Screened at UnionDocs May 13th-16th, 2016

I saw a poster for this live performance and film project advertised at Hunter and have always wanted to go to Uniondocs so I went to check it out. It was really worth it! This was a hybrid piece combining live theater, dance and filmed documentary and other fiction images and was unlike anything I’ve seen. It began with theater, a reenactment of an interview or a slightly fictionalized version of a laundry worker telling some details of her life. We then saw images of a laundromat and an interaction on screen, then a live dance piece with the four actors who were not one character, but many characters each, at different points portraying laundromat workers and customers. The whole piece went on like this, blending fiction with non-fiction, film with live performance. After a while, I got the sense that interviews with laundry workers were perhaps hard to come by as many of the stories that the actors told were often women saying “My job is boring, there is nothing to tell, I don’t want you to film me”.  I found this very interesting because, through theater reenactment, we got to see into the documentary process, which is quite rare. I appreciated the honesty of this.

What I liked most about this piece was that it was never clear or straightforward yet carried a strong emotion — we heard snippets of conversation, two people ranting in different languages with no subtitles, a strange dance sequence in unison, an interview with a Chinese man at a laundromat with subtitles, two actors reading from scripts live in shadow profile. All of these different scenarios created feelings, without following a plot. It seemed that there was always space to go in a totally new direction — to bring in facts from history, to tell a personal story, to have a trivial conversation. At times the mood felt awkward, or sad or funny.

One thing I found very interesting was that probably at least half the audience watching this piece were some of the customers that the laundromat workers told some stories about — all the drop off laundry and what you can tell from a person by what is dropped off. In that way, it felt like a strange direct address to the audience. I liked the boldness and honesty of this piece.

Uniondocs itself had a nice vibe; it’s a small space, but  even though I arrived only 10 minutes before the scheduled start I was able to get a great seat in the second row. After the performance/film there was a Q&A with the directors and actors. We got to learn a little of the backstory which was really neat. The piece developed in 2014 from live performances on site at different laundromats — sometimes they were acting out scenes and interactions, and sometimes it was more abstract. While performing at laundromats, they began to talk more with customers and workers and hear their stories — which is how the film aspect of the work began to weave in. They plan to continue working on this project and continue to expand it and have future shows.

I highly recommend this piece. The combination of other arts besides documentary to tell this story was so inspiring and helped prove to me that there are no limits to how a story can be told and that audiences have a greater capacity than I give them credit for to appreciate the abstract and non-linear sides of storytelling.

Vietnam (25 minutes)

Screened at: Athens International Film & Video Festival in Athens, Ohio (4/7/16)

I spent 3 days watching films for at least six hours a day at the Athens International Film & Video festival this past April, and although the program that this film was a part of was the least attended that I witnessed (only five others in the audience!) this film was my favorite. Pham Ngoc Lan takes his time with shots, they allow time for the watcher to really feel what is happening in the scene, to take in details like wallpaper texture or the way suds slides down a glass window when cleaning and allow these details to sink in.

The film begins in a white-roomed gallery setting; a middle-aged woman takes a hair dryer from her purse and begins to blow her hair dry, but then takes off her hair — it’s a wig — and continues to blow it dry in her lap. She then takes fruit out of her purse — she is meticulous and intent and aware of the camera. The shot is long. We are then transported to a private karaoke room where several mid-20 year-old’s are strewn about the room, one singing, another lying on the floor crying, another looking bored — all amidst flashing lights of nightlife karaoke. The song is dramatic and sad; we learn, through tears, that the man crying has just been broken up with after a long relationship and engagement. What then proceeds is a sappy love song, while all in the room are long-faced and silent, absorbed in their own thoughts while a  disco ball lights up their faces.

We watch the middle aged woman look out the window as her high-level apartment windows are washed by two men wearing safety harnesses and sitting on swings. This scene is silent and meditatively long; we see the window washers frantically moving contrasted with her stillness as she watches. Many thoughts arise while she watches at “crotch-level” of the male workers. This scene cuts and then we see a series of long take of suds sliding down the window at various speeds and the reflection of the buildings and city in the glass and water.

As the film proceeds, there seem to be non-sequiturs scenes, building a mood with a slight plot weaved in — or rather, a familiarity builds as we watch characters play out and form relationships and do things on their own. It seems that the main plot is of a relationship ending and another one beginning due to pregnancy. The middle aged womans role is somewhat ambiguous, at some points seeming like a mother, at other points seeming like a lover.

Even though a fractured plot emerges, that is not what captured my attention the most. What struck me about this film was the mood that it created: longing, awkwardness, sadness — created by such specific scenes of characters alone and with others. The fragmented plot is not bothersome, it is a collage of situations, of relationships, of feelings. The scenes are elaborate and specific, but sometimes the specificity is unclear or ambiguous as they don’t pertain to a plot, but rather a mood.

The ending is of a waterfall and all of the characters lying on a rock. It is a pan shot and we first see one character walking over rocks in a creek, and then the camera pans over in real time as he walks, to the big rock with all the characters revealed lying like beached whales. I felt that this walk through a rocky creek somehow represented their journey through life, which seemed painful and challenging, only to reach people who are living in their own worlds with difficulty connecting. I really loved this film. The colors, scenery, soundtrack and pacing were right on.

The title of the show, which rhymes with the artist’s last name, is a good indicator of the feel of this piece which, refreshingly, does not take itself very seriously. I visited this show in the late afternoon on a weekday and besides my friend who joined me, we were the only ones in the gallery. Lining the walls were fuzzy black and white moving images of composition notebooks, on the floor a video of a cat playing with a camera “Touching (Otto)” is being projected onto a litter box, and coming from the back, the main attraction, the 3-D video inside a cardboard dome with a soundtrack filling the space. Upon walking in, we were greeted by a gallery employee who taught us the ropes to this show: there are two sets of 3-D glasses, and one of them has an “on” button that is a little tricky.

At the back of this show was the little dome containing an 11 minute 3-D video “Trading Futures” playing continually as a loop, which is where we started. It is a cozy little spot, fixed up with cushions so you can lay down and get comfortable. I had no idea what was going on the first time around watching “Trading Futures”, it took about 5 minutes to get comfortable with the 3-D image and figure out the “on” button of my glasses. We then proceeded to watch this video 2 and a half times. This video features a dancing animated diaper-wearing person, a little girl (his daughter?), a cat, and a white-spandex suited man. The audio is non-sensical philosophical instruction with a comforting generic beat in the background. At times we see industrial landscapes, inside the girl’s bedroom filled with toys, and outdoors. Somehow it felt to me that part of this video was about entertaining the little girl (who I assume was his daughter), though it also entertained me. The music is calming, and the voice (perhaps Coonleys?) is calming as well even as it prompts us to think and answer questions while we watch, which feels like we are taking a non-consequential quiz. There is one point in the video where we hear a whispering voice saying “I don’t think it’s working. I don’t think my glasses are on” which I found very funny, because I really did have those thoughts and my glasses were in fact, not “on” at one point.

I found his “Rotating Composition” series of slow, pixelated composition notebooks to be funny and somewhat sentimental, as I have used many composition notebooks in my life, but they did not hold my attention for very long. I liked his piece “Touching Otto”; we got an up close image of his cat (same cat as in the longer dome piece), playing with this camera, which was entertaining to watch and cute. There was another piece in the corner “Touching (Lumpy Ghost)” which I did not connect with much, it was a video projected on a rotating spherical mirror. All in all, it seems to  me that Coonley wanted to create a playful and light piece, starting with the title that rhymes with his last name; to poke fun and entertain himself, his daughter, and us, and in that, he succeeded.

 

-Jamie Matson