Cynthia Plaster Caster wants you... Cynthia sizes up the Incredible Simulation guys. Gone's Cecilia Dougherty. The infamous French tickler press pass.

Well, Sundance wouldn't give us press passes, so George sent me to the 8th Annual New York Underground Film Festival instead. The NYUFF is one cool organization. The people running the show are sharp and sassy, and everyone I dealt with was friendly, knowledgeable and helpful. There were even a few Insound people working for the festival, so it was cool to have a chance to meet people at least remotely connected to Splendid face to face! (Most Splendid writers have never met...)

The festival was a week long, although the last two days were dedicated to replaying some of the more popular films from earlier in the week. There were screenings each day from about noon to midnight; that's a lot of films! I was only able to make it to a few films on Thursday and a few more on Sunday (got to make the donuts). Attendance at all screenings was high -- press tickets were released at noon, and by the time the evening showings came around they were mostly gobbled up. I had trouble getting into a few of the screenings, but the staff helped me out, so I got to see pretty much everything I went for.

In addition to lots of screenings, there were also a bunch of concerts and parties tied to the festival. Because I'm a dork I didn't actually make it to any of them, although some of them sounded real nice. Next time.

Thursday night I started off with the only film on the whole festival that I had heard about before and that I was determined to see: Plaster Caster: A Cockumentary Film by Chicago filmmaker Jessica Villines. Plaster Caster is a strangely touching and perverse look at the life of Cynthia Plaster Caster, the legendary cock-mold-making 1960s rock star groupie and artist. It follows her around as she prepares for her first ever gallery show at Threadwaxing Space in NYC. The charm of the film is largely due to Cynthia herself; she comes off as an incredibly sweet, slightly neurotic, slightly naive, wholly wacky woman who just happened to have had a really clever idea almost forty years ago. She's now in her early 50s, but she still has funky died hair, hangs out in indie rock clubs and flirts with bands. At the Q&A session after the film she called herself a "chicken hawk", referring to her still-active appetite for cute young men. And while it might seem unlikely, by the end of the film you can't help but be awed by the fact that this sweet, awkward woman is still getting down with the occasional scrawny rocker boy, not to mention making casts of their cocks.

Rock and roll shenanigans aside, one of the most compelling aspects of the story is the tension between Cynthia the "outsider artist" and the New York art world insiders who are putting on her show. When Cynthia's newly-assigned publicist asks her what her biggest fear about the show is, she says she's just afraid that her mother will finally find out what she does. Time and time again, when she's forced to deal with strangers (the people making duplicates of her sculptures for the show, the art handler, the gallery managers, famous castees), what ultimately comes across is her sincere attachment to the work and the memories that go with it. Although at one point she says that she'd someday like to make some money off of the whole affair, it's clear that given the choice between some cash and her "babies", the cash wouldn't stand a chance.

The film is full of strange scenes, odd personalities and great quotes. Cynthia gets her casting materials and advice from her dentist, often while he's working on her teeth. At one point they have a very ordinary conversation about the problem of keeping the cock hard while doing the casting; he says that even if it goes soft she can always try again, since cocks are like perrenials -- they keep coming back. Eric Burdon (from The Animals) says that making cock casts is a "ballsy thing to do." Momus draws a parallel between his cast and British post-modern rock: "both are unerect." And so on.

As you'd expect, there are cock jokes aplenty in the film, but there's also lots of honest, direct emotion, and insight into the not always pleasant personalities that make up Cynthia's world. Cynthia Plaster Caster has a clever gimmick, and that's why someone wanted to make a film about her. But Jessica Villines wisely takes the film beyond the gimmick and into the chaotic world of the real person behind it. In choosing to focus on Cynthia and not just her notoriety, Villines has managed to make an extremely compelling and honest cockumentary.

Next up on Thursday night was a double feature: Punking Out, a 1978 documentary by Maggi Carson, Juliusz Kossakowski & Frederic Shore and ...An Incredible Simulation, a new documentary by Jeff Economy & Darren Hacker. Punking Out was filmed one night in the spring of 1977 at CBGB's, the epicenter of the 1970s NYC punk scene. It's a fascinating look at some legends in the making, and includes interviews with a young lady named Lydia Lunch (already a bad ass), a bunch of wise-aleck kids called The Dead Boys and those totally incoherent glue-sniffers, The Ramones. Although a few interesting performances were captured (like The Dead Boys doing a cover of "Anarchy in the UK"), the best parts of the film are the mini-interviews with the bands and the crowd. Apparently The New Yorker had recently run an article about "punk rock", which had resulted in a sudden influx of gawkers and wannabee punks. Even in its earliest days, the punk scene was struggling with questions of legitimacy, street cred and belonging, and many of the people interviewed clearly have the "what does it mean to be a punk" question on their minds.

Then again, lots of the kids at the show clearly don't care, which probably means they were the real punks. Lydia Lunch throws used tampons at The Dead Boys. Richard Hell rocks out on "Blank Generation". When asked how the loud music affects her, a girl says, "It made me want to kill my mother once. I didn't do it." Hilly Kristal, CB's owner, says that the super loud music actually prevents violence, since no one can hear well enough to say anything nasty. Meanwhile, The Ramones explain that they write songs about sniffing glue because where they come from, there's nothing else to do but sniff glue and write songs.

For a hand-held film shot in a dark club in black and white, Punking Out looks pretty great. And the sound is amazingly clear, given the circumstances. As I understand it, the print we saw is one that is currently being restored. Hopefully they'll be some sort of video or even internet release of this film soon; it's really worth a look, particularly if you have any interest in the history of underground music in the United States.

Speaking of questions of legitimacy, ...An Incredible Simulation (The Nation's #1 Tribute Film) dives into the wacky, sleazy, slightly depressing world of midwestern tribute bands. According to the filmmakers, on any given night there's a tribute band playing the songs of any band you could imagine, within an hour's drive of Chicago. Armed with only a video camera and a mic (and hopefully earplugs), they set out to document this troubling phenomenon.

Unfortunately, video is not as forgiving of dark, noisy environments as film is, and I found this video very hard to watch. It's about an hour long, and by the end of it I was pretty much ready to heave. So I guess it's a tribute to the content of the film that I stayed put through the whole thing. Remember that scene in Gummo where a bunch of trashy folks get drunk in someone's kitchen and start beating up on a chair? That's what this movie is like, only it's real.

Let's see, there's Hot Rocks, a Rolling Stones tribute band with a middle aged, kneepad-and-tights-wearing Mick Jagger. Then there's the sleazy, hairy guy in the Neil Diamond/Abba tribute band called Lightning and Thunder. Nuthin' Fancy is a Molly Hatchet tribute band. Yes, it's true. I don't know who Molly Hatchet is either, but someone must. Crazy Flame does Janis Joplin covers. Prezence: Led Zep. Fair Warning: Van Halen. Funky Monks: The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Ball Breakers: AC/DC. Sticky Fingers: The Stones. Blackwall: Kiss. Strutter: Kiss. Kisss: Kiss. You get the picture.

Then there are the younger sort of ironic/hipster tribute bands. The Replicas play Gary Numan songs. Numan is interviewed in the film -- he says it's truly frightening to him that anyone would look to him as a role model. The Young Men do Joy Division. Giant Bug Village does Guided By Voices. Adam and the Ants do...I'll let you guess.

While all of the bands obviously like the music of the band they're covering, there also seems to be a heavy "let's play dress up" element to the whole thing. Nearly every band wears makeup and costumes. The Mick Jagger clones seem particularly interested in exploring Mick's less, um, manly side. Maybe tribute bands are a convenient way for otherwise heavily repressed midwestern men to explore their tights and boa-wearing impulses. Maybe they're just really scary.

Strippers, explosions, big hair, drunken revelry, rock and roll...this film pretty much has it all. And while the filmmakers do their best to stay out of the scene and let the bands speak for themselves, there's no denying that this video presents a somewhat pathetic, depressing view of the testosterone and beer fueled atmosphere that these bands thrive in. It is a bit hard to watch, but this is a fascinating, voyeuristic look into a world that many of us will (hopefully) never have a chance to enter.

Whew! So by this point I was pretty tired, and felt like hurling (I don't usually get motion sick, but something about the chaotic images and sounds in ...An Incredible Simulation really got to me), but I was sitting next to a cutie, so I figured I might as well stay for the next show. Unfortunately the next show turned out to be full of gross-out sex, drugs, gore, low-quality images and shaky cameras, so I didn't exactly feel refreshed afterwards.

First up was the short Freaks on the Beach by Chase Lounge. (Ha ha.) From what I could tell, the filmmaker and his friends went to the beach one day, took off some of their clothes, ran around, pretended to vomit on themselves a few times and filmed the whole thing. That's pretty much it. The image and sound were both pretty bad. In general the sound in the films I saw on Sunday was better than I expected; usually sound seems to be the lowest priority for indie filmmakers. The picture quality was pretty dismal, though. It could be that many of the films were shot with cheap video cameras and then blown up for projection, which is a pretty nasty looking process (Freaks... was shot on Super 8 and then transfered to video). So while I can't really fault the filmmakers for using what's available to them, I do wonder whether it's really worth going through the trouble of projecting something that's going to look way crappier big than it would on a TV or even streamed over the web. But that's another story.

Freaks on the Beach was kind of dopey, but at least it was short and sweet. Chase Lounge introduced it in about seven words, something along the lines of "Here's something I made with my friends". The next film, Fucked in the Face by Chicago filmmaker Shawn Durr, was also dopey, but it was anything but short or sweet. As you might imagine, face-fucking of a particularly brutal sort figured largely in film. It's clearly a John Waters wannabe, but instead of being clever and subversive it's just sort of monotonously gory and over the top. The story is rather complicated, but it's essentially about a down on his luck semi-homeless young guy who bounces from boyfriend to boyfriend and bed to bed all the while idolizing a pretty boy serial killer he saw on a wanted poster. Surrounding him are a variety of pathetic/psychotic characters, among them a trio of "fag-hating lesbians" (one of whom is named "Ruff Snatch", a la Waters), an evil, abusive, face-fucking daddy/john, an evil, abusive, face-fucking ex-boyfriend (whose copious, chunky and possibly brown, spew we get to admire about thirty times) and a really annoying insecure guy who washes his hands a lot and ends up bludgeoning someone to death. Oh, and of course there's the pretty boy serial killer. We see various characters getting fucked in the face and otherwise penetrated in a variety of ways (at one point one of the lesbians mounts the funeral urn of her recently murdered lover). We see a bunch of people get killed. We see lots of spew and lots of white powder being snorted. Etc. The film was about an hour long, and by the end of it I just really really really wanted to go home and go to bed. The characters were just caricatures, and all the filmmakers seemed to have to say was that young gay men spend a lot of time having sex, taking drugs and killing people, while lesbians spend their time having sex, hating men and killing people. It's clear that this was supposed to be a parody, but I'm not sure what the target was meant to be. Despite his cleverness, even some of John Waters' films get bogged down in their own silliness from time to time. Fucked in the Face, lacking any sort of subtlety, cleverness or even style, was was worse than bogged down; it was awful.

Then I went home and slept for three days.

The first thing I saw on Sunday was a shorts program called Fast Food Fuck. (Yes, "fuck" seemed to be a pretty popular word/concept at the festival. Go figure.) I like shorts programs, particularly in situations where many of the films are not exactly hi-fi. I'm not at all down on low-fi, on a budget of zero dollars and zero cents productions; it's just that, as anyone who's been forced to sit through a wedding video or kid's dance recital knows, watching low-fi video for long periods of time can be really painful. In short doses, however, it can be great.

And some of the stuff on Fast Food Fuck was great! The show started out with Jerks, Don't Say "Fuck" by Zhao Liang from China. It's composed of recolored and distorted loops of oppressive-feeling video clips of military imagery: armed women marching in formation, a man pounding rocks, lots of pictographic "no" signs (e.g. a "no smoking" image) and so on. It's very rhythmic and engaging, although the distorted techno sound track could have been a lot louder. Billed as an "anti-totalitarian camcorder tirade", it's both clever and disturbing. The finale, in which a squadron of shirt-less men fly off into the distance, is a suitably ambiguous way to end the tirade.

Stephen Marshall's documentary The Most Dangerous Game is a slickly distorted look at the history of the top-secret CIA mind control project code-named MK-ULTRA. MK_ULTRA involved bringing ex-Nazi scientists to the US after WWII so that government scientists could learn and expand on the mind-control research they had been doing. Using heavily processed interviews as well as some archival footage, Marshall has constructed a hyper-stylized "Guerrrilla News Network" report that wouldn't feel out of place in a Matrix-style sci-fi flick. The scary thing is that it's all true. This is a good looking, rather troubling film.

The next video, Helium by Patty Chang, was the freaky highlight of the program. A wig-wearing woman (Chang) sits in a chair. She talks dirty to an off-screen figure as they hand her balloons filled with helium and water. She sucks the helium out of the balloon, takes the water into her mouth, spits the water out all over herself, and demands another balloon. This goes on for six minutes, with Chang's voice and manner getting more and more out of control: "Come on, give it to me. Wet my face. Is that the best you can do? Come on! I want it now!" Occasionally there are jump cuts and Chang is inexplicably wearing dry clothes and a new wig. Finally she can't take her assistant's incompetence any more and says, "Come on, I'll do it my fucking self!" as she grabs one of the balloons and starts biting at it trying to get at the helium and water inside. This was hysterical. Trust me.

Continuing with the fetishistic silliness was Xan Price's Pikkulzz, an erotic video featuring a jar full of pickles, a bunch of scuzzy hair and floor-sweepings, some sqeezable foods and a razor blade. With slowed-down getdown music playing in the background, a man's hand romances one of the pickles in the jar. He caresses, strokes and smears the poor thing into a frenzy, then in a rather disturbing climax he slits it with the razor blade. Yikes. This one was a lot of fun, and it also looked and sounded great.

The next film, Shawn P. Morrissey's Automatic Meat Probe, had a distinctly old-skool, non-digital feel to it. Morrissey took a fight scene from a bad '70s action film and went to town with the optical printer and magic markers. He plays the scene through in various ways, blocking out one character or the other, slowing down blows, highlighting bad acting faces and so on. While it probably would have stood up as a really bad segment on its own, Morrissey managed to transform the scene from merely bad to gloriously awful. Some of the effects were a bit tired-feeling, but they were used in such a playful, creative way that it didn't really bother me.

The penultimate film on the program was Chilean/Cuban director Alicia Scherson's The Last Olive (La Ultima Aceituna) (in Spanish with English subtitles). It's a seventeen minute black and white epic about two jewel thieves (a man and a woman) who are holed up in a crappy motel after a heist. As they wait around trying to make contact with the gangster who is supposed to help them get rid of the jewels, they have to figure out how to deal with a lack of food (they only have one jar of olives), a lack of smokes, constantly humping neighbors and, ultimately, each other. The film moves pretty slowly, although it's punctuated by some humorous scenes, like when the woman figures out how to eat olives with her feet. After sitting around half-naked for a few days (hours?) listening to the neighbors go at it, the pair start humping each other (he out of love, she out of boredom). We don't get to watch. He takes a bunch of showers. She paws through the trash looking for butts. Finally he manages to get a hold of the gangster while the woman is in the shower. But instead of telling the gangster where they are, he tells him that he's bailing out on their deal, that he wants to marry the woman and that he's going to keep all the jewels to pay for the wedding. The gangster thinks that's a bad idea. The man hangs up. Later, when the man goes out to get some food to please the woman, the gangster calls back. The woman answers. She doesn't know what the man is planning (he kind of creeps her out), and just wants to get out of there, so she tells him where they are. Except that she's not really sure what room they're in, so she guesses. You probably know where this is going, so I'll leave it for you to figure out. This is a tense, humorous, well made film. Scherson leaves all of the exciting stuff, the sex and the violence and the heist itself, off screen. All she lets you see is the boredom, the waiting, the slow sadness of a doomed couple. Yet all the while there's a sense that there's something else, something big, something tragic or exhilarating just beyond your reach. That's a nice trick.

The last of the shorts was Route Master - Theatre of the Motor from Finish director Ilppo Pohjola. I can't really say too much about it, since it made me (and much of the rest of the audience) incredibly drowsy. It was a lovely, grainy, black and white montage of race cars, car crashes and fuzzy, abstract shapes. Apparently it was about "speed and the use of human cadavers in crash tests", but it was so slow and lulling that I didn't really get anything out of it other than an intense desire to go to sleep. It would probably work much better either as an installation or as a video projected behind some other sort of action. Or maybe it would be a good video to go to sleep to. It was only seventeen minutes long, but it's pretty hard to actually focus on something so soft and abstract for that long. My feeling is that it's a very strong work, but that a regular theater is the wrong place to show it.

So then I went out and ate dinner at an overpriced and not very good veggie restaurant in the East Village. I should have just gone to Kate's, which is always good, but I wasn't thinking straight after the last video, so I wandered into this other place instead. Then I spent an hour or so browsing some of the many "custom kitch" stores that are popping up in the East Village. You know, clocks made from Dukes of Hazzard lunch boxes, little sculptures of Grover eating Big Bird for dinner, that sort of thing. I briefly toyed with the idea of giving in to my exhaustion and calling it a night, but I was pretty excited about the next film, so I pinched my nipples a few times to wake up and headed back to the Anthology.

By the time I got back, there were a ton of people in line for Cecilia Dougherty's two-channel video, Gone. Dougherty was one of the bigger names on the festival, which probably accounts for the size of the crowd. Gone is thirty seven minutes long, and they were going to show it twice that night. I saw the first showing, and when I left the theater there was another full-house crowd waiting to get in. That's pretty impressive for a short, experimental video work!

Gone is projected as two images on one large screen, giving a split screen effect. Its structure and dialog are based on an episode of the 1970s documentary TV series An American Family, in which a camera crew filmed a family's day to day life. The episode was re-staged and filmed by Dougherty and a small group of her actor/artist friends. It's pretty hard to explain exactly what happened; "re-staged" is probably the wrong word, but I'm not sure what else to call it. The story is about a young woman living in the Chelsea Hotel with her friend (girlfriend?). Her mother comes for a visit, and normal mother-child "when are you going to get a job?", "I'm so proud of you", "Write to your father once in awhile" interactions ensue. Now here's the hard part: the actors don't really act out these parts. It's more that they play themselves, but instead of saying what they'd normally say, they say lines from the episode. Often the same scene is presented on both screens, but on one the actors are really not acting and on the other they're sort of acting. Or sometimes a scene is repeated but the mood of the actors changes, in one they're neutral, in another they're really depressed or neurotic. Then there are occasional "reality" sections in which everyone in the film just sort of hangs out in the hotel room they're shooting in and gabs. It's all very confusing, but also totally engaging and weird. You have no idea really what's going on or what you're supposed to be following. Ultimately you get a sense of who the actors are as real people, and forget about the story that they're ostensibly there to act out. In the middle of all of this are a couple of music video-like interludes (with music by Mike Iveson and Le Tigre), as well as a strange dance by Jennifer Monson in which she dances with her dog, gets naked and seems to hump a large bunny rabbit doll.

Okay, so it was pretty confusing, and I'm not even sure how much of it I'm remembering correctly after the fact. What I do remember is that it looked and sounded great, the dual-screen setup was used very effectively, and the story and the people telling it were weirdly compelling, even if what they were doing didn't necessarily make any sense. This was probably the most engaging film I saw at the festival; it's the only one that I'm still actively thinking about, the only one that was at once serious, challenging and entertaining. I imagine Gone will have some sort of tour/distribution. You should definitely check it out if you can.

So that was my two days at the New York Underground Film Festival. Some of the stuff I saw was really crappy and some of it was hard to look at, but on the balance I was quite impressed with what I saw. I'm not sure that traditional "sit in a theater and watch the video" is the most appropriate format for a lot of what's being created these days. It will be interesting to see what sort of impact the web-based film sites like iFilm.com will have on flesh and blood festivals like the NYUFF. And while there's something to be said for easy-on-the-eyes digital distribution, there's also nothing quite like sitting in a room full of people who are all cracking up as they watch a woman curse and gobble up helium filled balloons on a big screen. Either way, it's clear that the underground cinema is alive and well. "Blueballs for the undergound cinema!"

For more information on the New York Underground Film Festival, visit its website.

Article and photos by Irving Bellemead