Once that craving for big budget sapecial effects is gone what else it there?
Basement Films has answered that question by delivering the most outrageous alternative filmmakers right into the very towns where we live and breathe.
For a nominal fee of $5 you can enjoy the visual stylings of Jim Finn and Dean Rank this Wednesday night as The Men and Animals Film Tour, presented by Basement Films, rolls through Albuquerque.
Take an abstract idea and apply it to a concrete form such as video media, splice some stock footage and overlay some voiceovers and you essentially have the outer shell of one aspect of experimental filmmaking.
Taking conventional Hollywood precepts of what video making is all about and smashing them into tiny and unbearably sharp shreds of shrapnel is the name of the game. Giving a well-defined medium a violent and sometimes horrifying, sometimes beautiful, makeover is the goal. Why? Because most of the time the over-marketed Hollywood media is nothing but formulaic drivel.
Finn and Rank are two Chicago filmmakers who use motion pictures as their medium of expression. The featured films will range from shorts lasting 1-3 minutes to longer.
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Twenty-minute features include films like Finn's "Super-Max," which is a chilling roadside tour of our nation's maximum-security prisons that equates European occupation to imprisonment. The featured filmmakers have made a name for themselves in the underground film scene.
Rank, who studied film and video at the University of Illinois-Chicago, has created a variety of works including an experimental music video for the band Shipping News. According to the Web site at www.swampland.org, his films have been screened at the Thaw Films Festival in Iowa City, the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Blinding Light in Vancouver, Vox Populi in Philadelphia and the Butcher Shop Gallery in Chicago.
His latest Project, a short film opus entitled "Team" is one of the featured films of the Men and Animals film tour. "Team" is an ironic look at the machismo of aggressive male sports, that goes as far as giving certain numbers the quality of being "femme." "Super-Max" and "Team" make strong use of irony to get their points across.
Finn, the second featured filmmaker, is also of considerable notoriety. According to a press release, his films have been screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, Impakt in the Netherlands, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Cinematexas in Austin and the L.A. Freewaves Festival. Controversial works like "comunista!" were aired on the PBS show EGG the Arts in Nov. of 2001. Another, "el gÅero" toured in the 2002 European VideoGallery.
He has also won acclaim for his photography. "Snow and Farm", a photo that was part of a series that used miniature models and Prozac pills, appeared in the January 2000 issue of Harper's.
If the idea of another drab Hollywood ending is too much to take, it may be time to check out The Men and Animals Tour. The screening will take place at The Walls, located at 510 Central SE near Edith at 8 p.m.
