Ten Minutes with Richard Hansen, Director of the 2nd Annual Duluth International Film Festival

A friend of mine said that when he went to the Duluth Film Festival last year he was blown away. His expectations were modest, but after the first film he couldn't believe what he just saw. Then he took in the second, and the third. Ultimately he attended 11 films and participated in many of the dialogues with directors that can be part of a film festival experience.

Two weeks ago I met Richard Hansen, director of the event, and was sufficiently impressed with his vision and enthusiasm to make sure we had lunch together last week. I now understand why an international film festival would make its home in Duluth. It's my hope that Hansen and associates is sufficiently successful to make this the next Sundance.

Ennyman: How did you come to Duluth and what prompted you to start the Duluth International Film Festival?
Richard Hansen: Riki McManus of the upper MN Film office and I had a mutual friend named Andrew Peterson who suggested that Riki and I meet. He knew Duluth was a great spot and that Sound Unseen could expand here. I meet with Riki about 3 years ago. We became instant friends and I fell in love with Duluth. There were so many supportive people and organizations, it became a no brainer to develop the festival franchise here.

Enny: I heard nothing but rave reviews over last year's films. What is the process for deciding what films will be shown?
RH: Well, that’s very flattering, Ed…thanks for saying…We have an outstanding staff of programmers who literally scour the globe looking for films that will fit into our festival. Last year alone, we had representatives at Sundance, South by Southwest, Tribecca, Berlin, Rotterdam, Toronto, Seattle and numerous other festivals. These guys are professional programmers who book for other organizations and festivals, so everybody is always looking. As Adam Sekuler, one of our programmers likes to say ‘We’re professional lookers.’

We also like to choose filmmakers who we think have bright futures in the industry and are just all around good people. This makes for much better visiting guests. We like making new filmmaker friends then asking them to come hang out with us in Duluth. We do have some thoughts on what we think will play well here in the Twin Ports area…sort of a Duluth style, so that plays into our selections as well.

Enny: Will there be actors, directors, writers and/or producers here?
RH: Yes, yes, and yes…and even some film distributors. We like to have a range of industry professionals come in. We’re especially proud to have Gina Belafonte as our featured guest. She is the producer of our Opening Night film Sing Your Song, which is a documentary on her father, Harry Belafonte. (right) She produced the film so it is really, obviously a very passionate and heartfelt project for her. It’s only screened a Sundance, South by Southwest, Tribecca and Berlin…which are 4 of the most influential festivals on the planet. Sound Unseen Duluth is its final festival screening before it goes to HBO…so obviously we’re really pleased that we got the film.

Additionally, we’ll have over a dozen directors/actors/producers/industry professionals in attendance. This is a great part of what we are doing, because each of these talented people become really accessible to festival participants. There will be question and answer sessions after all of the films with a filmmaker present, and they’ll all be at the parties and events…they’ll be walking down the street and on the lakewalk enjoying Duluth just like all the rest of us do. We think this something that makes our festival special.

Enny: In addition to the films, you also have music and art. What's unique about this facet of the festival?
RH: We’ve had a focus on music and art within the festival since its inception a dozen years ago in Minneapolis. This is our niche in many ways. We think film, music, and art are such natural crossovers, that it just made sense for us to work on more than just showing movies. So many filmmakers are artists or musicians, and most everyone who enjoys this type of film also appreciates art and music…it seemed very obvious the work it all in together.

Both last year and this year we have a Film Competition where we screen 6 music related films and have jurors decide on which one they like best. There are so many great music related films out there, we think this is a great way to celebrate that fact.

Enny: Who picked the UMD student selections and when will they be airing?
RH: UMD students picked the UMD student selections! Working with UMD this year has been outstanding, and we wanted to find a way to incorporate this great university into what we were planning. There is a great bunch of young minds coming out of UMD who burn for this type of opportunity, so we let the bright and ambitious kids take the lead on selecting some of the UMD selections. The shorts collection will screen Friday June 11th at 5 pm at Zinema. The kids are as excited as is the UMD staff.

Enny: Thank you, Richard, for all your efforts to bring such an event to our beautiful shores.

EdNote: The project could still use some financial support to obtain additional special funding. I strongly encourage friends of the arts to visit the Film Festival Kickstarter page to help bring this event to full fruition.

Phantom Galleries Springing Up In Surprising Places

I stopped for gas near Carlton this weekend and saw that a restaurant was closed that used to be adjacent to the truck stop. In Superior numerous buildings have vacated areas on the main drag. In one abandoned building we saw a pair of pigeons standing on the red carpet spread there. It's a scene is being played out repeatedly -- not the pigeons, but the abandoned real estate -- throughout our region's extended non-recovery.

When hard times strike, buildings can be left vacant for a season. But with a little creativity, they don't need to remain vacant.

A few weeks ago when I had my Dylan paintings at the Ochre Ghost Gallery in Duluth, I asked Jessica and Calvin how they found the space. They said it had been nothing more than a place where the owner of the business around the corner stored his motorcycle for the winter. The space has been alive with several shows since spring and it's exactly the kind of thing we will see more of here and there around the country.

Right now in Wisconsin there's a move afoot to bring vibrancy back to the streets of many towns through the partnering of the business community with the arts community. Superior is one of six Wisconsin communities selected for a Phantom Galleries project. Funding for the project comes from the Morgan Fund of the Duluth-Superior Community Foundation and the Wisconsin Arts Board with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Another Wisconsin town seeing a bit of life breathed into its downtown is LaCrosse. A news story by Jason Smith titled Phantom Art Strikes Again tells the story of downtown revitalization.

It's night time in downtown La Crosse. The storefronts in the historic downtown area are mostly dark, except for a few brightly lit window displays interspersed throughout the area along the river. A small crowd gathers in front of a glowing window, gazing and pointing at colorful paintings and sculptures by professional local artists.

Walking through downtown La Crosse on a warm spring evening, it's a lovely sight to behold. But what is this artwork doing here in the window of an empty building, and who put it here?
This novel use of empty space in La Crosse is what's called a phantom art gallery. Phantom art galleries are temporary exhibition spaces created by community artists who work together in order to enliven street-level downtown windows, empty storefronts, and public spaces with colorful artwork exhibitions and installations that are viewable and accessible at all hours from the sidewalk.

But this notion of placing art in an unexpected context is more than about simply beautifying drab downtown areas: it's about economic development for community property owners, businesses, and artists alike.

And actually, I think this idea is brilliant. I know artists with whole houses full of art. Gallery spaces are limited. What does one do with all this creative output without an audience? Artists may not be as outgoing as rock stars, but they do feel the occasional need for validation, hence they value opportunities to put their work in front of an audience. Vacant real estate is a great way to connect with eyeballs. What's more, it's good for the merchants who own empty spaces, because the eyeballs are now drawn to these buildings that otherwise might appear to be eyesores.

Will it work? Can Phantom Galleries re-vitalize our downtowns? The verdict is out, but my personal feeling is that if we get people thinking about the problems of our cities, willing to take risks and explore creative solutions, we just might be surprised.

Kudos to the SPACES team for taking these steps toward bringing the various facets of our community together for a common cause.

Read the complete Jason Smith article here.

Photos on this page: Top right is Jessica L., co-founder of Ochre Ghost Gallery. Lower two images were taken at the Dylan themed show opening May 25.

Serendipity

There are two approaches to writing stories or making art that seem at odds to me. The former is when a picture is envisioned in its entirety and executed as envisioned. Or, when a writer creates a story in his mind and through one careful sentence after another leads a reader through its channels to the epiphany.

Juxtaposed against this approach is the writer who creates characters, sets a story in motion and pretty much watches the story emerge from the uncertain fog. Or the painter who begins with a pallet of colors and spreads his or her sails seeking a favorable wind. This latter approach relies on intuitions and instincts, and along the way enjoys the wonder of serendipity, those happy accidents that lift a painting or story above the mundane.

For the artists in any medium there's a wonderful quality to serendipity, that experience of finding something you weren't expecting to find. It's often my approach with

So the question is, how can we live our lives in such a way so as to experience a greater variety of "happy accidents"?

Too many of us get locked down by our own routines. They are comfortable, and can even become almost ritualistic. I think here of the narrator in The Accidental Tourist sets out to insure that every detail is covered and every environment controlled. No disconcerting surprises here, but then again no happy accidents either.

John Updike called boredom one of the four major drivers behind our actions. The manner of our life approach may contribute to that flattening out of our interests and experiences so that we no longer experience the exhiliaration of joyful discovery. There are so many fascinating people and places in the world. What causes us to disengage from life in favor of safety?

Maybe it's because we don't like to release control. Maybe we're afraid of the unknown. Maybe we dislike being disappointed. Maybe it's a bit like stopping at garage sales where after forty years you feel like it's just a waste of time. The thing is, sometimes there really are treasures waiting for you, but you just let them pass.

This week, make it a point to do something you wouldn't normally do, something outside of your routines... and enjoy the moment.

Top Right: Serendipity. I painted a background, then spray painted red enamel through a wire mesh. Afterwards I left the panel outside in the rain overnight to complete the background upon which the face carbon black acrylic was painted. Click to enlarge.

The Cult of the Amateur

It's shaping up to be a beautiful day here, one that will be talked about for weeks to come. But let's not go there and discuss an issue that has been debated for decades but now has a new face.

In 2006 Andrew Keen produced an essay which went on to become a book about the destruction being wreaked upon professional journalism and culture by the proliferation of Internet content created by amateurs. A polemic, a diatribe, a venting of the spleen -- Keen's point is that all this proliferation of free content is costing us in a variety of unseen ways that are damaging to us in the long run.

The book, which I have never read but have read about on several occasions, reminds me of another book lamenting the damaging effects of pop culture, Edwin Newman's Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English? Newman was a news correspondent for NBC when he wrote this book in 1974. His carefully pointed analysis likewise laments the way things are going with regard to language and culture, though he is more concerned about language than what it was actually doing to the people whose jobs were involved in utilizing it.

Keen's book is decidedly aimed at bashing one of the foundational tenets of the Internet: "Information wants to be free." Keen notes that "free" always costs something, and to some extent he's right. For example, Duluth, MN has something like 29 "free" public parks. I had lunch this week with someone involved with the city who reminded me that free public parks are expensive to maintain.

For the longest time I have been watching the magazine industry as it strives to transition to the Internet. Some are doing it better than others. Yes, there are pressures being placed on journalism, but think of all the writers who have finally found a voice, who can own their own soapbox and not be squeezed out from publication and kept away from readers because they failed to have suitable credentials. Every writer knows that the publishing game was in need of an overhaul. You jump through hoops and hope somehow to bypass the gatekeepers so a managing editor will pick up your query and read it while they still have half their brain engaged after shuffling through 3,000 other queries.

If Keen's rant shows up in audio format at our library I will certainly make an effort to give it a fair shake. In the meantime, I will read the reviews. Here are some of Olly Buxton's comments at Amazon.com:

Since Andrew Keen is so instinctively dismissive about amateur contributors to the Internet - people like me - it's hardly surprising that I should instinctively dismiss his book, so let me declare an interest right away: I like Web 2.0. I've been a contributor to it - through Amazon customer reviews, Wikipedia, discussion forums, MySpace, Napster and so on - for nearly a decade now, and I've followed the emergence of the political movement supporting it, exemplified by writers such as Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler, with some fascination. and no, I've never made a dime out of it (though I have been sent a few books to review, not including this one).

Andrew Keen is that classic sort of British reactionary: the sort that would bemoan the loss of the word "gay" to the English language, and regret the damage caused by industrial vacuum cleaners on the chimney sweeping industry. His book is an impassioned, but simple-minded, hearkening to those simpler times which concludes that our networked economy has pointlessly exalted the amateur, ruined the livelihood of experts, destroyed incentives for creating intellectual property, delivered to every man-jack amongst us the ability - never before possessed - to create and distribute our own intellectual property and monkeyed around mischievously with the title to property wrought from the very sweat of its author's brow.

Keen thinks this is a bad thing; but that is to assume that the prior state of affairs was unimpeachably good. You don't have to be a paranoid Chomskyite to see the pitfalls of concentrated mass media ownership (Keen glosses over them), or note that the current intellectual property regime - which richly rewards a few lucky souls and their publishers at the expense of millions of less fortunate (but not, necessarily, less talented) ones, isn't the only way one could fairly allocate the risks and rewards of intellectual endeavour.

Well, there you have it. Hope you'll now get out there and enjoy your weekend. Make it a good one.

What Should It Be?

"The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life." ~Z. Smith

I've been listening to a book titled Changing My Mind, a book of essays by Zadie Smith. It's been a stimulating read so far because she's a writer's writer. I mean, she writes about writers and she writes very well while doing it, and with authority. It's a book about consuming and producing literature, and you can tell quite quickly she's consumed plenty.

She slices and dices lives and works of people like Kafka, and E.M. Forster and Nabakov, and gets one thinking about what good writing ought to look like. What should a modern novel look like? Is the traditional 19th century format the way to go or is it time to be abandoned? How much work should the reader have to do to get the author's pearls?

The reviews on Amazon.com indicate that the book is not for everyone. Maybe I will get bogged down myself, but for now the essays demonstrate a mind awake and a keen eye for observation.

In some ways I'm wondering what motivated her to go into such depths with regard to George Eliot and Middlemarch. My suspicion is that she's trying to figure out for herself what a novel should be. Tom Wolfe arrogantly pronounced the novel dead about forty years ago, and by the proliferation of Reality Shows on TV, he may be right that the hunger for fiction has diminished in our time. But "dead" is a pretty strong pronouncement and based on the sales of books by Michael Crichton, Tom Clancey, Stephen King and James Patterson, I'm guessing there's still plenty of life in the genre.

NEW TOPIC
Oh, and if you're looking for someplace to go some evening this weekend, check out the new show featuring the 3-D art of Mary Plaster at Beaner's in West Duluth. It's big, and it's delightfully in your face. Death, Gaia, Poseidon, Helios (the Sun God) and Zeus are all on hand in rich enormity. Obviously she used a vehicle larger than my Honda to transport the pieces there this week.

In the meantime, whether you're making art or making stories, good luck in working out the fundamental problems of the work. How accessible should it be? Who is your real audience? And where do you want it to go?

And just to mix it up, here's another quote from Zadie: "I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat. "

Till the morrow....

Marilyn at 85

The other day I saw a news story that Marilyn Monroe's dress, the one which memorably billowed out over a subway grate in The Seven Year Itch, was going up for auction and would likely fetch two million dollars. I did not know at the time that this news item was designed to coincide with what would have been Marilyn's 85th birthday, had her days not been cut short by an overdose of barbituates in 1962.

To be honest, I was never a big Marilyn Monroe fan so until three weeks ago I don't think I had actually seen a single one of her films in full. But someone at work has a Marilyn calender in her cubicle and after months of seeing various black and white images of the iconic blonde starlet, I actually decided I should go ahead and stop judging her by the bad reviews she garnered for her weaker films, failed marriages and misdeeds. And guess what? I learned something.

The two films I watched were Niagara and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The former is classic film noir, the latter a musical comedy.

In Niagara, Ms. Monroe plays the role of a scheming wife who conspires with her current lover to bump off her neurotic husband, played by Joseph Cotten. There is only one provocative scene in the film and it's early on where Monroe is lying in bed watching her husband and you can see her bare back, implying she probably does not have any clothes on. In the early fifties this was no doubt risque, even though she was with her own husband in a hotel room at Niagara Falls.

Well, the acting is generally flat throughout, and not just Marilyn, who did her best under the circumstances. There was probably a limit to how much chemistry one could show in those days, though maybe this was lacking, too. The bottom line is, in my opinion she was just another actress playing a role. What's the big deal. Hollywood is full of pretty faces.

But then I saw Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and understood her star power.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is about a pair of showgirls who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and are working their way across the Atlantic on a ship. The pair, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, are best buds from small town America who have contrasting agendas. Russell is looking for love and Monroe, as Lorelei Lee, is a gold-digger. Directed by Howard Hawkes, both women appear to be having a great deal of fun.

The script is saturated with sexual innuendo and crisp comic witticisms throughout. Even though this has never been my style of film, one thing you can't help but notice... every time Marilyn shows up she lights up the screen. Both she and Russell must have enjoyed the opportunity to shimmy and shake with abandon. The cameras loved it, and probably their fans enjoyed it to. Some people have it listed as one of their favorite films of all time.

When I read accounts of Marilyn's short life I feel pity for her. But I also think she may have gotten lucky in some ways. Being famous and beautiful creates many difficulties and I can't picture her aging gracefully. On the contrary, it is easy to imagine her aging disgracefully.

She grew up in the glory days when bad behavior was often concealed from an adoring public. The 1950s was an age of innocence still, though Marilyn was bigger than the Hollywood PR machinery could handle, marrying a superstar ballplayer, a famed Broadway playwright and generating rumors of dalliances with a U.S. president and his brother. How well would Norma Jeane have held up over the next five decades had she lived? The Warhol images enshrine her as a pop icon. And Elton John's Candle in the Wind portrays a saintlike martyr of legendary stature. As for me, I can see from her films that she was more than just another pretty face. In the end, her story makes me sad.

Wordless Wednesday