This Thursday marks the first night of the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, the largest annual showcase of experimental moving-image work in Chicago. Running through Sunday, the festival contains work by a number of notable artists (among them local filmmakers Melika Bass and Deborah Stratman, who are represented in Thursday’s program) as well as up-and-coming figures from the experimental community. Onion City is a welcome reminder of what a great city Chicago is to see avant-garde films and videos. Between the Nightingale, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Siskel Center’s ongoing Conversations at the Edge series, Doc Films and the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago, and Block Cinema at Northwestern University, local moviegoers can expect to find at least one valuable experimental program every week.
Notebook: Films by Marie Menken Marie Menken’s rhythmic, sometimes frenetic films influenced Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and others, and are too little seen today. Menken’s Notebook (1963), with its brief sections that lyrically treat subjects like water droplets and Christmas tree lights, seems to have inspired Brakhage’s Sketches (1976). The speeded-up views of Manhattan and of ships traversing New York Harbor in Go Go Go (1964) are engaging, and I especially liked the mysterious image of flames superimposed over moving cell-like shapes in Hurry! Hurry! (1957). Menken’s transformation of the seen world into movement can sometimes seem reductive, though, and some of the other films on this program are weaker. —Fred Camper
