Four years is a long time in a transient college town, certainly enough to make Rooftop Cinema at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art an abiding summer tradition. The four week-long avant-garde and experimental film series returns on Friday for yet another all-too-short month of screenings atop a garden overlooking State Street.
Launching the series in 2006 shortly after the museum opened, UW-Madison film student Tom Yoshikami has programmed Rooftop Cinema each summer since. His experiences with developing the museum's series, along with those previously programming UW Cinematheque and the Wisconsin Film Festival, are invariably a balancing act."Trying to appeal to one particular audience is difficult," he says, acknowledging that the setting is a big draw. "I'd love it if the hardcore avant-gardists come out for the series, but I'm also interested in attracting folks who might not normally be inclined to spend their Friday nights watching experimental cinema, and are willing to enjoy the rooftop setting and try watching some films they might never have heard of before."
Rooftop Cinema continues to evolve as Yoshikami builds upon the last three years of programming. Week one consists of the series' second retrospective of a single filmmaker, in this case the work of animator Emily Hubley. The following week is built around the theme of the sky above, particularly fitting for the screening location, and a night that begs for clear skies. Week three consists of a pair of films about Anura, a short followed by a well-known Australian documentary about invasive cane toads. The series ends with "The Sight of Music," which offers an avant-garde yet familiar collection of shorts combining images with song.
Yoshikami responded to some questions from The Daily Page about the new summer of Rooftop Cinema at MMoCA, discussing the ongoing development of this annual series and its four weeks of screenings.
The Daily Page: What have you learned over the past four years of programming Rooftop Cinema?
Yoshikami: Each year we continue to experiment with different types of shows, and at this point I feel like I have a bit better sense of what plays well on the rooftop and what doesn't.
Last year, for instance, I thought it might be a good idea to screen our first feature-length film, Chris Marker's Sans Soliel, which is one of my favorite films. We ended up moving the screening inside due to inclement weather that night and I'm actually glad we did; it isn't necessarily the most accessible film in the world, and I think it would have tried people's patience on the rooftop.
This year we're sticking to programs under an hour long. Alternatively, last year we also tried a director retrospective (films by the late Helen Hill), which worked out quite well, and had a terrific audience response. This year we've decided to feature another retrospective, this time of Emily Hubley's short films, which kick off the series on Friday.
Where did you acquire this summer's films? Is it easier or harder to build programming over the last few years?
This year's crop of films comes from all over the place. We've rented some from traditional avant-garde distributors like Canyon Cinema or Video Data Bank, but we're also working directly with filmmakers, which is something that we haven't done too much of in the past.
In the "Above and Beyond" program, for instance, we're getting Jeanne Liotta's Observando el Cielo, Gretchen Skogerson's Frontier Step, and Travis Wilkerson's National Archive V.1 all directly from the filmmakers themselves, each of whom are excited to have their films screened outdoors. I wouldn't say that creating this year's program was any harder or easier than before. I don't think, for instance, that we'll ever run out of films to show, but I do intended to bring back some of the best films from previous years in future Rooftop Cinema series.
Why did you decide to program a week focused solely on Emily Hubley? I'm also a big fan of her animated segments in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, as well as Judith Helfand's films and her work with her sister's band Yo La Tengo. I thought it might be fun to feature a handful of her short animations in a single program. While many people may be familiar with her work animating segments of feature films, very few have had the opportunity to watch her short films, which are a lot of fun. The films in the "Above and Beyond" screening look to be fairly new works, created in the last decade. How is changing technology driving the development of avant-garde film, particularly in these selections? Obviously digital formats have improved greatly over the past decade, and more filmmakers than ever before are shooting and editing digitally. But of the five films in this program, only one film was shot digitally: Frontier Step, which is a transfixing work of abstraction in which you watch workers go about their jobs atop the Louisiana Superdome. The other four films were all shot on 16mm film (or originated on film, as in the case of National Archive V.1), so in some sense they're all pretty traditional. On a side note, I really hope it doesn't rain that night, as these films all need to be screened outdoors. I think it'll be amazing to see these films underneath the stars. Rooftop Cinema doesn't typically screen many documentaries. Why did you select the doc about cane toads for the series? Music and moving images have long had a symbiotic relationship. What stands out about the selections for the fourth week, and what makes them avant-garde? In the past I've tried to screen films that rely on their visuals, as you never know what kinds of outside noises you're going to encounter on a Friday night on State Street, and I've been leery of films that rely too much on their audio track as a result. But with this program I felt like we could feature films where the soundtrack is key, and even if you're not able to make out every lyric, you're going to understand and enjoy the films. As for what makes these films avant-garde, part of me simply wants to say that they're all by filmmakers who work in the avant-garde tradition. But that's kind of a cop-out answer. I'd say that each film tries to explore the nature of the relationship between music and moving image in a different way that was antithetical to the ways in which narrative filmmaking had done so. So while Bruce Connor's Mongoloid may look like a standard music video today, it was a pioneering work in 1978, and is part of Connor's larger project of collage films. The complete schedule for the fourth year of Rooftop Cinema follows, along with links to online previews of films screening over the four-week series: An extended version of the schedule, including descriptions of each film, is available in the related downloads at top right. Rooftop Cinema returns on Friday, June 5 for the first of four screenings each weekend through the month atop MMoCA. Tickets go on sale at the museum lobby desk at 8:30 p.m. on the nights of screenings, and are $5 or free for MMoCA members. The screenings will begin once it is dark enough outside, which is generally around 9:30 p.m., and will be moved to the Lecture Hall on the first floor in the case of a rain forecast. Popcorn and beverages will be sold by Fresco. What's in store for the future of Rooftop Cinema? "As always we'd love to expand the series, and hopefully one day we'll be able to," notes Yoshikami. "While there's a chance that we might be able to do some one-off screenings into the fall, for now we'll stick to the one month in June. But we'll definitely be back in 2010."
I also help organize the
Oh, man. That's too big of a question!
Cane Toads is definitely not an avant-garde film, and you're right, we haven't done many traditional documentaries before. But like our screening of Sans Soliel last year, this is somewhat of an experiment: I wanted to screen a longer piece (most of the films we've screened rarely run longer than 20 minutes), and try out a new genre. I also wanted to feature a film that people may be familiar with already -- and Cane Toads is one of those films that a lot of people, even if they haven't seen it, have heard of it before. And it really is a hilarious film.
At this year's Wisconsin Film Festival, Jim Kreul programmed Ben Russell's Black and White Trypps Number Three. This film showed close-ups of a handful of audience members in a mosh pit at a Lightening Bolt concert, which I thought was terrific and provided the inspiration for this series about music in avant-garde films.
Friday, June 5
The Short Films of Emily Hubley
Animator Emily Hubley makes short, hand-drawn animated films that explore personal memory and the turbulence of emotional life.
More information about the filmmaker is available at online version of the film.
Watch an online version of the film.
More information about the filmmaker is available at more information about the filmmaker, including updates on screenings and an interview.
More information about the filmmaker is available at A Frog on the Swing.
Watch a trailer provided by Radio Pictures, and find more information about the documentary on Wikipedia.
Read an interview with the filmmaker published in Film Culture and an introduction to his filmography, watch various short films he has created over the last four decades. More information is also available from Canyon Cinema.
Friday, Jun 26
The Sight of Music
What do a Thai royal anthem, three Elliott Smith pop songs, a Stravinsky suite, and Devo's "Mongoloid" have in common? They provide the soundtrack four of the films in this collection of works highlighting the intersection of music and film.
Watch an online version of the film, and find more information about the filmmaker at the Video Data Bank and online version of the film.
Read a review of the film as it screened at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, and find more information about the filmmaker on Kick the Machine and Wikipedia.
Listen to the two scores for the film, and find more information about the filmmaker at UbuWeb.
Read an obituary of the filmmaker in the New York Times.
Find more information about the filmmaker at Wikipedia.
More information about the filmmaker is available at the California Institute of Arts and Canyon Cinema.
