One of the hallmarks of Louise Page’s sound is the arranging skill she brings to her songs. Her solid piano playing always keeps things grounded, but her crack band often supplements that with horns, inventive rock guitar, and other elements. That’s not the case with her latest album, though. The whole point of Play Nice, an album written and recorded during the first year of the pandemic and released in 2021, is to strip all of that away. Befitting the isolation of those times, the album presents only a singer and her piano: intimate, raw, and real.
The unvarnished sound is matched with some of her most personal lyrics as well, and that’s one of the striking qualities of this single, “Little Icarus,” where she questions both her own trustworthiness and that of her lover or other person in her life. And yet, like the fabled mortal of Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun and suffered for it, there’s a romantic yearning in the song as well. It’s a theme ripe for bringing to life visually, and Page, director Ben Siler, and producer Chris McCoy (the Memphis Flyer’s film editor) have done so with stunning clarity.
As Page herself writes, “I’ve always loved using mythological references in my music, and the story of Icarus has been one that I’ve loved for quite some time — it has inspired so much art, both ancient and contemporary. Something I loved about working with director Ben Siler was his interest in making homages both to the original story of Icarus and also to the various works across time inspired by Icarus.”
Look for local rapper and producer Lawrence Matthews for his star turn as Icarus here. Often celebrated for crafting his own videos with a painterly sense of the visual, he brings that same attention to detail and artful integration to this project. And if the song asks some tough questions, it also revels in romance, with palpable chemistry between Page and Matthews as the video progresses.
“Little Icarus”
As Page further contemplates the song and the video, there is certainly love here, but … it’s complicated. “From my perspective as the writer, the song ‘Little Icarus’ is a love song, albeit a tragic one, that the Sun is singing to Icarus,” she writes. “My thought process was, while the sun isn’t a personified character in the original myth, the sun is responsible for melting Icarus’ wings. One might say the sun is responsible for his downfall — although most would say his own hubris brought about his fall. This thought process of personifying the sun became a metaphor for myself and my own fears about hurting others and being hurt by love.”
Page is also quick to share the credit for this vivid teleplay with her collaborators. “Ben Siler, the director, had the idea of there being two Louises in the video — one inspired by Sun God imagery and one more inspired by David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. These two versions of self are open to interpretation by the viewer. Is one version of Louise reality and the other fantasy? If so, which is which? It’s up to the viewer to decide.”
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, things were really weird.
Just in time for your Saturnalia celebrations, something new from Memphis’ favorite experimental filmmaker Ben Siler. “Christmas at Midnight” is from Robby Grant’s 2020 album Put A Quarter In The Christmas Vending Machine, and it represents a darker take on the holiday season. Siler, no stranger to darkness himself, rose to the occasion with this music video. Starring expat actress Kim Howard and a host of Memphis talent (including yours truly, who provided sets), this one is for everyone who feels frog marched through Yuletide joviality. Happy holidays, and enjoy the world premiere of “Christmas At Midnight”!
Memphis experimental film auteur (and occasional Memphis Flyer contributor) Ben Siler is one of the most fascinating talents this community has produced. Siler’s short films range from the heady to the confessional to the downright weird. His editing is impeccable, and he’s never afraid to tell you exactly how afraid he is.
On Friday, March 29th, Cooper-Young Gallery and Gifts will put on a retrospective of Siler’s work. Beginning at 6 p.m., the gallery will screen a curated collection of the dozens of short film Siler has produced and directed over the last decade. Curator Joel Rose says the films will screen in an art gallery environment, and “you can move freely around the rest of the shop, like an art opening.” Siler will be on hand to meet and greet and answer questions, of which I am sure there will be many. Hopefully, he will also give life advice, like he does in this short film, directed by Robby Grant.
Spend An Uplifting Evening With Memphis Filmmaker Ben Siler
I don’t know exactly which films Rose and Siler have selected for this retrospective, but I will never pass up a chance to share this film. An Indie Grant-funded collaboration with director Edward Valibus Philips, and actors Jessica Morgan and Alexis Grace, “On The Sufferings Of The World” has a unique look that came about when Phillips took his cut and Siler’s cut and superimposed them on each other. It packs more story and characterization into a wordless four minutes than most blockbusters. Watch it now, or regret it later.
After a gala opening at the Halloran Centre Thursday night, Indie Memphis moves to Overton Square on Friday. The schedule is packed with great stuff beyond what I could fit into this week’s cover story about the festival.
Madeline’s Madeline (1:10 PM, Studio on the Square)is an acclaimed, visually inventive film by director Josephine Decker, who won the Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award at Indie Memphis 2014.
Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror
She began as a refugee from Sri Lanka, and ended up playing on the world’s biggest stages. Matangi/Maya/MIA (3:40, Studio On The Square) is a documentary about the fascinating life of political dance pop musician M.I.A.
Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (2)
The festival’s first world premiere is Diego Llorente’s Entrialgo, a beautiful vérité documentary about life in rural Spain.
Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (3)
The second world premiere of the day is Shoot The Moon Right Between The Eyes (6:30, Studio on the Square). It’s a musical by Austin, Texas director Graham L. Carter that sets the music of John Prine amidst a story of a pair of small-time grifters who meet their match in a strong willed widow. It’s inventive, heartfelt, and a little rough around the edges, which is totally appropriate for a film that takes inspiration from Prine’s lyrics.
Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (4)
At 6:30 at Playhouse on the Square, the Hometowner Documentary Shorts bloc features films from Memphis artists, including Lauren Ready, Jason Allen Lee, and Klari Farzley. Best of Enemies director Robert Gordon and producer Kim Bledsoe Lloyd’s film “Ginning Cotton at the Dockery” tracks down the men and women who worked at the last functioning cotton plantation in Mississippi. Memphis musician Robbie Grant makes his directorial debut with “Ben Siler Gives Ben Siler Advice,” in which Memphis filmmaker and Flyer film contributor Ben Siler meets a younger Memphian named Ben Siler and tells him how the world works. It pretty much does what it says on the box, in two hilariously depressing minutes.
At 9:10, there’s a genuine only-at-Indie Memphis moment. Mahogany is a 1975 star vehicle for Diana Ross, directed by Motown impresario Berry Gordy (and a couple of ringers). Also featuring a smoking turn from Billy Dee Williams in his prime, and a smash hit number one song from Ross as a theme, it’s a 70s classic. To illustrate the depth of the Mahogany cult, the film will be proceeded by “Mahogany Too,, a short film shot on Super 8 by Nigerian filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu that is a lighting retelling of Ross’ film, featuring Nollywood star Esosa E.
Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (5)
At 9:10 on the big stage at Playhouse On The Square, an experimental documentary about Memphis’ most radical band makes its world premiere. In Negro Terror, director John Rashmaintains a light touch, focusing on the sights and sounds of the hardcore punk band’s legendary stage show, and the words of the band’s three very different members, led by Omar Higgins, an anarchist Hari Krishna devotee who is a longtime member of Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP). In what is definitely a first for Indie Memphis and probably a first for just about anywhere, the band will provide a live soundtrack for the film about them as it premieres.
When you think of “film festival fare,” what usually comes to mind are sincere indie dramas, light language comedies, and earnest documentaries about social issues. But that’s not what’s on the marquee for Memphis’ newest festival, Cinematic Panic.
Black Lodge Video was a Cooper-Young institution for 15 years. As anyone who frequented the place can recall, there was always a few film freaks hanging around in the store watching selections from its vast video catalogue. You never knew what you were going to see on the vintage big-screen projection TV.
Since the Lodge shut down its original location four years ago, co-owner Matt Martin has been on a frustrating and seemingly quixotic quest to bring it back to life. Last year, it was announced that they had finally found a new home. The bigger and better Black Lodge would relocate in a storefront at 405 N. Cleveland. The completely new space will include not only the legendarily huge video collection for rent, but also an arcade with new and vintage video games, and a combination movie theater and music venue in the back.
Evil Dead
Once the new Black Lodge was in operation, Martin says he envisioned a weekly event called Cinematic Panic that would be in the spirit of the old days of cinephiles daring each other to watch the unwatchable. “The idea was to show the most weird, off-putting, bizarre, uncategorizable movies I could find.”
But while he was helping Memphis filmmaker Chad Allen Barton with the Piano Man Pictures Roadshow, a touring retrospective of films created by the collective, Martin says Barton suggested changing the concept. “He said something that struck me: If you do it every week, the shock loses its power.”
Barton and Martin set out to try something new: a film festival dedicated to outré cinema. They scheduled the first Cinematic Panic festival for October, when the new Black Lodge was scheduled to be completed, and called for submissions. “We wanted to see what we can find here locally, and as far as our reach can muster,” says Martin. “That turned out to be global.”
From Beyond
Barton says they were unprepared for the more than 300 submissions they got from all over the world. It was an avalanche of the kind of movies that rarely get screenings in conventional festivals outside of midnight slots. “Everybody wants to be Sundance,” says Lodge co-owner Danny Grubbs.
“We’re underneath Sundance,” says James Blair, Lodge partner and chef who is designing the menu for the new kitchen. “We’re in the sewers of Sundance. That’s where you’ll find us.”
Last House On The Left
Martin says movies intended to unsettle have been around the beginning of cinema. “What does Edison first shoot for? A version of Frankenstein. Shock and horror has been a staple of fiction since drawings on the cave. We look back at the Edison stuff, or look at Nosferatu, or “Un Chien Andalou” by Dali and Buñuel. These are all films that were trying to explore the newly created concept of cinema, and asking, how far can this go? Can we shock and terrify with just images and sound? The answer, of course, was a resounding yes.”
But the Black Lodge team was dealt setback after setback as they tried to create the new space. “We’ve been panicking for a year and a half at this point,” says Blair.
‘Return of the Flesh Eating Film Reels’
Grubbs says the construction is “80% done.” The 6,000-square-foot space lacks internal walls, but the floors, plumbing, bathrooms, and other critical systems are already complete. When it became apparent that the store would not be complete in time for the scheduled film festival, the team did some soul searching and decided to stage it as a pop up event in the cavernous space as a thank you to the Black Lodge faithful. “People have waited a long time, patiently, for the new Lodge to be built,” says Martin. “We don’t get to be public about its development very often. We knew everybody was anxious, so we decided to give them a glimpse. Come inside the space and watch movies on this massive screen. Get a feel for what the Lodge is going to do.”
Running five days starting Wednesday, October 24th, Cinematic Panic is jam-packed with classic weirdness and new strangeness. To set the tone, the first night will feature Videodrome, David Cronenberg’s landmark mashup of body horror and mass media theory, as well as David Lynch’s little seen 2002 “sitcom” Rabbits which stars Naomi Watts as a humanoid rabbit.
Cinematic Panic Film Festival Brings The Weird
Other werid classics screening include Todd Solondz’s 1998 black comedy Happiness, Peter Jackson’s perverse puppet show Meet The Feebles, the 1986 H.P. Lovecraft adaptation From Beyond, Sam Rami’s groundbreaking comedy horror Evil Dead, and a pairing of Last House On The Left and Audition. “[Last House On The Left] is a brutal film by anyone’s standards,” says Martin. “It’s a difficult watch. But it’s 40 years old, and as relevant as ever with its comments on assault and sexual trauma. It’s one of the films that changed horror from the old school world of monsters and castles to the monsters next door to you. Then we chose Audition because of the role reversal of female as tormentor.”
Memphis made movies include two features: Barton’s satire Lights, Camera, Bullshit and Jim Weter’s 2012 At Stake: Vampire Solutions. Among the 101 short films are John Pickle’s “Return of the Flesh Eating Film Reels,” and works by several Memphis filmmakers, including Ben Siler and Laura Jean Hocking.
Joe Finds Grace
Eight features will screen in competition, including Joe Finds Grace, a film Barton describes as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes on a road trip of self-discovery.”
There’s no jury, so winners of the short and feature competition will be determined purely by audience reaction.
The snacks Blair has prepared fit with the festival’s “I dare you” theme, such as chocolate covered grasshoppers and fermented Japanese string beans. There will be musical performances scattered in with the films, and Saturday night after Evil Dead, the festival will transform into the popular Black Lodge Halloween show, headlined by Negro Terror.
Grubbs says after the festival is over, they plan to finish construction and hope the new Black Lodge will be fully operational by the end of the year. This will be the first of many Cinematic Panic festivals. “We’ve got eight projectors, so we could do multiple screens in the future if we wanted to,” says Grubbs.
“No. No.” says Barton. “Please. No.”
Cinematic Panic runs from Wednesday, October 24 to Sunday, October 28 at 405 N. Cleveland. Schedule available here.
Uncle Drew is a light basketball comedy about a team of geriatrics returning to former sports glory. The elderly hoopsters are played by younger sports stars wearing wigs and latex. The effect is distancing: The fake old men are cartoons. We spend most of the time with their broad, wig-based impressions, and it’s like a long SNL sketch — or a feature-length Pepsi commercial, which is what it is.
The film stars Lil Rel Howery (Get Out) as Dax, an orphan who finds solace in basketball as a child and coaches teams as an adult to compete in the Rucker Classic Streetball Tournament in Harlem every year. He missed a shot when he was young, blocked by his rival Mookie (Nick Kroll). When Mookie steals his team- and money-obsessed girlfriend (Tiffany Haddish), he must seek out the mysterious Uncle Drew, a former great who disappeared, to lead him to victory.
The mystery dissipates almost immediately. Uncle Drew (Kyrie Irving), introduced by a cameo-rich 30 for 30 episode, which tells the story of how he won a game while holding a ham sandwich, is easily found. Then things descend into vaudeville. Most of the comedy consists of Dax anxiously commenting on the inanity of a setup — how careless a preacher is with a baby he’s baptizing, the thinness of a star player’s promise not to betray him, the oldness of Uncle Drew’s 8-track machine (“If Billy Dee Williams and Diana Ross had a lovechild, it would definitely be in this van!”)
It would be nice if there was more to laugh about than the script’s clichés. In Get Out, Howery was a breath of fresh air, comic relief from a heavy sci-fi/horror parable. Here, the movie he’s commenting on is more ordinary, turning him into a Woody Allen-style neurotic protagonist.
Shaquille O’Neal is Big Fella (during the credit bloopers he says “I’ve come a long way since Kazaam!”) He has an extremely fake beard, operates a dojo, and has a tendency to be separated from the rest of the cast for as long as possible, presumably because he has the highest day-rate. Chris Webber (five-time NBA All-Star) is Preacher, the aforementioned pastor, heavily indebted to Arsenio Hall’s Reverend Brown from Coming to America. He is married to Betty Lou (four-time Olympic gold medalist Lisa Leslie). Reggie Miller (also an NBA All-Star five-timer) is Lights, who is in denial about being legally blind. Nate Robinson (three-time Slam Dunk Champion) is Boots, who can’t walk. All do fine with cheesy humor, though too many adopt a low soft growl as their “old man voice.”
If they were actually played by older actors, this would be a very different movie. You would have to confront how their bodies broke down from their prime and note how society in general has no use for someone once they stop producing. As it is, we know these are elite athletes (most of whom are currently middle-aged sports commentators) playing at being decrepit, like gods in disguise.
When Uncle Drew switches from the silly to actual sermonizing, it falters. Moral lessons include: “This game is all mental”; “You don’t stop playing because you get older. You get older because you stop playing”; “We all need something to look forward to, even if it is just a pipe dream”; and finally, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” I disagree with all of these.
Having sunk all his money into the team, Dax is counting on the championship’s $100,000 prize to stay solvent. Uncle Drew scolds him, “It’s about the love, youngblood. Nothing else.” Dax forgets his financial woes and changes his team’s name from the Harlem Money to the Harlem Buckets.
But feeling pressure to earn money constantly is not a character flaw; it’s result of living under late-stage capitalism. The movie itself feels the pressure, chock-full of the sources of its own funding. Pepsi machines are everywhere.
Nevertheless, a family at my screening ate it up: The father announced, “That was pure fun” at movie’s end, and his little girl could not stop giggling during a scene in which Shaq repeatedly raised and lowered his hospital bed while someone was trying to talk. As for me, I felt like I was already watching this at 2 p.m. on Comedy Central.
Music Video Monday is ringing in the new year with Memphis’ best music videos! A big thank you to all the artists who submitted work this year. In case you missed it, get caught up with #20-11 here.
Ready? Here we go:
10. Telisu – “Im A God”
Director Quinten Lamb won the Indie Memphis Hometowner Music Video award with this banger.
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1 (10)
9. Six.oh.xiS – “Hiding Place” Chillwaver Christopher Osborne’s low-fi synth wash gets visual soma to match.
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1 (9)
8. Mono Neon & A Weirdo From Memphis – “America’s Perverted Gentlemen (Drawls)” Two of Memphis’ weirdest almost got arrested filming this awesome guerilla video, directed by Unapologetic mastermind IMAKEMADBEATS.
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1 (7)
7. Preauxx – “Terry Freestyle” Sometimes the simplest setting is the best. 35 Miles lets Preauxx’s charisma do the talking in this stony workout.
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1 (5)
6. Aaron James – “The Wile” Taking a cue from one of the classics of the form, Aaron James and animator Shakeya Merriweather rotoscoped dancers Rachael Arnwine and Fannie Horton for this multimedia tone poem.
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1 (6)
5 .Crown Vox – “Ruler of the Ball” Director Mitch Martin pulls out all the stops for Memphis goth pop queen Crown Vox’s epic Guilded Gallows video cycle.
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1 (8)
4. Don Lifted – “Take Control of Me” Don Lifted’s paean to romantic surrender takes a sinister turn in the hands of director Kevin Brooks. Brooks and Don have had one of the most fruitful collaboration of any Memphis artists in recent memory.
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1 (2)
3. Julien Baker – “Turn Out The Lights” At the forefront of the flotilla of Memphis women making musical waves in 2017 was Julien Baker. For the title track of her smash album, she got this explosive video from director Sophia Peer.
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1 (4)
2. IMAKEMADBEATS – “Mother Sang To Us” In 2017, the most interesting music in Memphis was coming from a small studio in Bartlett, where Unapologetic Records founder IMAKEMADBEATS gathered a crew of likeminded weirdos to push the boundaries of hip hop. His Better Left Unsaid album is a kind of multimedia creative manifesto, and this Afro-samurai anime from Sky5 Productions is better than Justice League.
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1 (3)
1. Snowglobe – “We Were In Love” Director Ben Siler worked for a year crafting this semi-autobiographical story of love, loss, and OCD. More than any other MVM video of 2017, it worked to solidify and expand the themes and mood of its song, while packing more plot than many feature films into just three minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, your best Memphis music video of 2017:
Music Video Monday: Top 10 Memphis Music Videos of 2017: 10-1
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
Welcome to our final installment of the Indie Memphis Greatest Hits series, which brings our list of the top vote getters in the Best of Indie Memphis poll to the present day. If you need to catch up, here’s part one, part two, part three, and part four.
Lights, Camera, Bullshit (2014)
It’s hard out there for a…well, you know.
14 years after starring in The Poor And Hungry, Eric Tate joined director Chad Allen Barton and Piano Man Pictures to cast a satirical eye on the whole indie film thing. Tate stars as a filmmaker who comes to Memphis to make art, but finds himself constantly sidetracked by increasingly absurd obstacles. His boss is a delusional crook who wants to stay in business despite the fact that his business has literally burned to the ground. And he being hunted by a terrorist organization who wear masks of Presidents. Lights, Camera, Bullshit is a maze of jokes and old school indie surrealism that takes on the myth of the self-sufficient auteur. Tate puts himself in the tradition of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd as the last sane man in a world gone nuts.
Comments from voters:
“The irreverence of the story to all things political as a subplot. The main plot was interesting, dealing with a power hungry record producer who hires a young man to work on a film who has his own ideas…. the diversified cast with so many fine performances. The Memphis locations were also a highlight…Also great photography.”
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo
Anomolisa (2014)
Being John Malkovitch and Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman used stop motion to adapt his stage play about a man drowning in depression who meets and briefly falls in love with a woman at a conference in an anonymous hotel. It’s safe to say that this is not familiar ground for an animation disciple best known for Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons battling Jason and the Argonauts. Anomolisa uses its formal tricks to great emotional payoff.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (2)
Movement + Location (2014)
Lots of people want to move to the big city, reinvent themselves, and forget their past life. That’s Kim Getty’s (Bodine Boling) plan when she arrives in Brooklyn. What’s different about Kim is that she’s from 400 years in the future, a time when the planet is overcrowded, resources are scarce and life is miserable. Who wouldn’t want to go back to the luxury of the early 21st century, when there was enough clean water to boil pasta? The problem is the past—which is to say, the future—is not done with Kim yet. Movement + Location is directed by Alexis Boling, and the combination of shadowy tension and Bodine’s intense performance made this low-budget sci fi a big Indie Memphis hit.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (3)
The Keepers (2015)
The Keepers won the hearts of the Indie Memphis audiences in 2015 by exploring the relationship between animals and people in a humane and empathetic way. With subjects like the staff of the Memphis Zoo and a skittish teenage giraffe, getting people to care was a matter of patience and editing in this cinéma vérité tour de force. “It was a very tight edit,” says Joanne Self Selvidge, who co-directed The Keepers with Sara Kaye Larson. Amy Scott, who was our editor, is a total badass. She started with a 2 1/2 hour cut, and got it down to 70 minutes. I had done all the editing at that point, but Amy was wham bam thank you ma’am done. It was amazing.”
Larson and Selvidge started their festival run with a win at the Nashville Film Festival and made it two for two at Indie Memphis. The director/producers hustled to transform their festival wins into wider success. “We were able to secure national distribution, which was huge. We worked at that. We were approached by a couple of people who thought it seemed like an interesting film…” before signing with Vigil, Selvidge says.
Now on Hulu, the film got a name change to See The Keepers: At The Zoo. Selvidge and Larson were recently approached by Real South to air the film on more than 200 PBS stations across the country, and possibly internationally as well. The pair are currently back in the editing room creating a 56 minute TV version.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (4)
Tangerine (2015)
The technological revolution that made the digital indie era possible has only accelerated. When Indie Memphis started, submissions were on VHS. Director Sean Baker shot Tangerine with three iPhone 5s, and it is visually beautiful. But it’s not the gimmick that makes Tangerine special, but the layered performance of Kitana Kiki Rodrigiez as Sin-Dee Rella, a transgendered sex worker just out of jail who tries to get to the bottom of her boyfriend’s alleged infidelity. Indie Memphis was lucky to get one of the defining moments of this film decade.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (5)
Carol (2015)
Indie film hero Todd Haynes brought a Douglas Sirk aesthetic to this period piece of forbidden lesbian love in an America on the verge of a cultural revolution. The list of accolades won by the film is long enough to rate its own Wikipedia page, so if you haven’t seen it, you probably should.
Voter comment: “One of my favorite films of the century so far, from its resplendently photographed Christmas-mode period trappings to its aching expression of unspoken longing to its “Brief Encounter” cribbing structure, “Carol” is my idea of pure heaven. It’s a coming-of-age story AND a midlife reckoning in which neither lead is a navel-gazing, dissatisfied man, and one of whom is Cate Blanchett. Need I say more?”
Cameraperson (2016)
Every filmmaker finds out quickly that you have to throw out perfectly good material in order to make the whole film stronger. Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson saved memorable shots and moments that didn’t make the cut from her twenty year career shooting all over the world, and then put them all together in this tribute to the emotional power of collage. Cameraperson is one of my personal favorite documentaries ever to screen at Indie Memphis, and I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one that felt that way.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (6)
Jackson (2016)
The human cost of the culture wars is front and center in this arresting doc about the relentless assault on women’s reproductive rights in Mississippi. Jackson won Best Documentary Feature at Indie Memphis 2016, and it’s currently finding a national audience on Showtime.
Voter comment:
“This documentary pissed me off and made me feel hopeless, but it also encouraged me to talk to strangers about these feelings. Our national apathy (veiled contempt?) directed toward women and their bodily agency is unacceptable, particularly when it comes to poor women of color. Jackson didn’t flinch.”
“On The Sufferings Of The World” (2016)
Filmmaker (and Memphis Flyer contributor) Ben Siler is one of Memphis’ most prolific filmmakers. His work got a lot of votes in the our poll, and unexpectedly “whichever Ben Siler film gets the most votes” was a fairly common response. I’ll let his fans speak for themselves:
“Ben Siler was always an unsung hero for me in Memphis movie-making. His strange and unexpectedly poignant short films were always favorites of mine.”
“Just everything Ben Siler’s done. He’s one of the few filmmakers, in Memphis or elsewhere, with a truly unique voice.”
“Ben Siler should be at the top of every list. I idolize him as an experimental filmmaker.”
“Ben Siler is literally a genius and all of his films should be in the Smithsonian.”
The Siler film that closes out our list of Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits is one of the most radical works ever produced in the Bluff City. Funded by IndieGrant, a program begun in 2014 to give competitive grants to Memphis filmmakers, it’s a collaboration between directors Siler, Edward Valibus, actresses Jessica Morgan and Alexis Grace that started when Siler wanted to marry images with philosopher Arthur Shopenhaur’s essay “On The Sufferings of the World”. It’s most striking feature, the layers of images that are similar but not quite the same, came about when Valibus and Siler were trying to reconcile different cuts of the film. It’s a haunting, beautiful end to our retrospective of the best films of indie Memphis’ first twenty years.
Surf a wave of nostalgia for this week’s Music Video Monday.
A few years ago, Memphis filmmaker (and Flyer contributor) Ben Siler started making a video for “Shoot Him Again, His Soul’s Still Dancing” by Minneapolis band Big Waves of Pretty. But life intervened, and he only recently finished the project, which he calls “pure, experimental lo-fi imagery…it features me and Monica Summerfield doing our best Wild at Heart impressions.”
The video is a hypnotic montage of hazy memories of the ups and downs of a relationship. As with many Siler productions, things seem unconnected at first, until a narrative subtly emerges, and the lost love turns dark.
Music Video Monday: Big Waves of Pretty
If you’d like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
There are lots of songs about life on the road. But when it’s the Rolling Stones or Bob Seger singing about the hardships of the tour, it falls a little flat. Those songs are more like humblebrags than honest laments. But the video for Chris Milam’s “Kids These Days”, shot by Andrew Trent Fleming, and co-directed by Milam and MVM frequent flyer Ben Siler, rings true to the struggles of the small timer trying to break in to the business. But it’s not all grim grind—there are little moments of magic that keep Milam going. It’s those evocative mood swings that make this video work so well.
Music Video Monday: Chris Milam
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
