Austin residents can be relied upon to keep their own city “wierd” year-round, but it’s not as often we get to export that signature vibe. Last week at the Sundance, the prestigious Park City, Utah film festival, Austin’s own Zellner brothers seized the opportunity to spread the good weird with their film, Fiddlestix. David Zellner’s own description of his three-minute short is peerless, and requires no help from me:
Fiddlestixx is about a gibbon with “magical brain powers” capable of bending space and time. Each installment is three minutes of psychedellic [sic] seizure-inducing nonsense, like a Sour Patch Kid sprinkled in angel dust. It was originally commissioned for the web and we’re excited to see it get a life beyond that.
There are currently three episodes of what is officially a web series. And now I really want some Sour Patch Kids.
Sundance boasted at least five other Austinites at this year’s event, according to my interview with the Austin American-Stateman’s Chris Garcia: Amy Grappell, Bryan Poyser, and another sibling team, the Duplass brothers. Grappell screened the short film Quadrangle, about a pair of partner-swapping couples (including her parents) in the early seventies, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in Short Filmmaking. Quadrangle is more than a movie—part of a larger mixed-media diptych that plays separate interviews with the couples simultaneously, it includes still photography as well as film and was featured at “Nat 24: New American Talent, the Twenty-Fourth Exhibition” at Austin’s local Arthouse. In addition to the honors from Sundance and Arthouse, it was also an official selection of the Rotterdam Film Festival. When she spoke with Wayne Alan Brenner at the Austin Chronicle, Grappell had this to say of her unusual structure:
I created this piece as a video installation with a museum setting in mind, but I think the diptych structure could be applied to a longer documentary as well—because it’s not used in an arbitrary way. I’m not a big fan of using tricks like that; I’ve almost never seen a diptych that I thought was necessary or had a real purpose in terms of the story and how it unfolds. But with this one, I think it allows two very different, definitive points of view to overlap – which allows the viewer to make up their own mind what they think about the story.
The critics seem largely to have agreed, and she’s received positive reviews from critics in Austin, San Antonio, and Chicago.
Bryan Poyser’s film was Lovers of Hate, about a pair of sibling writers at opposite ends of the spectrum of success and in love with the same woman, who happens to be one of their wives. It seems to have earned mixed reviews based largely on the reviewer’s tolerance for the film’s liberal use of the “humor of discomfort” in a tale with no clearly sympathetic characters. It’s referred to variously as “creepy,” “sinister,” “emotionally fraught,” and “deeply felt….operatic” “comic genius”. In any case, Poyser can rest assured he makes an impression.
The Duplass brothers introduced Cyrus, a largely improvedfeature-length film about a man’s attempt to date a woman who shares an intense (some might say “creepy”) bond with her 21-year-old son. A relatively big-budget affair (and their first studio film), it stars John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill, and Catherine Keener. Although it wasn’t honored at Sundance, the movie has found itself some fans: Peter Sciretta of SlashFilm reported that Cyrus got “probably the most laughs [he’d] heard in a Sundance movie in a couple years,” and Peter Knegt at IndieWire called it “bizarrely hilarious” (anyone else beginning to sense a theme?).
It’s only fitting that the city of Robert Rodriguez and Richard Lanklater should have such a strong presence at Sundance. MovieMaker magazine ranked Austin the country’s fifth-best city in which to be an indie filmmaker in 2010. For this honor Garcia credits our huge variety of geography (from urban to rural and hill country to desert), helpful tax and permit laws, and a seemingly limitless supply of inexpensive, knowledgeable crewmembers. UT does its part, helping foster an “incredible creative and intellectual culture” of photography and visual arts as well as filmmaking. In addition, there are a number of supportive organizations in the area, including the Texas Film Commission, which goes above and beyond by assisting moviemakers with everything up to and including writing their first resumes; the Austin Film Society, which provides grants to local filmmakers; and the Texas Association of Film and Tape Professionals, which lobbies for positive filmmaking legislation. And then, of course, there are the festivals: South by Southwest, the Austin Film Festival, and Fantasticfest together screened well over 300 movies last year. The city has been influential in other, stranger ways as well: the term “mumblecore”, referring to films depicting mundane post-collegiate existence by nonprofessionals, was coined in a local bar during SXSW by sound editor Eric Masunaga (and sparked, in part, by the Duplass brothers), and the depressingly generic landscape of the cult sweetheart Office Space is, in fact, Austin. And although Austin’s history there is fairly brief, it’s definitely compelling: Slacker took the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize in 1991; UT film professor Paul Steckler won the Special Jury Prize in 2000 for George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire; Kyle Henry’s drama Room premiered there 2005; and the Duplass brothers screened Baghead at the festival in 2008.
I had the opportunity to watch some of the Zellner brothers’ work (up on their website) and discuss it with David. It’s universally (though not uniformly) quite strange: normal, if tragic situations—car accidents, lost cats, drug abuse—and play them so broadly they move past funny into confusing, off-putting, and alarming, and then finally back into funny again. More than once I found myself laughing out of sheer confusion. When I asked him if that was the experience he and his brother Nathan intended to give their audience, he told me, “I don’t know that we have a particular goal in mind, but we’re interested in trying to combine humor and pathos whenever appropriate. It’s also fun to try to normalize the abstract and viceversa [sic].” For the most part, I found their writing too bizarre for pathos, but the manipulation of the normal and the abstract certainly suffused every minute of their work. It, like so many of our other local art and artists, is worth checking out.
Published February 2, 2010 on The Horn
Meghann Gordon 