme

In an attempt to disrupt the expectations surrounding experimental and avant-garde cinemas HUFF uses the term ‘underground’ to describe the selection of films contained here. Underground as in: creating a provocative event that may provide an impetus for local artists to radicalize their practice, to bring what is latent to the surface. It seems a good term to describe the artistic operations of Hamilton, New Zealand’s 4th largest city, in which a silent, invisible workforce of filmmakers, hidden far from the prying eyes of commercialism, are busy creating the cultural landscape of tomorrow.
YELLOW MOON (2010) by Hamilton’s Dan Inglis begins with images of dead wasps on electronic circuitry. It is as if life on earth has come to an end. A rocket ignites and launches into space, leaving our dead planet behind. Transmission between earth and the spacecraft is broken, an image of Charles Darwin’s THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES briefly appears on a console monitor. Pharmaceuticals appear, then a revolving floral patterned plate is followed by an apple before transmission is again disrupted. Transmission between the spacecraft and earth then resumes revealing wasps clambering over and feeding on a round object which becomes planet earth.
But other worlds also exist here on earth and Edward Turnbull takes us to one in his formally shot and composed Russian myth, TALES OF KING FOX. Here, a poor woodsman at work in the forest is visited by a vision of his future. Torn between the everyday and the supernatural the woodsman sells his soul to escape his life trials.
Two women perform ritualistic acts to engender states of super-natural possession which at times incorporate psychic and sexual transgression, underlined by unusual sound and lighting effects, in Vitesh Bava’s semi-psychodramatic DIRTY MIRACLES (2010).
We return to the everyday with BROWN’S BARBEQUE (2006) shot by Martin Rumsby at an African America barbeque in West Chicago. The film shows four generations of the family of Dots, the subject of longer film which documents African American street culture. Dots herself was not present at this gathering. University of Waikato anthropologist Michael Goldsmith described BROWN’S BARBEQUE as a work of “pure visual anthropology” and Kevin Hogg at the University of Guelph in Canada called it, “A wonderful window into another world.”
The first of a series of musical interludes in HUFF 2010 comes from the legendary Hamilton singer-songwriter Chris Thompson in a music video by Snakebeings.
Dave Normal returns to HUFF as dve nml with FRUITLESS (2010) a psychopathic suburban melodrama of the everyday trials of a lawn mowing and garden contractor. Here our hapless curator of grass finds himself pushed to enact a final solution. Proof indeed that one should not always act on the assumption that the customer is always right.
Instead of a commercial break HUFF proudly presents an animation of a ladybird pooping by Cat Meowl.
FLOUR POWER (2010) by Nicola Timms and Debby Yeung is a delightful little animation from the University of Waikato in which basic baking ingredients come to life and assemble themselves into their own baking mixture. But where are the humans who would bake and eat it? Maybe it is baking for the post-human world.
In Jordan Baker and Lara Ward’s THE FINAL DREAM a sleeping man is transported through the clouds before finally ascending to heaven.
Another animated dream, this time of a young person’s nightmare, OLE THE BRAVE comes from Pernille Rivedal Hellevik, Jordan Browne and Josh Hills
This short animation section of HUFF closes with Jo William’s RECENT DATE (2007), an animated rock video.
In CONFESIONES DE UN TOURISTE (2010), Spanish immigrant artist Yolanda Canardo-Galve creates the heightened sense of vision of a video camera with sixth generation technology inserted into the eye of a tourist in Bangkok airport. The technology renders the tourist’s sensory thermal and emotional data in an encounter with Bangkok airport.
A hand-held camera records a source of prismatic light emanating from a piece of jewelry in Pat Thompson’s ALL MY TEARS (2009). Speaking of this film, Chatham Islander Thompson said, “This is a little movie I made on my holidays. Mostly I like to video our family but this caught my eye. It reminds me of my grandmother.”
GLASS TEETH by Emit Snakebeings (2010) depicts a European landscape where rooftops and walls are covered with broken shards of glass as a deterrent to unwelcome intrusions and visitations, be they criminal or supernatural. The initial hand-held close-up shots create a feeling that one is looking at a large-scale landscape installation piece but later in the piece the scale is reversed by the imposition of garden vegetables which almost take on the spectre of celestial images.
In Kerry Glasgow’s Jenny things take an unexpected turn of events after a man watching sports on TV takes a shower and then begins grooming himself suggesting the possible alternate title of Who I Am.
The legendary New Zealand underground intermedia artist Brent Hayward is less ambiguous in an excerpt from THE EVERYMAN (1999). Originally created as a moving visual backdrop for a live piece featuring 40 performers it is like Hayward’s sermon for the marginalized, dispossessed and forgotten set to images of butts, Buddhas and gun toting strangers.
PERFORMANCES POETICAS is video documentation from the 1980s of four short performance art pieces by the Spanish artist Bartolome Ferrando. Espousing a theory of phonetic poetry Ferrando goes so far as to literally eat his own words in one of the performances.
Hamilton mechanical band The Trons are captured digitally by Snakebeings in a smoking live performance.
Joe Citizen’s WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING? picks up on the Spanish and musical threads running through HUFF 2010 subjecting flamenco dance to a music video style treatment in his slightly sinister fusion of the global and the local.
HELLO BIG SKY (2010) is a music video by Shoshana Sachi for the Hamilton band SORA SHIMA. Sachi says that it is about humanity’s connection to technology and nature, and how technology seems to be taking over our connection to the natural world. But in the end, nature triumphs as the cyborg-human is ‘restored’ and brought back to life.
THE WAY HOME (2010) a music video by ex Hamiltonian Michael Crook for Snowpeas. Here underwater images heighten the sense of a cool, dreamy, ethereal, floating weightlessness of the acoustic music track.
For REMEMBRANCE the European multi-author collective Origami Republica supplied eight different people with highly stylized moving image footage of three performers, two men and a woman, playing out a drama that exists in the rupture between an ideal and reality. The eight ‘authors’ each re-edited the footage they had been given, setting it to their own soundscapes to produce a polished psychodrama that demands imaginative readings as time and memory fragment in mirroring reflections almost as a report from a parallel universe. Karen Karnak made a special final cut of this film for HUFF.
Yolando Canardo Galve returns with NURSE COX (2010) a cinematic ritual associated with an ancient New Zealand ‘fertility dance’ enacted to increase the birth rate in the areas where it is performed. In an effort to stem world over population international authorities have been calling on Cox to abandon her potent ritual. Cox was recently arrested in rural China, being released only after an international outcry led mostly by women.

Matrix IV (Dick Whyte) is a sequel to John Whitney's 1972 abstract film Matrix III, made from found footage of Atari music videos, combined with slowed down Atari 8-bit music.

GLORIA by two Catalonians David Fernández And Gerard Gil is a masterful commentary on the passing of rural knowledge between generations. Its basis is in the power of names, Gloria being a deadly mushroom named after a beautiful woman who became victim to its posion.