STARRING:
Jennifer Lopez, Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Hershey, Samuel L. Jackson, Janet Leigh, Harrison Ford and Judy Garland.

ALSO STARRING:
Manipulating hands and unresolved desire.

WITH SPECIAL GUEST APPEARANCES BY:
Screaming starlets, wholesome teens panting unwholesomely, lecherous parents, the history of film, sappy moments, and explosions in
various atmospheres.


Sunset Strip may be a two-way street, but there’s no escape from female flesh when entering a movie coliseum or even the neighbourhood
microcinema. Not only is the Hollywood industry consumed with containing, exposing and displaying women, experimental filmmakers
(although formally and conceptually innovative) are similarly perpetrators and/or victims of these same crimes of convention. But most do so consciously, mining mainstream cinema’s endless blockbusters, influential archetypes and infamous female trouble. Yes, these girls are (in) trouble, this desire is problematic, these pictures are moving, those directions are dangerous.

Castration anxiety or aesthetic deconstruction? Can the cinematic avant-gardes generate an appropriate response to Hollywood’s “phallic
mothers,” femme fatales, feminine masquerades, monstrosities and misogyny? Where is the through-line of radical form, found footage and feminist film theory? Re-presenting representations of genre paradigms, readymade characters and dramatic soundtracks via campy performance, chemical experimentation, physical collage, dialectical and vertical montage and genre decoupage are the avantgardes’
preferred forms of star treatment.

The filmmakers assembled for Trouble extract not only hidden but also unintentional, third meanings, which are as varied as the ways of finding: From a shoebox of Coming Attractions left at a ramshackle prairie drive-in to pirated Golden Age video reductions, from a “girlie film” lifted from a friend’s dresser drawer to a sublimated obsession with a B-movie actress, all of the films gathered here inventively appropriate industrial-pop commodities.

Trouble begins with Matthias Müller’s Hitchcockian simulacrum, Home Stories (1) and Martin Arnold’s accordion played Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (2), which recast classic genres in parodic and structural fashions, respectively. Then Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film (3)
expands those genres to correlate roles and situations across multiple eras. Bruce Conner’s A Movie (4) questions the emotional manipulation by Hollywood that Fast Film and Home Stories subscribe to. Although the latter two playfully point out stereotypes of heroes,
damsels in distress and perpetual pursuits by swapping actors and scenes for other actors and scenes, they also rely on well-versed tropes to progress the story. A Movie sets-up a similar narrative with its grand music and heroic imagery but gradually reveals the lies conceived in Hollywood’s textbook marriage of sound and picture. In opposition to Fast Film’s doubly fabricated disasters, A Movie’s disastrous actualities have human consequences, trading feel-good chuckles for tragic realizations of everyday misfortune.

Lewis Klahr’s Her Fragrant Emulsion (5) and Linda Christanell’s Moving Picture (6) distill the focus onto single actresses. To create Her Fragrant Emulsion Klahr cut his heartthrob Mimsy Farmer out of a disposable ‘70s feature. Gluing and taping these jagged slivers onto clear leader, Klahr tactilely thrusts his aggressive passion onto the screen–feelings made tenderly passive through the acceptance that this is the closest he can get to her. Conversely, Moving Picture is a contemplative, abstruse reflection on the image of Barbara Stanwyck, actually, on the idea of Barbara Stanwyck (or any actress) who unnaturally exists in a studio glamour shot, eternally soft-focused and enticing despite real time lapse and variation that unfolds in Christanell’s romantic architecture photography.

Moving Picture provides a quiet pause before the angst, spectacle and barrage of the final two films. Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (7)
and Richard Kerr’s collage dʼhollywood (8) assume epic dimensions for avant-garde cinema. Super-sized to theatrical 35mm scale (with Outer Space maintaining the source film’s widescreen Cinemascope), they assail the eyes with accelerated action and saturate the ears with hyper-dramatic horror movie motifs. Each filmmaker lulls the viewer with stifled, sustained suspense, deviously foreshadowing the maelstrom to come. Shifting the assault on scripted screen victims to the live on-lookers in the theatre, these films ruthlessly deliver the ultimate Hollywood ending.

This January, sink into the distracting velvet luxury of manipulation, dreamily stargaze and empathetically role-play, imbibe the unhealthy
cocktail of fear and desire, and most importantly, Trouble yourself with an evening of celluloid screen play.