The Innerview (Richard Beymer, 1973).
In August 2021, when the contracts of Sheffield DocFest’s programming team were abruptly terminated following the departure of festival director Cíntia Gil, they published an open letter in Variety titled “What is a film festival even for?” This question–of what, or who, film festivals are for–hung in the air of the most recent International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), an event that has also struggled with its identity for many years, often trying to successfully encompass various competing objectives and visions. Over recent editions, this approach has created more significant issues. Having faced a declining operating budget, plus reduced income as a result of having to hold 2021 and 2022 editions online due to the COVID-19 pandemic (excluding a small-scale, reduced capacity summer edition), in May 2022 the festival announced a “restructure” which resulted in a 15 percent reduction of the staff headcount and saw a majority of the festival’s film programmers let go, with a new selection committee announced shortly after. As such, IFFR 2023, the first properly in-person edition held since the start of the pandemic, had the uneasy sense of everything being much the same but also different. Even if it resembled the festival I went to in January 2020 on the surface, the festival I attended in January 2023 is not the same, just as the world we lived in then is not the same as the one we live in now.
The program’s organizational structure remained largely the same, with 600-odd films varied in style, tone, form, subject, geographic origin, and quality spread across various somewhat arbitrary-seeming and difficult-to-navigate strands and competitions. Many filmmakers that have previously screened work at IFFR were not present, but in their place were a wealth of different names, making for a grab-bag of international independent filmmaking of a considerable volume and variety. While the 2023 edition may have seemed lacking in cohesion and coherence—the elements that make one festival distinct from another, and that ideally emerge from the commitments and connections of a group of programmers working, over time, together—the primary value I experienced was the possibility for unexpected encounters with the unpolished, imperfect sorts of films that can only find a home within a film festival of this scale and ambition.
The film that most embodied this goal was Richard Beymer’s The Innerview (1973), a work deemed imperfect by its own maker, so much so that he has been re-editing it consistently over the fifty years that have passed since its first screening. Beymer, best known as the child actor who played Tony in Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's West Side Story (1961), saw himself as more of a filmmaker than a star. Alongside a number of documentaries, he made what is considered his magnum opus: an unclassifiable, non-narrative, feature-length, avant-garde film that consists of a neatly structured barrage of energetic images—all of which are cut together rhythmically and associatively, with a mixtape-like soundscape—that flitter between different modes: documentary essay, found-footage film, folk-horror-film-pastiche, metatextual self-interrogation, abstract psychedelia, soft pornography, and something closer to straight fiction. From the opening—at first, a black screen accompanied by the sound of increasingly intense breathing, which soon subsides into a gently dilating yellow circle, which in turn gives way to a series of red spirals that appear either like the camera tunneling through an esophagus, vagina, or the inside of a rose—the film is immediately arresting. These dazzling cycles of abstract, playful sound and imagery create something like a 16mm version of the sample-driven, digital constructions of films by Soda Jerk or music by Girl Talk, the Avalanches, or the Books.
What it all amounts to is not easily decodable, but as a viewing experience, it is exciting and novel–even in the version on show at IFFR, which, according to the film’s introductory restoration information, most closely resembles the now 50-year-old original. Exactly why this edit, as opposed to any of the countless alternative versions that Beymer has produced over the years, was chosen for the digital restoration is not clear, but there is something amusing about Beymer spending a lifetime tweaking something, only for one of his earliest attempts to end up the one most modern viewers will see. Even better, Beymer’s “director’s cut” will screen at IFFR next year, meaning the edit shown at this edition is not even the ultimate version, but instead apparently just the one that is currently available. “What are your films about?” asks a character shown staging a mock TV interview at one point. “The belief in illusions,” replies the in-film version of Beymer with a wry smile; much of the film’s material similarly deconstructs filmmaking as a practice and cinema as an industry and form of entertainment. Later on, a voice encourages the viewer to “let it take over, whatever it is,” and, as such, it seems like the best way to watch this film is not by trying to unpack it fully but instead letting its psychotropic and idiosyncratic concoction of distinctly 1970s hippie mysticism, eroticism, psychedelia, and political intrigue wash over you in waves.
Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape (Kati Kelli, 2023).
Kati Kelli’s Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape (2023), another assembly of sequenced materials made by a Los Angeles outsider artist, made for an unexpected counterpoint to Beymer’s film. The film consists of a sequence of videos that the YouTuber Kati Kelli made between 2014 and 2019; it was compiled by filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) and producer Jordan Wippell, who was married to Kelli until her untimely death in 2019, and is now the executor of her archive. The material, some of which is still available on Kelli's channel and others which were never published online, broadly explores the experience of being a woman on the Internet, or, as Wippell put it succinctly during the film’s Q&A, the “body as commodity” and “identity as brand.” Preceded by a slim biographical note that opens the film, the videos are sequenced out of chronological order by the filmmakers. Structured thematically instead, Mixtape begins with more abstract and absurdist material, reserving the videos that are more overtly revealing about the intention of Kelli’s project and her own positionality for the conclusion. But the film intentionally never tries to explain who Kelli was, or what exactly she was trying to do through her work. This makes for an active viewing experience, allowing the audience to question the authorial intent behind each isolated video and draw their own conclusions about what their maker is trying to say through the corpus. It also lets Schoenbrun and Wippell (who is, of course, uncomfortably close to the material he is selecting and splicing together) avoid editorializing a project that was purposively inscrutable, contradictory, and coy, and risk imposing narratives that Kelli herself never intended. Situated somewhere between the 2010s style of vulgar surrealism best represented by Tim & Eric or Eric André, and a style of character-driven performance art seen in the 1970s work of someone like Andy Kaufman at one end, or Carolee Schneemann on the other, Kelli’s videos see her assume a beauty vlogger persona whose image is her product and whose life is the subject of her web show.
The range of what this involves is fairly broad. In one video, she shares her painfully earnest poetry or films herself eating flowers while crying, whereas in another, she shows off a “sexy skeleton dance” in which she twerks aggressively while wearing a skull mask. Many videos send up existing YouTube vlogger formats, such as a chaotic apartment tour made with several naked Ken dolls as co-stars, or the endless series of introductory “welcome to my channel” videos that carefully contradict any single understanding of the character she is building or the real-life person that exists somewhere behind. Despite the surface-level surrealism of these clips (in one video, she says she suffers from “hyper-erotic storytelling disorder”), there is always the sense that behind the ultra-exaggerated proclamations (“I’m twenty-two and I’ve done nothing with my life except be ugly”) lies some kind of reflection of a genuine expression or sincere desire. Most of all, the videos vividly display the experience of simultaneous self-obsession and self-loathing that constitutes much of contemporary life lived online, a kind of spiral of auto-documentation and self-commodification expressed through a desire for permanent visibility, adulation, and fame. “Let’s do it together, let’s create me together,” Kelli says in one particularly self-reflexive video, addressing her viewer’s claims that she is not “real.” In isolation, many of the videos seem grating and amateurish, but the compilation’s sequencing reveals Kelli’s work as a compellingly cumulative and participatory project, a clay-like character (and body) being broken down and rebuilt in public over time. Much like Beymer’s film, Kelli’s project also crystalizes a distinct period in time, creating a picture-perfect impression of the 2010s in which the satirical lurid excess of the internet seen here prefaced a documentary reality shortly to come.
No Go Backs (Stanya Kahn, 2020).
Just as appealingly rough-edged and scrappily charming was the work of US artists arc and Stanya Kahn, who were the subject of two of the festival’s Focus programs. These were carried over from the canceled 2022 in-person version of IFFR, which meant, bizarrely, that the programs were put together in part by curators who weren’t retained by the festival, and thus unable to present their own work. Kahn is a multidisciplinary artist, someone who makes films but works also with drawing, painting, sculpture, and sound. Accordingly, the seven films of hers included in the festival’s partial retrospective were all very different in tone, medium, and form. For the Birds (2013) and Friends in Low Places (2018), for instance, featured crude, brightly colored drawings and animation combining psychedelic imagery with absurdist ideas. Winner (2002), conversely, shot with an early digital handycam, was an improvised film made in a comedic mock found-footage form. In it, Kahn, playing an artist character, wrestles control of a video being shot of her, turning a commercial promotional video into a peculiar artist-portrait that veers wildly out of control. The two most compelling films, Stand in the Stream (2017) and No Go Backs (2020), were Kahn’s most recent, but neither of these were obviously recognizable as the work of the same maker either, the former being an essay film of sorts using a compilation of found and record digital images, and the latter an abstract narrative film shot on Super 16mm. The main connection between these two was the political conditions informing their production. Stand in the Stream was made between 2011 and Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, and is a frenetic, emotionally charged combination of original footage shot by Kahn with various cameras over the years, much of which concerns the declining health and eventual death of her mother, and images captured from internet live streams, chatrooms, and news feeds depicting various political intensities of the period (including protests in Ferguson, Missouri and the Standing Rock reservation, the death of Fidel Castro, and various anti-Trump marches). No Go Backs was produced just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but concerns itself with the idea of collapse, showing a band of teenagers moving mutely through various desert landscapes of the Eastern Sierra in what looks like a world existing in a kind of post-apocalyptic state, even if the exact source of the breakdown is never explicitly stated or shown. Both films, though entirely different in their style and visual grammar, are charged by the context of their time of production and the specific political perspective of their American leftist creator.
The work of arc, conversely, veil the presence of its creator. The IFFR sidebar presenting the “arc project”—which is led by a filmmaker who introduced themselves only as “tooth” during the screenings—involved a number of short films and performances, all of which foregrounded the use and manipulation of analogue film and the haptic energy of its projection. As well as the communal experience of such projection and performance, something that a festival like this is a vital home for, one thing that was emphasized was the variable, one-off experience of seeing films thrown on screens, how any single image can be processed and interpreted in many different ways depending on factors including the exhibition conditions and the nature of an individual’s vision or the way their brain interprets visual information. The films and performances, all of which could loosely be described as flicker films–films that emphasize the spectacle of the spectral experience of seeing flashing, dilating, or blurring lights and colors against a backdrop of absolute darkness–were, in some ways, all variations on a theme. Though this style and approach will be familiar to anyone who attends film festivals that show celluloid film, seeing these works in sequence emphasized the nearly infinite number of ways that film can be manipulated to produce different visual stimuli. Some, like conical signal (2016), explored the interplay between optical sound and analog imagery that is achievable through manual manipulations of the film strip both live and in the lab, while others, like infinite column (2023) showed how two projectors producing overlapping dancing lines can make an unique image through their collision, creating never-the-same hybrid images each time. Others, like the more straightforward window (2020), involved intense, elaborate black-and-white patterns, while breathing (2020) combined glowing meditative images with intense layers of charged voice and quotation. Most intense was katabasis (2021), a lengthy hallucinatory performance piece in which richly colorful mushroom-cloud-like patterns flashed over each other out of multiple projectors, creating rising layers of violently colorful swelling and shrinking blob-objects. Played all together, the two programs felt like one continual psychedelic sequence, a kind of tour-de-force demonstration of the technical skill involved in making and showing handmade celluloid creations like this, not a dying artform but instead one with a long, still-continuing life.
katabasis (arc, 2021).
As someone with imperfect vision, what was most satisfying about the arc programs was hearing tooth talk about making films that not only work well for people with all degrees of visual acuity, but that also actively serve to expose the fallacy of the idea of 20/20 vision, given that all eyes will process any given transmitted visual stimuli differently and convert the received data into a shape, object, or image of their brain’s own fabrication. Having seen tooth messing around with the lens focus of the projector and redirecting the morphing rectangle of the image away from the screen itself, collapsing many of the norms of screening boundaries and breaking the rules of technically “optimal” projection, I had the sense that there was some kind of logic to this spectacle, but it's always pleasing to have a direct, bodily experience undergirded by theoretical rigor explained through inclusive, understandable language. Talking about the works on display, tooth also noted a fondness for “purposeful imperfection” that had a basis in economic constraints and technical limitations but that was also borne from a love of physicality, tactility, and getting their hands dirty; of mechanical technologies that don’t always produce results as intended and of the infinite possibility of the meeting points of communal collaboration and artistic experimentation.
This project and its pleasures seemed to me to emphasize, or even analogize, the value of a festival like IFFR, but as tooth explained, art like this can exist just as well in more localized DIY contexts, achieved by autonomous collectives pooling their resources to make, preserve, and exhibit work together. Hearing about one possible way of working while attending another acted as a reminder that there are many possible ways of presenting independent or experimental films, not just the large scale festival that has come to be considered as a default. It is difficult to reflect on this year's IFFR, its program and its films, without also considering the industry context and the festival's own changes. With programmers being let go at Sheffield, IFFR, Locarno, and Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight in recent years, to name only a few, and with festivals often relying on the goodwill of precarious workers and volunteer labor, and the non- (or under-) compensation of their filmmakers, it can be challenging to see the value of the film festival in its current configuration. The model is evidently reliant on so many broken components and difficult-to-reconcile limitations that hurt people at a festival’s very center: those who are most invested in making festivals valuable for attendees and generative for film culture, and, as such, are often prone to having their own contributions be undervalued. Whatever a film festival is or may be, it is still somewhere to see films that often cannot be seen elsewhere, to encounter strange and unfamiliar objects that don’t exist within conventional distribution routes or exhibition venues. This is particularly true at IFFR in both its previous and current iterations. There is tremendous value in this encounter between filmmakers and their audience, and especially so with the kind of marginal, rough-edged, unorthodox sort of work found at IFFR’s outer corners—but only if that value is reflected not just in the showcasing of the art and gathering of the audience, but also in the treatment of those who participate in putting together that encounter, whether artist or festival worker.