IOW: Eight arms to ixnay you
No surprise, gang, but we crossed another 10-year anniversary in MICRO-FILM history a few days back, just two weeks after wrapping up our current activity to which it best relates, the New Art Film Festival. If your humble editor had his way in a previous role as Production Manager of the late Champaign-Urbana publication The Octopus, you might have been leafing through its April 20, 2001 issue a decade ago bearing the following cover:
While refraining from actual subterfuge, he offered up this “B” design since the photo files given him to illustrate that week’s cover story – a profile of Frank Black and the Catholics – were of less than stellar resolution. (We’ll also clarify that the deliberately cheeky blurbs at the bottom of this mock-up did not make it to press.) Indirectly promoting that weekend’s “Octopus Gallery Walk,” a precursor to the Boneyard Arts Festival, this alternate front page for the alt-weekly called attention to his first attempt as C-U indie movie impresario, MICRO-FILM Vérité, which took place across the street from the Octopus offices at The Highdive on Saturday, April 21, from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Tied in to “Zineophilia,” an exhibition of illustrative art and self-publishing staged at Southlynn Studios within the Octopus environs, MICRO-FILM Vérité offered a quirky slate of shorts, previews, and the Portland-made road trip feature GOOD GRIEF which had come through the front gates of the Secret MICRO-FILM Headquarters in its earliest days. Locally made material included John May’s stop-motion exercise ISOLATION, Mike Trippiedi’s “slasher film in rhyme” BUCKY McSNEAD, Peter James Zielinski’s spoof S.U.R.V.I.V.O.R., Mike Stone and Andy McAllister’s original Illini Film & Video teaser, and a trailer for Hart D. Fisher’s THE GARBAGE MAN.
The pixilated Black Francis and friends received the cover honors out of deference to editor co-workers, but at least we can’t say he didn’t step up to the plate on behalf of the film brethren. In the present, we’ll talk once more about “Zineophilia” shortly in relation to next weekend’s Midwest Zine Fest at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center and detail the role C-U Confidential will have in making the joint hop. Until then, we draw from the archives this MICRO-FILM Vérité flier with original MF model Cecilia Lucas, who currently lives in Berkeley, CA.
~ Jason Pankoke
