Taken from: A Well Nourished Moon: Stephanie Young on poetics, poetry, poets, the boundless charms of Oakland, & more!

http://stephanieyoung.org/blog/

December 6, 2005 * 4:51 pm

I should so be doing other things on my let's face it always unfinished list but this blog post has been coming on for twelve hours now and why fight it? Attended film night at Edinburgh Castle for the first time, that's why, a whole night of Cathy Begien films. (If you were at New Yipes last month you saw Begien's 'Blackout', plus the short about her favorite foods, I don't remember the title.)

Before I rave a little bit about Begien, I have to do some dumb compare and contrast things, like how this social scene of young filmmakers feels a lot like but then also not at all like (the non-institutional parts of) poetry world. Similar things: lack of funding, joking about/complaining about a lack of funding, collaboration, but collaboration as a really weak word for the intense friendship, group thinking and group making going on here. What I mean of course is that this group of artists, enthusiasts and amateurs (you know I use that last word with total love and self-identification) is making movies for *each other*. But they're showing them publicly which means you and I can see them too, and it's very very exciting in the way I wish poetry readings were more often exciting to non-poets. There was a (sorry to use this next one) palpable sense of comaraderie in the air of the tiny black box theater upstairs at Edinburgh Castle where films are screened twice a month. During the trivia questions (sidenote-Begien must work at Kiehl's. Trivia prizes included Kiehl's sample kits and there was more than one funny shot in her films of a medicine cabinet full of Kiehl's products - remember that thing I was saying yesterday about Del and his dayjob? A similar kind of bleed-through here.) anyways, geez, the parantheticals today! During the trivia questions it was clear that most of the audience, and it was packed up there, maybe 50-60 people, knew each other on a first name basis.

What's different? The big thing I'm thinking about is a lack of formalized speech placing the work in context, that is, there was no intro (as we'd define intro in poetry world.) No bio data, no describing the work, or comparing it to other films, placing it, circling it, working it out. Via speech acts, I mean. I don't have a big enough film vocabulary to understand how and where those things might be getting done in the films themselves. But I suspect that this activity, writing and discussion of the films, is (like other visual arts), going to be done by people outside the group if it is going to be done at all. Like articles in the Guardian. Like me and this blog post. I also wonder about a raw-er sense of experiment at play among the filmmakers than there is in poetry world. Where the artist determines the 'success' of a project based on audience response. Or literally that the film can't be seen by the artist until it's seen by the group. (how the group serves as a distancing/perspective tool against the obsessive close-up process of editing.) Last night was structured like this: older work, intermission, brand new work. I definitely got the sense of the older work having been culled from what succeeded at previous film nights, there were cheers of recognition and pleasure. Looking at older trailers/movies on Begien's website today I realize she's 1. prolific and 2. I'm curious about what, from the older work, did and didn't make it onto the program last night, and why. I think she'd been editing the newer work for last night right up until the last minute. Something was said about her going on two hours of sleep. Wondering about how much her process is shaped by working towards the event and the feedback she gets.

So the films finally, right? My personal favorites from the older stuff:

- the super-8 "Perils of Darkness" which showed Begien blindfolded moving through a number of heartbreaking scenes (spreads blanket on grass, begins to eat sandwich, gets hit in head by soccer ball, sandwich is knocked out of hands, feels for sandwich on grass but a dog comes and eats it) and ended with a shot of her walking by green apple books and then getting kissed on the corner. Loved the suggestion that one peril of darkness was missing all those books on sale.

- seeing 'Blackout' again. You can see the trailer for this one on the website, only it's called 'Drunken Diaries'. Begien is blindfolded again, sitting down, recounting an evening of partying. Throughout the film, people are shoving various drinks and cigarettes in her hands which she's trying to drink and it gets progressively messier - there's confetti, liquids are dumped on her head, etc.

- 'Begien v. Rodriguez'. Begien and Jose Rodriguez fight in what looks like a creepy parking garage. Lots of bleeding and shouting in french and spanish. (no english in this one, and no subtitles.) Begien loses. The two wind up climbing into the same bed, and the film closes w. Jose calling her a bitch. (wish I had been there for this night where it likely first screened.)

And from the new work:

- The two dreams. Both are shot from Begien's pov. We hear her voice, but don't see her. The first opens w. Begien insisting that she wants to make a snack for a girlfriend who's leaving - she goes into her house and starts making up a full plate of thanksgiving dinner, all the while there's this running internal commentary, "what if it spills? I better put it in a tupperware..." she winds up looking all over her house for bread and laying out an entire loaf on the table to make sandwiches, "just keep making sandwiches. Don't go outside. She's gone. If you just keep making sandwiches you don't have to go outside and see that she's gone." The second is a close-up of Rodriguez in the back of a car, kissing, starting to take down his pants, etc. Then we hear (a double of) Rodriguez outside the car, "what are you doing??" and Begien's voice, "get out of here - leave me alone!"

It's hard to talk about Begien without also talking about Rodriguez (BFF! it said about the two on one screen last night) who was famously suspended from the SFAI for showing films that depicted, among other things, him "gnawing hypnotically at the neck of a chicken which may or may not be alive." (full article from Film Comment here. ) They clearly adore each other (one of the trivia questions: "Cathy and Jose have a love-hate relationship. Give two examples.") and appear in one another's films over and over again. Both have that amazing relationship to the camera that's hard to describe. I just know I can't stop looking when either of them are onscreen. Where Begien plays it mostly straight, off and on breaking into a disarmingly open smile, when Rodriguez's face lets go it's into a kind of spastic malleability. And on the violence/tender continuum, Rodriguez leans more into violence and Begien tenderness but part of what makes the relationship so hypnotic is watching them push each other back and forth on that particular beam. Finally what I'm trying to describe *is* hypnotic, and disturbing, and abject, and mysterious and impossible to describe. Partly it's about gender. Partly b.c. Begien identifies as gay, the sexual tension between the two of them feels extra-charged. Or what reads as sexual tension because I don't have another word for it. The extreme distance between the fistfight in 'Begien v. Rodriguez' and another short, an almost-music video, where Begien appears in femmey drag, blonde wig and all, and Rodriguez waits for her in front of the Castro wearing a tux.

One of the best things about Begien's work is how it veers into moments of totally embarrassing, fabulously sentimental self-disclosure. As a viewer I get a sinking feeling first, "oh no, she's not going to do that!" like at the end of the film about her family, where various members have been given a camera and asked to tell Begien whatever they want for two minutes, which closes with Begien herself taking the screen and speaking to herself. But then those moments are turned up so loud they start doing something else, something, again, amazing - in this case she repeats herself a lot: "You're lucky to have such a great family.. they just want to know you more, to love you, why are you such a brat when you're with them? God! Why do you act this way? They even know you're gay and they still love you.. why do you act like this?" A litany of self-recrimination that goes on so much longer than is comfortable. She also allows herself the dumb joke again and again (In 'Blackout' a bucket of liquid is poured on her head and a beat later she says that Jose told her she was "being a drip.") It's a mode I really adore.

Wow this got way too long. If you make it to the next New Yipes reading, you'll get a chance to see films from another artist in this crew, David Enos.