Sundance

"He found his ration of words restrained. It was something one might think would never happen to you, like getting cancer. First nouns such as "egg" disappeared from his vocabulary. Then, adjectives such as "typically.'" Becoming multi-lingual did not help, for if he lost a word in one language, then he lost it in all languages."
-"whiteonewhite: algorithmic noir"

I figured that if I'm gonna live in Salt Lake City, then I should attend the Sundance Film Festival at least once.

This being my first time, I committed the rookie mistake of waiting till the second week of the fest to look at tickets.

Unsurprisingly, most were sold-out. Undeterred, I cobbled together from the scraps a list of what few films were still available, when, where, and with brief descriptions, and e-mailed it to a couple friends also lookin to go this year.

From my list, they picked "whiteonwhite: algorithmic noir"--a movie bizarre even by Sundance standards--primarily because it was the only one left actually viewing in Park City instead of SLC (since the whole point of going to Sundance was to get out of SLC for a night). They apparently didn't read the description.

"whiteonwhite: algorithmic noir" involves an actual computer algorithm editing in real time roughly 3,000 film clips filmed in and around Kazakhstan and other former Soviet Republics, and juxtaposing them with atmospheric music and voice-overs in English, Russian, and Russian-accented English.

The film is already running when you enter the theater. It is still running in the background when the house-lights come up and the director and actor come out for Q&A. That is, the film literally has no beginning and no end. No two viewing experiences are supposed to be the same.

The plot (such as there is) involves an American Geophysicist named Mr. Holz in "City-A," a near-future dystopia, beginning to suspect that the government has begun to infect the city water supply with Lithium (a hallucinogen) in order to lower the city's suicide rate, and make the citizenry more complacent and compliant.

Holz desperately seeks for patterns everywhere, something that proves his belief in a masterplan behind everything he encounters--that is, the protagonist is meta-narratively trying to impose the same sense onto his chaotic surroundings as the audience is trying to impose onto this strange film.

Now, I have enough art-theory training to understand that the function of such cinematic experiments is to call attention to and critique our innate human impulse to impose a neat narrative structure on our complex surroundings (indeed, I've taught the same to my own students).

And I have enough Post-Modernist background to understand that often such art is supposed to make you uncomfortable, to create a tension that causes you to second-guess you assumptions.

For example, after the film my friends and I said we each kept expecting some gratuitous sex scene or a sudden murder to appear--but why were we expecting that? What does it say about us that we kept expecting sex and violence from our films? That expectation speaks volumes more about me and my culturally-trained presumptions than it ever will about the film.

Nevertheless, near the end, I was really hoping for the house-lights to come up (and still not having my cell-phone to check the time also increased my discomfort--I could just wring Verizon's neck). Several audience members didn't even make it that far, and I didn't judge them for it. By the end, only my desire to get my $15 worth (yes, that is the cost of a Sundance ticket, explaining why I hadn't been before) kept me seated.

The lightening of the room and the silencing of the film (still running in the background) was indeed a relief, I'll admit. Also refreshing was how surprisingly unpretentious and low-key the film producers were. Indeed, during the Q&A, several of the audience members seemed to be fishing for some sort of congratulatory statement concerning their artistic stamina or avaunt-guard sensibilities or something, concerning the people who'd left early.

But director Eve Sussman only noted that "some people can only stand about 30 seconds of it" (and she said it the same way one might say "and there's nothing wrong with that") "while others can sit and watch it for 2 hours straight" (and she said it the same way one might say "and not even I can do that!").

I did participate and get my own question in: I noted that I have a Kazakh student this semester, and she told me that part of why she struggles with English is that in Russian, they do not use transitions, so I was curious as to whether the heavy use of Russian in this film was due to the apparent non-sequitur nature of Russian discourse.

Sussman laughed at that one, saying that they used Russian mainly cause it was the common shared language of central Asia where they were filming, but that, yes, that was a happy coincidence that Russian functions much like, well, the film itself.

The film itself, I'll just say, I was glad to have attended...though I'm in no hurry to see it again. And while I'll happily discuss it with someone else who's seen it, I would never recommend it to anyone else. At least not anyone sober.

We left after the Q&A, pretty much shell-shocked. Fortunately we'd had Park City itself to explore, which really is a classy little town worth visiting. Downtown does make one feel all one-percenty, waltzin past the up-scale boutiques and Escalades and classically-trained street musicians like a boss. If you ever attend Sundance, do make time to just wander downtown Park City.

Just get your tickets more than 2 days in advance.