Camera I

Looking at the RISD Class of 2000

by Peter Keough

RISD 2000 FILM ANIMATION VIDEO FESTIVAL. At the RISD Auditorium through May 20.

Why do people make movies? Maybe it's to become God, if only for a few minutes of screen time. That seems one of the motivations for the young filmmakers in this year's festival of films and videos by seniors at the Rhode Island School of Design. They've created their own worlds where they can indulge their imaginations in works that are self-involved, but self-assured as well.

As is obviously the case in The Gospel According to Luke by the eponymous Luke Boggia. An energetic absurdist parody of televangelism, it features a moustached huckster who promotes the Lord Luke and his message of love by healing "the lady with wheels" -- a transvestite crippled when she appeared on a Spanish game show without any knowledge of the language. It's self-indulgence at its tacky best, and a refreshingly shameless display of inanity and bad taste.

Other farces are as eccentric but not as successful. Brisket, Joel Frenzer's creepy animation about a penguin searching for tea in a store that offers only brisket, has a visceral, David Cronenberg kind of surreality but equates strident cockney accents with the wit of Monty Python. Similarly, bad accents make Brittany Hague's Hot Broads rough going. A tale of a gang of cowgirls out to land a man, it appears to have been inspired by the films of Russ Meyer and the early John Waters but resembles them mostly in the desperate production values. Those two outlaw filmmakers are recalled also in Ashleigh Carraway's Punish!, but its rawness too often sinks into puerility.

Animation fares better than live action when it comes to the whimsical and introspective, especially if it avoids crude humor. Tim Finn's animated Limboscape, in which a pair of heroes named Dozer and Fixer try to escape the nowhere of the title, is quirky but sketchy. More fleshed out is Natalie A. Matthews's Toothy Love, a fable about regimentation and true love featuring the Tooth Fairy; it's a bit cute but packs a Freudian bite. Also in the fairy tale mode is Johana Dery's The Last, The Rest, which is visually compelling with its woodblock-like imagery, its tale of wingless birds, mystery disks and the sea is a dark allegory of creativity, compromise and sacrifice. The creative imagination gets a second chance in Zach Horn's elliptical Are We There Yet?, in which the catastrophic intersection of a car, a train and an airplane is averted, seemingly, by an infant's laugh.

Other films take introspection to near claustrophobic depths, probing the shadowy border between self and other. In the live action There's Still Time by Peter Demarest, a lone soldier in the wilderness accidentally shoots a young woman and is granted an interlude in the afterlife to make amends. Alan Foreman's nightmarish animation 4 takes place at that benighted morning hour as an insomniac struggles with demons that threaten to separate him from the lover sharing his bed. Araby Williams's incantatory, black-and-white Inertia follows the quest of a woman pursuing a lost love cross country and finding only vacancy and unrequited obsession. Obsession is taken to greater extremes in Yashna Maya Padamsee's Pum Pum a rhythmic, meditative collage merging abstract beauty with earthly delights -- is that pubic hair and blood in the kaleidoscopic patterns? -- as the voiceover narrator intones the praises of her love.

Surprisingly, the best work in this show are the more conventional narratives, three of which demonstrate remarkable sophistication, insight and maturity from the filmmakers and skilled performances from the cast. Dan Abdo's My Name Is Otto Krupp revitalizes the familiar theme of middle class disillusionment with haunting twists in its tale of an ambitious sales rep who goes off track. Adam Swaab's Blind the Devil manages in its thirty minutes to tell half a dozen different stories of present day desire, frustration and delusion with subtlety, wit and compassion. And in Private Projections, Brian Chang explores with telling acuity the folies a dieux of two lovers who, despite their best intentions and efforts at understanding (a tip: never take advice from someone named Lars), can't figure out how to satisfy one another's desires.

They are, like nearly everyone else in these films from the class of 2000, trapped in their own self-consciousness. Perhaps it's significant that there are so few documentaries in the program. Janice Bernache's Actors Needed, a funny montage of aspiring cast members auditioning for what sounds like a wacky project, might qualify as such, though it's on the self-reflexive side. Which leaves Mary D.A. Wojcik's Paul, a Frederick Wiseman-like portrait of a young man with Downs Syndrome described, in the rough version I saw, as "a work in progress." Otherwise the filmmakers have demonstrated that though they are capable of creating their own inner world on the screen, now perhaps they should turn their cameras on the outside world as well.