The New York Underground Film Festival
It's getting to the point where the yearly arrival of the New York Underground Film Festival is as welcome as the coming of spring. Though it necessarily specializes in obscure, offbeat, pretentious and precious work, the very roughness of the lineup is a bracing antidote to Hollywood supertrash and trustfund indie-film glibness. Most of the films in any given NYUFF schedule are labors of love, shot on weekends and edited on begged, borrowed or stolen equipment; the thank-yous in the credits are often as long as the other names put together. The event embraces amateurism in the best sense of the word: even when a feature or short film isn't working, you get a clear sense that human hands worked on it, often for obsessive reasons too peculiar to be described in a TV Guide-style capsule. There's personality here. Fun, too.
Take An Incredible Simulation (March 8, 9:15 p.m.), subtitled The Nation's #1 Tribute Film. Directed by Darren Hacker and Jeff Economy (with a name like that, he'd better be creative), it's a ramshackle, very engaging look at the world of tribute bands. Talk about obsession: the groups spotlighted in this documentary have studied their heroes' licks, copied the costumes and stage patter and devoted their lives (evenings and weekends, anyway) to giving fans a xerox copy of their idols' performances?mostly in venues small enough to see the performers without a Jumbotron.
The bewildering array of bands includes a number of Kiss and Rolling Stones tribute acts, as well as facsimiles of Molly Hatchet, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adam and the Ants, Guided by Voices, Led Zeppelin, Gary Numan and Joy Division. The most intriguing act is Lightning & Thunder, a male-female duo that mimics Neil Diamond and ABBA on the same bill. The female singer somehow represents all four members of ABBA simultaneously; the crowd doesn't mind the missing voices as long as the music tracks for "Mamma Mia" and "Dancing Queen" come through loud and clear. (I have to assume this act has never toured Australia, because if they had, they'd still be there.)
I wish I could tell you the names and hometowns of all the performers featured in An Amazing Simulation, but this is a New York Underground Film Festival documentary, which means it doesn't bother with lame corporate media techniques like identifying interview subjects or telling you where you are. (It takes a moment to realize that the snippets from a documentary about the making of Beatlemania are from a real movie, as opposed to an incredible simulation.) The filmmaker seems either to have approached the subject in a disorganized way or lacked faith in the power of straightforward personal interviews. While the concert footage and backstage chats are amusing and engrossing, I wanted more information about how these people came to devote their lives to replicating every note in every song their heroes ever sang or played.
Which isn't to say the movie stints on motivation. A surprising number of the interviewees are up-front about the reason they were drawn to tribute bands: money. Sure, they love the music; they wouldn't join the band if they didn't. But on the club circuit, really good tribute bands, while garnering no respect from self-proclaimed artists, are basically cash machines with amplifiers. The phenomenon represents American business acumen at its bluntest.
Yet the reverence with which musicians and fans discuss the music obliterates charges of cynicism, and in the numerous "concert sequences" (some of which seem to have been filmed with a Hi-8 camcorder wrapped in veal) you can sense the primal connection between the fans in the audience and the fans onstage. The female half of Lightning & Thunder is a fortysomething blonde American; she encourages fans to sing along, indulging their pop star fantasies while satisfying one of her own. "The men," she narrates, over footage of her crooning to an enraptured male club patron, "make me feel like I'm Marilyn Monroe." "We don't see anything else out there right now," says a member of the Funky Monks, a Chili Peppers cover band. "We feel that we can cover the market on this material right now." To which a bandmate adds, "And the material smokes!"
Equally startling but much more controlled, Ruins: A Fake Documentary (March 9, 5:45 p.m.) riffs on white stereotypes about Indigenous American civilizations. Director Jesse Lerner and his fiendishly talented collaborators build a scratchy, black-and-white, feature-length mock documentary that purports to guide us through several centuries' worth of expert opinions about indigenous people; fake silent-era documentary footage is spliced together with phony educational films, Terry Gilliam-style cutout animation and snippets of bona fide anthropology documentaries that are so clearly full of shit that you can barely believe your ears. The ghost of San Francisco-based underground filmmaker Craig Baldwin (Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America) hovers over this weird, uncategorizable feature-length essay; but then, Baldwin is always a presence in NYUFF schedules, perfectly encapsulating the low-budget filmmaker's mix of obsessional grandeur, disregard for copyright law and "What-the-hell, let's-try-it" editing.
Lerner gives the real and the fake equal weight because, like Oliver Stone, he believes the crap we've been fed about our world should make us immune to the current version of How Things Were. Indeed, what scholars once thought were informed opinions on indigenous cultures has been regularly turned over and replaced with fresh helpings of poppycock. A funny voiceover montage underlines white European panic over coming late to the Western hemisphere; invented "experts" insist that indigenous American cultures were actually descended from millennia-old Jewish or Nordic migrations. The gleefully surreal credits promise appearances by everyone from Rod Serling and Margaret Mead to Allen Ginsberg, but mostly we hear from bogus English experts with names like Lord Edward Kimborough, John Lloyd Stephens and Sylvanus J. Morley. Weren't those aliases of W.C. Fields?
Also recommended:
? Pie Fight '69 (March 8, 11:30 p.m.), a short documentary about a staged pie fight at the San Francisco Film Festival that got 13 protester-performance artists arrested, including Peter Schickele, future real-world alias of classical music clown P.D.Q. Bach. The footage was thought lost until two years ago, when it was discovered by Bill Daniel and assembled into a charming, mournful mood piece with music by John Zorn, Miles Davis and other music giants.
? Punking Out (March 8, 9:15 p.m.), a documentary about CBGB, won't tell punkers anything they didn't already know about the subject, but it does feature some choice interview footage from the era that lets members of the so-called Blank Generation embrace and caricature their own media label.
? Coffin Joe (March 10, 11 p.m.), a documentary about Brazilian horror filmmaker Jose Mojica Marins, whose Dario Argento-esque fright flicks favor psychology and intimations of witchcraft over special effects, and attain a stupefying power.
? The experimental movie Tokyo Escalator (March 9, 9:45 p.m.), while too damned long at 11 minutes, is unnerving and riveting all the same. Writer-director Naoko Nozawa gets inside the mind of gender-bending camp celebrity Emi Eleonola, who dresses like a missing member of the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert gang and wanders Tokyo, riding every escalator she can find. I'm not sure what the point is, and there might not be one; I didn't care, though?I was too busy digging the early 80s-style trippy video effects and the out-of-nowhere stop-motion animation sequences. One of the latter features a musical group known as the Wiggy Tourists, who sing nonsense songs about being tourists and wearing wigs, then drop trou and spread 'em, revealing what one bandmember proudly identifies as "the carnivorous fanny island pecker fruit."
? Jeffrey's Hollywood Screen Trick, a mind-boggling animated short that chronicles a petite blond gay man's nervous search for sex in a strobe-lit nightclub full of sweat-slicked partyers. Filmmaker Todd Downing meticulously stop-animated poseable dolls by gay-friendly toy manufacturer Totem International (the makers of Billy Doll). The thoughtful compositions, tricky lighting schemes and razor-sharp edits bring an expressiveness to these characters that you wouldn't think possible, and some of the sight gags are a scream. Sidling up to a beefy black dream lover at the urinal, the hero shuts his eyes nervously, and when he gathers up the nerve to look to his left, the hunk has been replaced by another man?a preposterously ripped muscleman with the head of a troll doll. While the result plays like a parody of Queer as Folk, it's actually much funnier. (And the characters are deeper. Sorry, couldn't resist.)
The New York Underground Film Festival runs March 7-13 at Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave. (2nd St.), 252-3845 or [www. nyuff.com] for information.