The South Alabama Film Group is planning another film scramble, set for mid-summer, open to any interested filmmaker or team of filmmakers. Films must incorporate a brief dialogue written especially for the competition by Mobile playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder, author of “Gee’s Bend” (among other plays) and winner of the American Theatre Critics Association’s 2008 M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for an emerging playwright.
Filmmakers or representatives of each team must meet at Mobile Arts Council at 5 PM, Friday, July 18 to receive a copy of the dialogue. Completed films must be submitted on DVD by 5 PM, Sunday, July 20. In addition to incorporating the dialogue, films must be five-minutes or shorter and suitable for viewing by general audiences.
All entries will be shown and judged at Serda’s Coffee Company at 5 PM, Tuesday, July 29, during an informal meeting of the Film Group (when we’ll also screen entries from the last scramble). The public is welcome. Filmmakers/ teams who plan to participate should notify Charlie Smoke by Wednesday, July 16. Email him at csmoke@mobilearts.org.
For inspiration on making your own film, rent Michel Gondry’s valentine to homespun filmmaking “Be Kind Rewind.” In many ways, this is the ultimate film for this moment in time. It encompasses the digital revolution that is transforming every aspect of society and the media, but is also entirely steeped in film history and nostalgia.
The story concerns a rinky-dink video store in a crumbling building, a lone standout in the video format, resisting a switch to DVD, and on the brink of closing. Mos Def plays a diligent store employee devoted to the owner (Danny Glover) and Jack Black plays his paranoid friend. When Black accidentally magnetizes himself in a botched attempt to vandalize a power plant (affording us the amusing experience of seeing him painted to look like a chain link fence) he erases all the videos in the store.
The pair comes up with a solution, which is to remake the erased films themselves, a process they dub “sweding.” The website for this film (www.bekindmovie.com) gives instructions for sweding anything you want, and features Jack Black explaining sweding as a “Remaking something from scratch using whatever you can get your hands on.” He also adds, “It’s putting you into the thing you like.”
This is not just the central plot point of “Be Kind Rewind,” but the ideological core of the film as well. It is a celebration of revisionism, and amounts to the mission statement of the YouTube generation. Danny Glover plays a character obsessed with a past that he largely invented, and this film champions everyone’s right to make up their own stories, to rewrite their history, to change the ending of a movie to something they like better.
This movie worships other movies, and mines high and low culture to create something entirely new that is comprised largely of used pieces. Is this the suddenly popular “green” movement come to call, film as recycling?
Visually, Gondry always straddles high technology and handmade qualities. In the gorgeous “The Science of Sleep,” (2006) he used cutting edge methods to create a film that was largely comprised of felt and cardboard. While “Be Kind Rewind” embraces highly contemporary ideas stemming from democratic melting pot of art forms born on the Internet, such as blogs, YouTube and “fanfic,” its greatest pleasures are from the utterly un-technological ways that Mos Def and Jack Black recreate their high-budget source material. It has a charm that is entirely its own, but is also impossible to achieve or comprehend without a million winking references to what has come before. In “Be Kind Rewind,” everything old is new again, and everything new is made from something old. The result is reassuringly familiar, yet thrillingly new. Rent the film, make your own, visit the website, and jump into the process.
Contact Asia Frey at afrey@lagniappemobile.com.
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