I walked out halfway through an evening with Peter Kubelka screening his “metaphoric” films, partially because he was showing his 15 minute trip to Africa experiment in non-digetic sound cues and jump-cutting on parallel actions which even a ten-year-old could probably unpack in this post 2001 bone-spaceship world and then talking for nearly an entire fucking hour on the nature of film editing and what it represents (i.e. the filmmaker’s Godlike power over images/sounds and what they represent)… yep, an hour followed by — wait for it — a second showing of the same film that was already really fucking obvious the first time around and had all sense of charm, whimsy and (OK, twist my arm) “mystery” zapped completely out of it from the close proximity of the review from the first view and from Kubelka’s extraordinarly condescending and ridiculously long-winded explication of his technique. By the time the second of an advertised four roughly fifteen minute films had begun, I’d been sitting in that shitty donated theater seat for nearly two-and-a-half hours and had already made up my mind to follow my companions to the exit at the end of that second film. Totally skipped out on that Film Comment darling whatnot he did with chocolate advertisements or whatever. Good thing the Gin & Tonic was stiff afterward. Fuck. Such a disappointment and only reinforced my aversion to having a film’s director present at a screening. If I’d been able to just watch the four films (without having to watch them over again after the peek behind the magician’s illusory handkerchief or whatnot), we might even be talking possible new additions to my brigade of color-coded films. But when Kubelka mentioned that the Africa film had taken him five years to make… I almost immediately collapsed into blind, sobbing depression. Especially because of the fact that I had been empathizing with the jocular young man two rows in front of me who was rolling his eyes at his girlfriend (“the guy won’t ever stop talking down to us, will he?”) and that meant that I too would probably rather be stealing away from the entire program for a five-minute fuck.
And then I came home and was sucked into Mona Lisa Smile for about 45 minutes before eventually giving up. By the time I’d begun rooting for the Miss Manners characters to somehow prevent the triumph of yesterday’s notion of feminism (which, in this film, seemed to implicitly imply that the gains that have brought us to where we stand today are essentially enough… inviting an incredibly patronizing political indifference that whatever we, the audience, consider our “enlightenment” is more than enough — for Christ’s sake, one character even says as much about the 1950s!), I’d realized that I’d probably been poisoned enough for the evening.