OK, it's the weekend after Valentine's Day, and unless you've already made plans to go check out Britney Spears' new flick, you're probably looking for something to do with the person for whom you bought those paper roses and Walgreen's candy.
Not in the mood for "Crossroads?" Well, UNM's Southwest Film Center has another option for you - three days of the hottest underground films recently committed to celluloid.
The center will screen a collection of oddities called "Alien Anomalies out of Other Cinema," assembled by Sacramento, Calif., producer Craig Baldwin; "There and Back Again, or 15 Films About Death," a collection by New York indie film production company the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema; and on Sunday, Oregon producer Matt McCormick will join the film center in person to present his collection of East Coast films "The Peripheral Produce."
"This is the experimental low-budget or no-budget extravaganza," center co-director Mathew Lerma said. "This is what's happening right now."
"Other Cinema" will include films from San Fransisco-area directors Greta Snider, Scott Stark, Mormon Church and more.
Snider began making films as a punk rocker, according to a press release, and "embraces a raw-edged aesthetic to 'distill the energy of punk into potent testimonies against the oppressive patterns of normal American life.'"
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Her film about Bay area punk rockers in the '80s, "Hard Core Home Movie," is described as a seedy and frank documentary that asks the question "what is hard core?" It promises everything from "fucked-up teenagers to elderly Mexican tourists" attempting to explain the allure of the scene.
The varying films in the "Other Cinema" lineup include an excerpt from Baldwin's "Tribulation 99," Marilyn Van DeBur's "Surprises of Failure," and Patrick Nguyen's "Biker Dave" - a look into the mind of the world's greatest freestyle biker.
"15 Films" includes films from New York filmmakers Jeanne Liotta, Zack Stiglicz and James Fotopoulous. Bryan Frye, the co-director of the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, collects and screens all sorts of underground and found-footage filmmaking. "15 Films" is a selection of films relating to life, its cessation and what might follow.
And finally, McCormick's "Peripheral Produce" brings together much of the same type of work from the Northwest. "Produce" acts as a propaganda machine to promote underground, experimental film, video and media based art. The program will include work from Vanessa Renwick and Dawn Smallman, Bryan Boyce and Naomi Uman.
Not to be missed is McCormick's own production, "The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal." In this mesmerizing piece, McCormick asserts that the odd, mismatched, ubiquitous squares covering graffiti are actually art in themselves - "a product of artistic merit that was created without conscious artistic intentions" by municipal employees. He calls it one of the most important art movements of the 21st century. Delicate filming and a fascinating soundtrack that rides the fence between music and random, though pleasant, noise form the backdrop for McCormick's juxtaposition of quickly-applied cover-ups on buildings and vehicles against paintings by 1940s abstractionist Mark Rothko and others.
McCormick will speak to the audience about "Produce" after the screening.
"Other Cinema" will screen Friday at 7 p.m and Saturday at 9 p.m., "15 Films" will show Friday at 9 p.m. and Saturday at 7 p.m., and "Produce" can be seen Sunday only at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. The Southwest Film Center is in Room 2018 of the Center For the Arts Building. For more information, call 277-5608.
