Film

Ghosts and Butterflies

Good, Bad, and Boring at the Madcat Film Festival

by Traci Vogel

There are butterflies in this year's Women's Experimental Film Festival. There is a terrible, dated short cartoon called A Feminist Creation Myth, where penises grow from the ground. There is a self-indulgent, we-are-poisoning-ourselves, didactic half-hour film. There is--brace yourself--a mime.

But wait! There are also tiny toy cowboys! There is a camera floating above a serene forest floor filmed in black and white--a mesmerizing shot you could watch for hours. There is a hilarious ode to the power of television, drenched in remarkable saturated colors and sound.

The Madcat Women's Festival was created to open a space, ostensibly, where the good could exist with the bad in a less rigorously male, less biased free market. Like most experimental film fests, the resulting artifact is bumpy: sometimes intolerable, sometimes ecstatic, and as unpredictable as a butterfly's path.

And in fact, said butterfly opens the most successful short film in the first half of the festival: The Devil Lives in Hollywood. Amy Lockhart's animated short, set to a soundtrack that sounds like elf children singing in the first level of Hell, combines crayoned images of race cars and pumping hearts in a wistful nonsense narrative that accumulates power surprisingly.

Another short film that packs surprising power in the festival is Removed. Director Naomi Uman took a '70s-era porno, and, using nail polish and bleach, distressed the film to the point where the women sometimes entirely disappear. What the viewer witnesses, as a result, is lascivious men groping or ogling undulating white ghosts, a disturbing and effective commentary on the role of porn in the '70s.

This kind of creativity and irreverence toward a found document demonstrates what is most attractive about the idea of a women's film festival: that you might find yourself walking clear beneath a paradigm so subverted it ceases to obstruct the sky. Instead, all too often, the subversion hangs too low.