Nancy Andrews’ “On a Phan­tomb Limb” | Image by nancyandrews.net

On the sched­ule for the 2010 iter­a­tion of the Trans­mod­ern Fes­ti­val, the Thurs­day night activ­i­ties included an Exper­i­men­tal Film Pro­gram. But on the pro­gram for the event itself, the same pieces are intro­duced as the videos.

Not too long ago, this would have been a sig­nif­i­cant error, par­tic­u­larly in the ter­ri­to­r­ial world of exper­i­men­tal film and video. In the forty-something years film and video have uncom­fort­ably co-existed, film­mak­ers have tended to exag­ger­ate the mate­ri­al­ity of films while video mak­ers have focused on the insta­bil­ity of the mov­ing image and its capac­ity to cap­ture performance.

The eight pieces in this pro­gram embod­ied the ten­sions and con­tra­dic­tions that under­lay the now con­cluded long war between ana­log and dig­i­tal, film and video, the hand­made and the computer-generated. The first few pieces in the pro­gram—Jeanne Liotta’s wired “Sutro,” Gregg Biermann’s struc­tural­ist remix of scenes from The Sound of Music titled “The Hills Are Alive”—worked bet­ter as expec­ta­tion set­ters than works in them­selves, alert­ing the viewer to the embrace of the archive and dig­i­tal com­po­si­tion in the works that would follow.

The pro­gram picked up con­sid­er­ably with Martha Colburn’s ani­ma­tion “Myth Labs,” which retells sto­ries of the Amer­i­can fron­tier, only this time the pil­grims and pio­neers are con­stantly on the verge of becom­ing meth addicts. While the patch­work cutout fig­ures are too famil­iar look­ing, the watercolor-like land­scapes calm the piece. Colburn’s ani­ma­tion was fol­lowed by another crowd pleaser, Amie Siegel’s “My Way,” a mon­tage of YouTube clips all fea­tur­ing ado­les­cents singing a song from High School Musi­cal in their bed­room or other domes­tic space. While the Bier­mann piece over­works its raw mate­r­ial, Siegel’s piece has a much lighter touch, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to assess as homage, par­ody, or sim­ply wry com­men­tary on the copy­cat bed­room singers.

All of this led up to the cen­ter­piece of the show, Nancy Andrews’ new hybrid work “On a Phan­tom Limb.” Mix­ing archival footage, fake archival footage, draw­ing, images of nature, and ani­ma­tion, the short tells the story of a woman who has a surgery that allows her to become a bird. While the piece is the­mat­i­cally con­nected to work of Guy Maddin, Andrews’ incor­po­ra­tion of her own body and draw­ings into the film makes it much more inti­mate than Maddin’s over­wrought films. The whim­si­cal, uplift­ing final act in “Phan­tom Limb,” in which the oper­a­tion is com­plete and Andrews becomes a bird, pulls together not only the short, but the entire night’s pro­gram­ming. Andrews reminds you that there’s noth­ing wrong with hybrid­ity, par­tic­u­larly if it allows you to see new pos­si­bil­i­ties for exper­i­men­tal mov­ing images.

Tags: films, transmodern