I was planning to write (gasp! an original blog entry that doesn't involve reposting my work from
Netscape) something today about
Dance Party, USA, Aaron Katz's short-but-sweet first feature, which opens at the Pioneer Theater here in NY today. Watching it -- however ironically, from a screener, because I couldn't fit it into my schedule at last year's SXSW -- it seemed to fit so comfortably in the same pocket with other films that I've seen (and loved) over the past two years at that very festival:
Kissing on the Mouth and
LOL;
Mutual Appreciation;
Four Eyed Monsters; etc etc. I was *going* to write my first lengthy blog post since the day I relauched this blog all about all of that ... but then, browsing through
GreenCine Daily, I discovered
David Lowery had beat me to it.
At SXSW, Lowery writes, "a certain type of filmmaking seems to flower above all others, and the filmmakers, inadvertently or otherwise, form a sort of self-propogating clique." He goes on to reference this films I mentioned above (with
The Puffy Chair in place of
FEM, and then describes how though these films, though "all made independently of each other ... have a sort of shared formal aspiration, a blurring of form and content (or, rather, a crystallization of Susan Sontag's belief that form and content should be inseparable, indistinguishable) and an alluring, incisive sense of naturalism." He cites these films' common "disregard for overt incident" as their binding theme: though these are surely films that largely make use of low budgets and non-actors, more importantly they share a sense of "space": "They exist almost entirely between the beats of a 'traditional' narrative, finding their own three act structures entirely within these exploded moments."
I suppose this will teach me not to wait until my afternoon off to blog -- someone smarter will say what I'm thinking first, and in smoother words than I could ever produce. But, I will say that
Dance Party is an exquisitely natural portrait of a 24 hour period in which a two teenagers make seemingly small moves that accidentally, potentially change their lives. Katz is exploring the aesthetic possibilities of cheap video in an interesting way, especially in terms of its ability to add an almost supernatural sheen to the mundane. And there were moments of
Dance Party -- not whole scenes necessarily, or even individual scraps of dialogue, but small, perfectly formed moments -- that gave me a palpable sense of deva ju, and I find it hard to believe anyone who has ever woken up on the carpeted floor of somebody else's parent's house wouldn't feel the same. It's a homerun of a first feature and I'm excited to see what Katz comes up with next.
Seeing films like this really makes me long for the days in which I dictated the material i was able to cover at my day job. Someday I'll work out a way in which I can go to every festival and see every film and do everything in my power (which will hopefully be quite a bit) to make sure the good movies get the exposure they deserve. In the meantime, I'll pay my bills.
The WebsiteScreening infoLabels: aaron katz, american filmmaking, andrew bujalski, dance party usa, david hudson, david lowery, digital video, film festivals, indie film, joe swanberg, sxsw
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