C-U Blogfidential

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Our future as a diversified nation is in trouble if we don’t ease the toxic levels of disconnect between us, dearest readers, and I’m not talking solely about the initial reactions to and early repercussions of the tallies to be counted as today wears on. We’ve had plenty of opportunity to participate in Election Day by voting remotely and maintaining our wellness as best as possible, but if you have not yet partaken then please figure out a way to do so safely. I received my mail-in ballot with time to spare and ultimately slipped it into the yellow drop box adjacent to the Champaign Public Library on State Street. Since I needed to be in the C-U last week I figured, why not? My voice will still be heard.

I should have been in town much of the past two weeks per my initial plan, not just on Thursday to run errands and deal with mail, for reasons that will become apparent soon. Even with the brief pit stop in Champaign-Urbana – there is no other kind of visit from your humble editor anymore – this segment of my life does not rate as one I am going to remember too fondly. Apart from the overall lack of camaraderie with my friends and neighbors, the reduction of everyday activity due to COVID-19 precautions, the fearful climate stoked by the political monsters among us, and the personal shift in geography that will be coming to fruition by the end of 2020, it’s the ghosts in my attic that have been bothering me greatly.

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I used to look forward to this period on the calendar when University of Illinois campus bustle would ramp up as nature settled down for the winter months. These days, it only serves to remind me of what is not there for me anymore in our harried Twin Cities. Two years have zipped by since the most recent New Art Film Festival took place at the now-closed Art Theater on October 29, 2018. Last week marked the 15th anniversary of the release of MICRO-FILM 7, the last print edition, while this month arrives at the 20th anniversary of when I published MICRO-FILM 3, “the one proving MF to be worth the effort.” And, it has been 20 years since the fourth and final Freaky Film Festival rocked downtown Champaign between October 27 and November 2, 2000, culminating with a “best of fest” show at the Art and a Salaryman gig at the sorely missed Highdive. The fall season has some serious gall to tease me this way.

Paying even loose attention to my writings in the last year here on C-U Blogfidential, you probably have noted a sense of defeat and impending revelation. As the writing hits the wall, so to speak, I’ll alert you on what is happening and how it will impact our Confidential doings. Said writing will continue for the undetermined future, but this is clearly a warning shot that CUBlog and every other connected project will never be the same again. That goes for yours truly, I think. I hear that change is good. Right?

~ Jason Pankoke

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p.s. I kind of bit off more than I was intending to chew by launching several short-term article series in the last couple of months, including one more that begins next week. I will shepherd all of them across the finish line because they involve stories and discussions that are worth sharing. Don’t panic!

p.s.2 In the grand scheme of things, dates are just flippin’ numbers. I know. However, some numbers matter greatly just like today, Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Find your polling place and mask up if you’re willing to wait over the long haul on tired legs and aching feet to cast a last-minute ballot. It may be a pain, I know, but it is necessary if you have interest in starting to right some institutionalized wrongs.

p.s.3 I grabbed a frame from 30 FRAMES A SECOND: THE WTO IN SEATTLE to represent Freaky Film Festival in the article, partly because it was in (muted one-chip) color, and you can rent the indie doc fave through Vimeo. Following this note is a high-contrast portrait of Dominique Gallo from A PRIMER FOR DENTAL EXTRACTION, a Chicago-made experimental piece by Carl Wiedemann that played Freaky 2000 along with 30 FRAMES; click here to witness its monochrome industrial strangeness, thanks to a high-definition transfer posted just two weeks ago. You can also learn more at this link about Jon Moritsugu’s lo-fi dramedy SCUMROCK (top photo), which I gave a full-page review in MF 7, and go here to watch Andy Due’s bittersweet THE CLOWN (third photo), which played the last NAFF, starting at the 10:20 mark.

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Less than a week ago, we heralded the arrival of a new book on Quentin Tarantino’s unreleased proto-feature film, MY BEST FRIEND’S BIRTHDAY, which includes an essay by your humble editor that attributes a sense of worth to all those well-intended projects in the universe that didn’t quite make it to the finish line. As an example, it revisits a student film I worked on in 1998 that remains AWOL to this day. No one may ever see it, yet it at least provided a valuable experience to its makers in the moment.

Presently, I’m thinking back to another life moment from the era. On this date in 1999, a much younger me tamed the stomach butterflies and introduced the first issue of MICRO-FILM to the rapt audience of the Freaky Film Festival at the Art Theater in Champaign. I briefly recalled that watershed moment here on C-U Blogfidential a while ago and affect it above with a more recent photograph. Sadly, I can only seem to muster a muted “how ‘bout that” in acknowledgment of the anniversary.

It becomes harder with passing time to look at the seven issues and miscellanea we scratched out at the Secret MICRO-FILM Headquarters and still feel a sense of excitement or fulfillment. I’m proud that M-F managed to complement the rise of independent cinema and self-published alternative media during its run, even though it did not really help define the movements or their legacy in any significant way. In my fatigued heart and mind as of late, M-F is primarily a fossilizing bedrock on which both C-U Confidential and the New Art Film Festival were built. The nutrients and DNA still provide but they’re running low.

Given the news that punched community members and cinema goers of the C-U in the gut last week, the NAFF has suddenly found itself on the endangered culture list with the imminent shuttering of its forever home. Where will the NAFF go once the Art ceases to do business after this Thursday, October 31? How will CUZine continue to prop up the local film arts if its resources keep dissipating? Why should we even wax about MICRO-FILM when its successors are faltering in an increasingly jumbled and agitated world of media and entertainment caught in the squeeze between corporate behemoths and a completely glutted marketplace? Yikes. Then again, I can only afford to save my breath when I’m dead.

This is not a good moment to engage in celebration. We did begin tinkering with a small-scale M-F surprise for you, even going so far as to solicit guest writers for the cause, but it and most of the other NAFF functions are suspended until we know better what we’re doing about a date, time, and location. No combination of us will be sitting together at the Art on Sunday, November 10, to watch a new cluster of area-made cinema, that’s for damn sure. We have our work cut out for us and decisions to make.

I want to believe that better times and sunnier prospects await us in the future for everything on the Confidential docket. I have to believe that, otherwise, none of this would continue with any sense of agency or integrity. No matter how small a reach our efforts have attained over the years, especially in recent times when we’ve elected to “go local,” I can still attribute a sense of worth to our well-intended projects dedicated to the C-Universe and its motion picture arts. This message is essentially a 20th anniversary marker pumped with that old school MICRO-FILM moxie, reminding us all about where we’ve come from and what we’re still capable of doing.

We won’t promise or self-impose 20 more years of peculiar creation within the walls of MFHQ, dearest readers, but we will pledge in earnest to deliver the best indie culture we can while we’re at it.

~ Jason Pankoke

p.s. We know the representative cover below is not the first issue. Despite our belated distaste for the multiple appearances of guns on the covers of MICRO-FILM, we decided to illustrate our post with the “Illinois” issue 5 since we have been prone to red-and-black graphics over the past two weeks.

p.s.2 M-F will receive a much-belated “permanent” presence soon on CUBlog. Stay tuned!

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Greetings! I hope that you can still take up my call to empathic arms from last week, dearest readers, where I asked you to help support our friend Leslie in battling a financial pitfall as she fights a cancer scare for her life. Please go now to her GoFundMe campaign as this can wait. However, if you’re still here on C-U Blogfidential, then we might as well get down to freakin’ business by recalling the former Champaign-Urbana cultural event that she and I gave many volunteer hours, the Freaky Film Festival. We’ve talked about this cornucopia of left-field cinema once or twice or maybe even thrice in the past but, for today, I want to load you up with colorful weirdness because I’m simply in that kind of mood.

But, why this time? “Left field” is the closest point of origin any of us could come up with for the YouTube Premium series CHAMPAIGN ILL when it was first announced last summer. I still haven’t watched the non-free episodes of the set, which follows rap star entourage members played by Adam Pally and Sam Richardson as they attempt to find a footing back in Midwest society, and the Atlanta-as-Champaign-IL location shooting did not dampen my mild enjoyment of the first three. While many Facebook and Twitter voices who apparently know the C-U and its hip-hop quotient cried foul over inaccuracies, I decided to care less about it. The story wasn’t very dependent on geography. Since then, YouTube has nixed ILL as the service retools its original programming slate. Everyone can chillax.

Yet, my movie brain is not wired like other movie brains so I considered a more extreme comparison. “If people feel that CHAMPAIGN ILL is aesthetically ‘off,’” I had thought at one point, “their minds would melt down at the sight of URBANA.” Thanks to the miraculous algorithms of Google, I was able to quickly pull up the experimental short film URBANA made by San Francisco artist Brien Burroughs in 1994, a depiction of that city’s architecture as an alien landscape in reverse color photography. Its title is a derivation of “urban” and not a direct reference to Urbana, IL, yet it was chosen anyway for the first Freaky Film in 1997 and played back-to-back with another Burroughs venture into unusual technique, AQUAMORPHEUS (1996). You can replicate the sensation by pressing “play” below.

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AQUAMORPHEUS (1996) from brien burroughs on Vimeo.

URBANA (1994) from brien burroughs on Vimeo.

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Wait a moment… Her face looked familiar in the Facebook post that scrolled into view. Do I recognize that name? The last time I stopped at MFHQ I had grabbed the old guides for research reasons, so I flipped through them to make sure I remembered it right. Sure enough! We knew each other during her college years as she peripherally brightened a part of my Champaign-Urbana world with her pleasant personality and helpful spirit. Like many young people who came to town and attended the University of Illinois, she soon moved away and moved on. It was refreshing to see her appear in my news feed, but there is more to the story. A mutual friend wanted to alert the C-U faithful to her plight. I’d like to do the same here.

If you know me, you know the Freaky Film Festival is a seminal (and increasingly singular) occurrence in my personal history. This includes all the individuals who volunteered to organize the event, whether or not we’ve kept in touch, and it can still be a gut punch when you learn any of them are in trouble. I’ll ask you to visit this GoFundMe campaign sooner rather than later to see how financial support might benefit a former Freaky Film staffer, Lesli Putman, and her daughter, Sterling. The page goes into clear detail on what is happening with Lesli and the red flags associated with her aggressive form of cancer, so, I won’t attempt to rephrase it. Please help me help a former cinema accomplice and her family.

If you know me, you also know that I’ve been more focused on health and well-being issues as of late. While this article is first and foremost about Lesli’s care and her child’s future, I can’t help but reflect on what I’ve witnessed while staying with and aiding Ma JaPan and my stepfather for the past two years. He has weathered Parkinson’s disease for nearly three decades and now resides in a VA retirement community. She has been stable for several months after moving past numerous hospital and recovery stays over a year-and-a-half-long period. I could stand to shave some pounds off, reduce the chance of recurring gout with diet, and sleep more soundly as we finally decide how to meet Ma’s daily needs.

The three of us have been lucky in financial terms, given the combined circumstances, and I’m not blind to how the lack of money and resources drastically hampers the health of many thousands of Americans every single day. This obviously is a major hurt on Lesli no matter how well she responds to treatment. This arguably played a role in the inadvertent passing 10 years ago last Friday, May 24, of Urbana musician Jay Bennett, who could only afford fentanyl patches to ease his pain instead of undergoing the hip replacement surgery he sorely needed. This possibly compromised the chances of my acquaintance J. T., a woman with a family who juggled retail and service industry jobs, to rise above a history of addiction that ultimately bested her at age 24. You have certainly heard about if not directly experienced a heart-rending episode like these. We want our fellow citizens to meet a better fate, yes?

The films, arts, hobbies, functions, vacations, work hours, and politics must be set aside at times to focus on family members, friends, and neighbors who need a positive push so they might weather their health-related storms. Be decent and compassionate at the very least and proactive as much as you can muster.

~ Jason Pankoke

p.s. I thought it not applicable to dress up this piece with goofy Freaky Film ephemera or press pictures of Bennett that I don’t have permission to use. Calm landscapes of the Illinois Valley farmland by yours truly will have to do. You can surely find an appropriate metaphor in them if you dig your spade in the earth.

p.s.2 After the image below, we provide links to various agencies and directories that could help you and yours with health needs.

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IDES in Champaign County
Champaign County Health District
Champaign County Chamber of Commerce, Health Care directory
Champaign County Health Care Consumers
Planned Parenthood of Illinois in Champaign
Developmental Services Center

Carle Foundation Hospital
Christie Clinic
OSF Heart of Mary Medical Center

American Red Cross
Health Insurance Marketplace

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Truth be told, we have moments when we contemplate why the New Art Film Festival and Champaign-Urbana film culture of 2017 does not outwardly resemble or inwardly feel like that which originally stoked our fire in, say, 1997. Times change, people grow, the Twin Cities evolve, and local media tends to reflect its community’s needs, yet we can’t escape the possibility that our own interest level flags. In the thick of NAFF action between mid-summer and the fall, we’re fine; during our down time through the rest of the calendar year, we inevitably self-criticize and question the place or need for our reporting, aggregation, and outreach.

Strangely, it is when we dig deep to bring forth the past that we often feel the most engaged in the present, for we better than most understand the historic groundwork that is the basis for the movies of Champaign, Urbana, and the cities beyond. If nothing else, recalling the early years can only help to reset perspective when our compass du C-U is out of whack. We hope our overall investment is apparent to you, dearest readers, whether we post about the old or the new.

A few months back, we happened to catch a Facebook share by our friend Johnnie May of an early film short he finally digitized and uploaded to stream. Known alternately as CA 1997, CA 1999, and now CA 2017, the stop-motion Super 8 phantasmagoria CASTLE ASSHOLE was designed, animated, and photographed by May and Brian Robertson (MONSTER, NAFF ’17) in the former’s Urbana basement using a mix of art supplies, found objects, discarded toys, mechanical parts, and recyclables. Modest Mussorgsky’s famous composition “Night on Bald Mountain” accompanies a high-seas adventure as pipe cleaner rogues brave a raging storm to make land and cause mischief in the title structure.

The primitive technique is at once charming in its handmade quality and hallucinatory in its leisurely gait, allowing the viewer to study in real time its clever low-budget camera tricks. We don’t remember if CA 1997/1999 surfaced at the Freaky Film Festival after it was first finished – other Tabletop Studios inventions like ISOLATION and COMPLETELY DRESDEN did make the Freaky cut – but it embodies the freewheeling, rough-and-ready underground film aesthetic that once ran rampant in America.

We miss the unpredictable and often anarchic nature of Freaky-style filmmaking that became a sort of hipster-resistance subgenre in the Nineties and Aughts, but what may have populated the B-list indie film circuit then simply does not materialize now in the annual lot of NAFF submissions. This is completely acceptable because the NAFF is designed to primarily represent the local movie projects of today. However, we thank the cinema gods when they bless us with an opportunity to fuse the old guard with the current zeitgeist.

Case in point, May contacted the NAFF after a long break from his own work and we eventually accepted from him a vintage music video (SHOT ON SIGHT, NAFF ’14) and a brand-new dimensional animation (THE CROSSING, NAFF ’15) that improves greatly on his frame-by-frame craft. For comparison, we have paired THE CROSSING and CASTLE ASSHOLE 2017 below so you can see how a distinctive artist can progress and also retain a visual identity. May has made Madison, Wisconsin, his home since 1999 although we still consider him “one of us” and could not have been happier to include him with our usual suspects at the NAFF. Enjoy his flights of fantasy, C-U. We do.

This concludes our run of last-minute NAFF VIII writings in 2017 as we head into the 2018 fray. Have a hearty New Year’s celebration and join us safely on the other side!

~ Jason Pankoke

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Fellow citizens will be hanging on every moment (or steering completely clear) of today’s inauguration at 11:30 a.m. CST when Mr. Make America Great Again pledges to do what a president of the United States of America is tasked with doing. Contradicting his own words, paving inroads for corporate influence to flood Capitol Hill, and belittling women and persons of color at will are three of his many previous behaviors that cannot continue. The incoming cabinet, populated by creatures of regressive habits, also seems hell bent on divisive doctrine instead of truly encouraging American unity. We must guard against the potential ill effects of their decisions and protect neighbors who may become more vulnerable than before due to gender, skin color, religion, medical needs, or financial insecurity. While imperfect, the tenure of outgoing President Barack Obama at least left us feeling more human and vital in the fight for cultural discussion and social progress with a stabilized economy in place; we will have to work even harder at it under this new rule.

There is no better time than now to speculate cheekily as to how our thin-skinned President-Elect of Paranoia operates within that thick skull. We could only think of one video that might illustrate our misgivings and equally lend itself to C-U Blogfidential inclusion, an older parody about hero worship and consumerism and artificial weaves, oh my! Vancouver-based humorist Ken Hegan is a contributor to the Canadian Broadcasting Network, an established travel columnist, and senior copy writer at the Blast Radius firm. Hegan also makes the occasional film short such as WILLIAM SHATNER LENT ME HIS HAIRPIECE: AN UNTRUE STORY (1996), starring himself as an overzealous fan who desires the perks bestowed on Montréal’s favorite stargazing son, William Shatner, played by Gary Jones (STARGATE SG-1). They meet and agree to place atop Hegan’s cranium the catalyst of Shatner’s glory – his toupée, stored on a Hamlet prop where it makes dead-of-night calls to seal all those deals – for two weeks. Hegan realizes the piece is a decoy and steals the real (non-“Bones”) McCoy. Chaos ensues!

We could not find an official stream of HAIRPIECE to embed for you, dearly distressed, so we turn to a remnant from the Nineties underground that once spread its roots across this great land! Scott Huffines and Tom Warner of the Baltimore, MD, alternative shop Atomic Books produced a micro-budget mélange titled ATOMIC TV, airing on local cable access for a decade and filled with outsider delights. Luckily, the gang has finally migrated ATOMIC TV episodes to the World Wide Web including an unnumbered show from 1999, “Not a Repeat,” in which HAIRPIECE appears; skip to the 42:15 mark where an animated Warner introduces the 13-minute-long opus. Our host also mentions its appearance in 1997 at the first annual MicroCineFest, an awesome stop on the indie film circuit of yore organized by the great Skizz Cyzyk to the delight of Charm City denizens and lo-fi moviemakers. That same fall season, HAIRPIECE played the second night of the inaugural Freaky Film Festival on Sunday, November 2, in Urbana’s Channing-Murray Foundation, hereby connecting Hegan’s farce to the home front.

Shot-on-video silliness aside, this laser blast from the past came to mind for a single reason. If we substitute in our minds the president-elect for Shatner, his misdirected voters for Hegan, and any one of his orange herring promises for the toupée, HAIRPIECE’s panic doesn’t seem all that removed from skittish public discourse a la Donald J. Trump, does it? As much as our cynical selves tend to demonize politicians for subsisting on double- and non-speak to avoid making claims or promises they can’t back up, Trump has managed to lay down next-level verbal waste during the debates with Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the professional news media, and on social platforms – a sad trend that may continue well beyond today, Friday, January 20, unless his advisors reign him in – while still being picked by the Electoral College after losing the popular vote. (In a telling press conference bit, Shatner nonchalantly blathers to reporters – “…blah blah blah, the Enterprise, blah blah blah blah” – after “[forgetting] what had made him a star” per the droll Hegan narration.) We can’t escape a feeling that policies put forth by his administration will compromise greatly our democracy, security, and international standing.

~ Jason Pankoke

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To complete our week of connecting dots between the present day and our primordial motion picture past, when the Paper Opteryx had barely evolved from the Champaign-Urbana mire, we share this house ad from page 31 in the October 2000 program of the final Freaky Film Festival designed by our pal Ted Veatch. Shrouded in a darkness that can only be affected by dense ink on newsprint, the trophy pictured here never had a chance to become universally iconic like the Academy Award statuette or uniquely referential as is the “Golden Thumb” given to guests of Roger Ebert’s Film Festival. However, in our minds and hearts, mad props have always gone out to ace artisan Michael Schwegmann for creating the hand built, one-of-a-kind tokens given to that last set of winning FFF filmmakers. The craftsmanship typifying Schwegmann’s work today is certainly leaps and bounds classier than his crazy vessels with FFF co-founder Eric Fisher’s “Film Guy” poking its cartoony mug out the side, but we know those recipients absolutely loved inheriting works of art instead of assembly-line mantle fillers.

Of all things local since the FFF folded after that year, the super-awesome custom cakes designed by MeMe’s Treat Boutique of St. Joseph for that other freakin’ event, the Freeky Creek Short Film Festival, are the closest descendants. We don’t know what exactly Joe Taylor and Bill Kephart bestow upon the Freeky Creek entrants who win their event’s various audience awards but maybe, just maybe, MeMe owners Eric and Patty Woller could transfer their three-dimensional ghoulies from an edible to displayable form in the previous Schwegmann mold. If we’re dreaming big in the weirdest way possible right now, please give us at least that pleasure on a dreary, drippy, post-“Ebertfest” afternoon.

~ Jason Pankoke

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…when the middle component of our first MICRO-FILM wave flooded the shelves of many Champaign-Urbana businesses, providing their patrons with lively words on cinema the likes of which did not appear in their humdrum, average, everyday media! The newsletter MICRO-Scope first appeared on Friday, August 6, 1999, and thereafter every six to eight weeks during the 1999-2000 academic year. A follow-up to MICRO-FILM: The Warning Shot from that spring and a quick-and-cheap attempt at keeping our name on the streets between the newsstand MICRO-FILM issues, the ‘Scope was packed with as many bite-size tidbits of interest as we could cram onto the front and back sides. We considered news, interviews, reviews, shout-outs, MF promotion, and calls to filmmaking arms fair game, bestowed upon our community free of charge and copied on crayon-hued paper stock. We screamed all the colors of the cinema rainbow, we did! Sadly, the ‘Scope was shelved once our flagship title picked up some traction.

In the near future we will share the fruits of these dark-ages labors for your perusal but, right now, let’s tease with a facsimile of MICRO-Scope #1. Topics included the nationwide release of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, a Freaky Films screening of WADD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN C. HOLMES at the New Art Theater, the empowering video-making activity of Girlzone, the sixth Chicago Underground Film Festival up north, and a messy, noisy, and totally rad moving-away show for our pal John May featuring local bands and his own film shorts. Not unlike MF proper, the ‘Scope ranged from the local to national and provides a selective timeline that helps us remember our beginnings. Just click on the graphics to pop up an enlarged, easy-to-read scan! Underneath that, we chart the who, the what, the where, and the when appearing in the newsletter’s brief run. If your humble editor’s old-school comrades are interested in a hard copy set to file away, write him to arrange an exchange.

“Between one copy-shop ‘zine, two full-blooded glossy ‘zines, seven newsletters, and a brand-new Web site, I think I can say that it’s been exhausting and exhilarating so far,” I professed at the head of the final MICRO-Scope issued Friday, April 28, 2000, during the second Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival. The general sentiment still applies in 2014. You’re welcome, then and now.

~ Jason Pankoke

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MICRO-Scope
“MICRO-FILM’s Newsletter of Local Cinematic Action”
August 1999 – April 2000

M-S 1.1, 8/6/99: MICRO-FILM 1 preview; Chicago Underground Film Festival ’99 details; Freaky Film Festival ’99 update; seeking THE GARBAGE MAN; box office victory for THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT; Girlzone makes videos; John May rocks out before Madison move; WADD film review; The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide by Chris Gore book review; MF: The Warning Shot plug; Caffe Paradiso plug…

M-S 1.2, 9/17/99: Adventures in seeing STAR WARS: EPISODE 1 at the Lorraine Theatre in Hoopeston; the revival of the Normal Theater in Normal; Russ Meyer attends his own film in the C-U; UIUC student makes short film in Chicago; THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT review; Channing-Murray Foundation plug…

M-S 1.3, 10/22/99: John May talks creating a “film scene;” words to film by from Eric Stanze (ICE FROM THE SUN); Bruce Campbell wisdom remembered from Freaky Film Festival ’97; complete Freaky Film Festival ’99 program essay by Mr. JaPan; DOGS IN QUICKSAND local film review from Shock Cinema…

M-S 1.4, 12/3/99: MICRO-FILM 1 now available; Freaky Film solo shows coming to The Highdive; MF 1 cover story film RUNNING TIME released on home video; MICRO-FILM Web site announced; looking for C-U short film OPEN TO CLOSE; first reactions to MF 1; preview of MF 2; TED: THE MOVIE local film review; Game Over by Mike Cole local comic ‘zine review; Freaky Film Festival ’99 local event review…

M-S 1.5, 2/4/00: Peter Asaro and Doug Matejka talk producing C-U homeless documentary IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD; Leila Ramagopal Pertl on acting in Champaign Underground music video DELTA QUEEN; LIVING PROOF: COURAGE IN THE FACE OF AIDS film review; SPREADING THE DISEASE local student film review…

M-S 1.6, 3/17/00: John May discusses developing animated fairy tale SAMARIA; thought provoking coffee talk with Jay Rosenstein; Ralph Roether III on appearing in thesis film short LOTTO; Illinois Wesleyan at the Movies local book review; DREAM WHEEL CIRCUS local film review…

M-S 1.7, 4/28/00: MICRO-FILM 1 review excerpts; Champaign-Urbana local film directory… fin.

What a boo-tiful day to enjoy Halloween, dearest bleeders! For the adventurous – e.g., those not completely knocked out by pre-All Hallows’ Eve partying last weekend – tonight may be round two, or three, or some other ghastly number, but any which way please be safe. We’d like to toss a few alternate suggestions into your goodie bag of horrifically filmy things you might do this October 31!

First and foremost, go see a scary movie! After an early show of SAMSARA, the Art Theater will present the acclaimed Magnet Films release V/H/S at 7:30 and 10 p.m.; it’s a low-budget, highly creepy anthology taking the “found footage” concept in a new direction. The multiplexes still have most of the recent Hollywood scare fare on tap, although one-off digital presentations of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN and the classic Universal duo FRANKENSTEIN and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN have already passed. Both the Goodrich Savoy 16 and Carmike Beverly Cinema 18 will play SILENT HILL: REVELATION, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4, SINISTER, and HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, while Savoy has held over Tim Burton’s FRANKENWEENIE in a 4:40 p.m. matinee (hurry!) and Beverly will bite tonight at 9 p.m. with George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in a 3-D and (ugh) colorized edition.

If one must stay home, then one can plan ahead and stock up on a few of the thousands of horror movie videos enshrined on the shelves of That’s Rentertainment in Campustown. Also, Urbana Public Television will offer an evening full of vintage eek starting at 6 p.m.: THE DEVIL’S MESSENGER starring Lon Chaney, Jr., TORMENTED directed by Bert I. Gordon, and THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA and TERROR IN THE CRYPT both with Christopher Lee. Of note is that TORMENTED anchors a “Halloween Special” hosted by Baltimore horror host Dr. Dreck (a.k.a. indie filmmaker Mike Legge) in a tradition long abandoned by the networks, cable outlets, and most local television stations. (One of the rare big-city exceptions is Chicago’s Svengoolie portrayed by Rich Koz, now a nationwide institution on ME-TV.) Numerous bumpers and skits pertaining to Windy City fear programming have been archived on the invaluable Museum of Classic Chicago Television Web site, including the video above which opened the early Seventies iteration “Freaky Films” on WLS Channel 7, the ABC-TV affiliate.

For whatever insidious reason, Champaign-Urbana itself does not host a full-blown Halloween/indie film festival in the fall, bringing us to the topic of past and future glories. Fifteen years ago tonight, many of the C-U’s brightest were enjoying the very first Freaky Film Festival held in the University of Illinois’ Noyes Lab and the Channing-Murray Foundation/Red Herring Coffee House, as evidenced by this ancient post courtesy of then-local resident Gerry Kissell. (Yes, that is Bruce Campbell, along with director/former Sam Raimi posse member Josh Becker.) Can our community marshal forces to reignite that spooky fire? Maybe it will take, for instance, the youthful verve and particular sensibilities of a group like the one producing the upstart horror entertainment Web site, Horror-Fix, launched in Rantoul by editor Ash Hamilton. We present a tease below picturing their SINISTER review written by Urbana resident Colin Price, who appeared on the cover of the most recent C-U Confidential digest. Hmmmmmmmm…

~ Jason Pankoke

[Janet! Brad! Rocky! Dr. Scott! This is post #700 on CUBlog!]

[Whew … at least this isn’t #666. That’s, um, right here.]

We’re back with a second sampling of cinematic imagery pulled from our electronic archives that has never before appeared on C-U Blogfidential or in C-U Confidential! This round kicks off with an outdoor scene from TOO MUCH FLESH, starring Jean-Marc Barr and Élodie Bouchez as accidental lovers making life miserable for housewife Rosanna Arquette in the conservative American heartland. Directed by French filmmaker Pascal Arnold and filmed in nearby Rankin, IL, FLESH is the second of three “FreeTrilogy” dramas produced by Arnold and Barr, none of which have been distributed in the United States despite international festival play and home video release. LOVERS (1999) and BEING LIGHT (2001) are the two other features in this trilogy.

The above image appears in the filmed portion of Salvatore Martirano, Michael Holloway, and Ronald Nameth’s late Sixties multimedia collaboration L’s G.A., which we first wrote about a few years ago when Martirano’s colleagues revived the piece during the annual experimental music concert held at the University of Illinois School of Music in the late composer’s honor. Eventually re-edited and released separately, the film component of L’s G.A. is trippy montage set to Martirano’s electronic notations and a creepy recitation of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by Holloway. Not surprisingly, it is rarely seen or performed although pricey copies of the original Polydor LP soundtrack appear regularly on eBay.

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C-U Blogfidential has never been taken off-line for maintenance, so we have to fit in the back-end chores when time allows during our weekly madness. Currently, we’re cleaning up our desktops at the Secret MICRO-FILM Headquarters which includes reorganization of electronic files pertaining to the movies of Champaign, Urbana, and the cities beyond. Filtering through these assets, we couldn’t help but set a few aside to share with our dearest readers!

For the next three “Images of the Week” postings, we’ll present images that have never appeared before on CUBlog or in C-U Confidential, starting with this “all student” grouping! We begin with promotional artwork for the unfinished slasher flick FACES IN THE MIRROR, directed by Chicago videographer Brian Patrick while a senior at University High School in Urbana. Streaming clips tucked away on Patrick’s portfolio Web site under the “Watch” tab imply he’s worked on it since the Uni High premiere in 2006. Apart from being a product of ambitious high school students, FACES gained notoriety when rumors flew that local businessmen invested $30,000 worth of money, equipment, and software into the project.

Above is a screen grab lifted from the defunct Web site for LATE AFTERNOON OF THE LIVING DEAD, a low-budget comedy action feature made by Illinois State University graduates Jason Huls and Paul Brooks in Bloomington-Normal and Decatur a few years ago. We snagged this shot for sentimental reasons; the basement studio in which actors Travis Huls, Ashley O’Neil, and Brooks hole up during AFTERNOON is WESN 88.1 FM, the low-power radio station of Illinois Wesleyan University where your humble alumnus editor co-hosted “The RadioActive Doghouse” show in the early Nineties. Brooks and Huls have reinvigorated their label Ten Wing Films in Chicago with new projects including an almost-completed short called THE DRONE and the more elaborate CITIZEN IN THE TEMPLE, which Huls will submit as his thesis film in DePaul University’s Digital Cinema program.

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The link-a-thon continues! For the next five weeks, we will post weekly groupings of five key posts from the first five years of C-U Blogfidential’s existence and tell you a little bit about why we chose the ones we did. Feel free to click away and read what has gone before; leave Comments below about those stories or your own favorite CUBlog entries. Dig!

~ Jason Pankoke

Select C-U Blogfidential Stories, 2006-2011
Part 2 of 6

“IOW: When We Were Freaky,” 11/12/10 – Just about any local film festival can be right around the corner and it will trigger a flashback to this seminal odyssey in C-U cinema weirdness, the epitome of what we look for in such things: fun, friends, and film! We shout out to Grace Giorgio and Eric Fisher for cooking it up as well as all the fans, volunteers, and filmmakers who made it sizzle from 1997 to 2000.

“From back lots to Big Lots,” 12/12/09 – Living in transient Champaign-Urbana, some favorite neighbors will inevitably escape to other parts of the world. If their life choices or activities somehow fall under the CUBlog umbrella, why not include those stories as well? We shout out to Danielle Cloutier for being a cool young lady and doggedly pursuing her dream to be a professional screen actor.

“Coming Soon: Nov-Dec 2008,” 11/11/08 – Speaking of flashbacks, have you ever been reading a calendar listing only to be abruptly displaced by shifts in time and space that briefly deposit you amongst the brews, views, and fearless freaks of yore? If the answer is “no,” try on this C-U film event round-up for size. We shout out to Seth Fein and The Canopy Club for indirectly inspiring this convergence.

“Sal Martirano lives on in LsGA, SAL,” 11/15/07 – Many fragments of C-U cinema culture lie shrouded in the past. We rarely get an opportunity to piece together this sketchy history and present it accurately on CUBlog, let alone experience it first-hand in a modern light. We shout out to the late Salvatore Martirano’s family and peers for believing the music/film/performance piece L’s. G.A. (1968) was worth a reprieve.

“Princess Theatre article,” 8/26/07 – For a while, one of our quick-and-easy tactics for generating posts on CUBlog involved linking to outside editorial and commenting briefly about it. When particular editorial got under our skin, though, brevity went out the window. We shout out to everybody dealing with the money issues of former Castle Theater operator and sometimes poet Ben Slotky during this time period.

:: Part 1 | Part 3 ::

November 2, 2000, seems like such a long time ago. On that evening, what would be the last instance of “freaky” cinema activity took place at The Highdive and the New Art Theater and informally at Boltini lounge. It had been a magical, meteoric climb from the ranks of unknown grassroots events to a desired stop on the Nineties festival circuit for indie filmmakers and their work, but a few months after its fourth closing night the Freaky Film Festival would vanish despite talk of transplanting it to Seattle or Portland. With one co-founder splitsville and the other settled in the C-U but otherwise willing to move on, the freakin’ coffin lid had been nailed shut without much resistance.

Ten full years later, we’ve witnessed the coincidentally named Freeky Creek Short Film Festival, which could carry on the Freaky spirit although its scope is limited due to the smallish environs of host Sleepy Creek Vineyards. We also just received a coincidentally timed overture to assist with the next IMC Film Festival, which we once tagged as a worthy successor to Freaky although its purposeful political leanings dampen any sense of “fun time” as was characteristic of Freaky, even when it played key pieces from the end-of-millennium zeitgeist like 30 FRAMES A SECOND: THE WTO IN SEATTLE. We’re ecstatic that our community is trying once again to develop avenues for championing the non-mainstream cinema, but we can’t help but exhale a big heavy sigh as no one is replicating the Freaky formula quite yet.

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…that I sat in the lobby of the New Art Theater in downtown Champaign with operator Tom Angelica as well as Grace Giorgio, Eric Fisher, and the other core Freaky Film Festival volunteers as the opening night feature pURe kILLjoy finished unspooling and freaking out our audience. We had just cleaned up pizza boxes and other refuse so when the movie let out things would look back to normal. Not that anything involving an event called the Freaky Film Festival could be construed as normal, including kILLjoy which I skipped because it had already bent my mind via screener videotape (remember those?), although I stayed in the auditorium long enough to catch the film short that officially kicked things off for the third annual go-round, RESURRECTION directed by Leslie Nagy.

That night proved to be even more of a happy anomaly for myself. Somehow, the pizza buried the butterflies released in my stomach just prior to the films during opening remarks, when Giorgio invited me up front to introduce a new C-U publication designed to address exactly the sort of out-there oeuvre which powered Freaky Films and the United States’ burgeoning underground film festival circuit of the Nineties. Our popular local event provided a refreshing antithesis to commercial movie-making and gladly went places that neither the cinema studies department at the University of Illinois or the brand-new Overlooked Film Festival hosted by Roger Ebert would ever go. The same could easily be said for that which I held up high so everyone in the SRO crowd could see:

It certainly qualified as a high point in my life, especially given that my force of will pretty much pushed this issue out the door and into existence more than anything else. Let’s see what we can do about reinvigorating them apples in the coming months for the sake of all micro-films great and small, true believers, whether locally composed affairs or cultural products of this great wide world.

~ Jason Pankoke

p.s. Strangely, this marks the first-ever appearance of MICRO-FILM on C-U Blogfidential. You can bet it won’t be the last.

p.s.2 We’re also going to leave the Comments fields open for this one. Please contribute your thoughts on our first 10 years of micro-cinema activity after the jump. Encouragement, constructive criticism, and free advice are all welcome!