Given the high–caliber talent here on campus, Northwestern is constantly showcasing experimental, alternative student art that's well worth checking out. This week, instead of analyzing the typical Hollywood Trailer Trash, we’re taking a look at some notable works produced by NU film students over the past few years.
On My Own
Director: Jake Marcks
Cast: Anna Marr, Charles Mueller
What it’s about: On My Own, an experimental short film by Jake Marcks, uses a reality television format to warp a medium usually reserved for trashy programming into something "more akin to a horror movie."
“The core idea behind the movie is editing. Most people are aware that when they watch reality TV, they're really watching something that has been heavily edited and constructed and sometimes scripted,” Communication alumnus Marcks told NBN. “I think there's a certain cruelty to that, to taking a person and chopping up and manipulating their portrayal of themselves to suit your own needs.”
Our narrative follows high school dropouts Molly (Communication alumna Anna Marr) and Derek (Bienen and Communication alumnus Charles Mueller), a young couple grappling with finances, family and the banality of anonymous corporate employment as they adjust to living on their own for the first time. The film’s big twist is that Molly and Derek also co-star in a reality television show, On My Own, a sort of documentation of their day-to-day grind as they struggle to scrape by and maintain a healthy relationship. Over the film’s 12-or-so minutes, the ubiquitous presence of a handheld camera intruding on Molly and Derek’s lives flares tensions between them and eventually takes the show off the rails into the territory of a “scary, inhuman monstrosity.”
Marcks achieves his increasingly frenzied aesthetic through quick cuts, rapid editing and animation flourishes that recall similarly themed programs like Teen Mom or 16 and Pregnant. Though the script follows mapped-out story beats, the dialogue between Marr and Mueller is entirely improvised, lending their performances a naturalistic quality well suited to reality television. Marr, who serves as the focus of the story, is particularly unnerved as her life collapses under the magnifying lens of the camera.
“I’ve always liked stories and projects that are unsettling in small ways,” Marcks said, citing House of Leaves, an experimental novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, as an influence for his work. “I did a short prior to this called Calumet that was a similar concept (a corporate training video that becomes scary and strange), so this was a more elaborate and fully–realized expansion from that.”
Thinking About You
Director: Harrison Atkins
Cast: Drigan Lee, Zoe Maltby
What it's about: An impassioned love affair occurs between two teenagers with a shared set of exceptional abilities in Thinking About You, a short film from RTVF graduate Harrison Atkins.
Brandon (Communication alumnus Drigan Lee) is a teenage telepath and a social pariah, cast out and forced to wear a bulbous helmet that prevents his mind’s powerful subjectivity from intruding into the lives and thoughts of others. Used to being a loner, Brandon’s world is flipped around when he meets a new student, Janet (Communication senior Zoe Maltby), a girl similarly gifted and equally as shunned for her powers as Brandon.
Their love for each other is immediate and explosive, and as it grows they form a unique bond both mental and physical, merging consciousness and memories; however, this singular intimacy threatens Brandon’s grounding in reality, and he soon must choose between staying tethered to Janet and recessing further into himself or cutting ties and returning to a more normal life.
“If you trace it back really far, I think the original genesis of Thinking About You had to do with me being an only child and creating all these narratives of implicit connection with another person,” director Harrison Atkins said of his senior directing project. “The main draw of the project for me as a filmmaker was the opportunity to use formally experimental visual techniques to illustrate the internal experiences of the characters.”
The film’s distinctive look and more surrealistic visual touches were achieved through handmade glass camera filters, which were coated with substances like honey or glycerin to warp and distort images, an artful but also pragmatic choice for off-kilter science fiction. Similarly, the synthesized noises in the audio-visual mix are largely organic and homemade by the crew. Atkins and his collaborators were inspired to take this experimental route because of outré artists like Stan Brakhage and Kurt Kren, filmmakers known for their non-narrative style and atypical editing techniques.
Thinking About You was selected for the Grand Rapids Film Festival 2013 and the Route 66 International Film Festival 2013, among many other festival selections. Atkins has additionally just finished writing and directing a new film in a similar vein titled Chocolate Heart, an absurdist sex comedy produced by Alicia Van Couvering (Tiny Furniture) and Andrea Roa (this year’s Drinking Buddies).
High All Day
Director: Brandon Daley
Cast: David Brown, Chelsea Taylor, Fudgy (as himself), Julius Perry
What it’s about: High All Day is a high concept stoner comedy that takes a more sobering and critical look at a genre that usually champions recreational drug use.
“Most negatives in the world – or at least in the United States – come from drug and alcohol abuse,” director and RTVF alumnus Daley told NBN. “There’s a lot of negatives that come with smoking pot everyday.”
Daley’s film follows a particularly shitty day in the life of Linus (RTVF sophomore David Brown), a pothead whose intense habit cripples his memory in a similar fashion to that of the protagonist of Christopher Nolan's thriller Memento (2000). In fact, High All Day was originally intended as a sort of riff on Nolan’s hit film, framing its story with a scattered chronology through clever editing and a script that starts at the end and works backwards from there; however, Daley ran into trouble trying to piece things together in such a complex, anachronistic manner, finally deciding to cut the film more straightforwardly as a dark stoner comedy.
“I was a little disappointed in it,” he said, though he stated that he was still proud of his film and gave shout-outs to the actors for doing great work in capturing the essence of his characters. Through the experience of Linus, Daley and his team offer up a critique of a culture that celebrates casual drug use while shrugging off its apparent detrimental effects such as memory loss and laziness.
“I did not want to glorify [drug abuse] in the way other films do,” Daley said.
High All Day additionally features Communication graduate Chelsea Taylor as Linus's girlfriend, Jessica, and two non-university actors, Fudgy (who plays himself) and Julius Perry as Sticky Mike, a drug dealer.
Doggy Bag
Director: Lawrence Dai
Cast: Pat Buetow, Emily Olcott
What it's about: Doggy Bag, the senior thesis film by Lawrence Dai, begins with a Woody Allen-esque neurotic named Marshall (Communication senior Pat Buetow) breaking the fourth wall, a fittingly meta introduction for a movie centered on a man who struggles to communicate through any medium other than irony.
Like many of the films on this list, Doggy Bag examines someone grappling with a relationship heading steadily downhill. After a string of bland girlfriends, Marshall finds something special in Rachel (Communication alumna Emily Olcott), but his personality is so steeped in smarm and one-upsmanship that she quickly tires of his refusal to engage in honest conversation.
"I mean, is there anything in here that isn't ironic?" she asks, flustered, as she examines the various curios – goofy posters of horses, goofier paintings of clowns – scattered around Marshall's bedroom.
"Doggy Bag came around as my senior thesis film mostly due to the unfortunate realization that I was finding it harder and harder to be sincere around my friends," RTVF alumnus Dai said. "I found myself constantly surrounded by really smart and funny people ... And the thing about comedy people is that they're always ready with a joke, sometimes there's this tendency to constantly one-up each other's riffs ... I found that all of my social interactions were tinged with irony and performance, which made it hard to be sincere when I needed to be."
Filtered almost exclusively through Marshall's pop culturally savvy point of view, Doggy Bag features a wide spectrum of clever visual gags, from a convenient "Kiss Cam" setting on the camera to a full-stop karaoke video, complete with spandex-clad 80's flashdancers.
While Doggy Bag's humor may be breezy, its tone light, Marshall's experience has something universal to communicate about the facade of cool many high school and college-age students adopt to impress their peers.
"Ultimately, my wish for the film is to show that using humor as a defense mechanism might be easy or safe ... but in order to find love, one must risk being earnest and sincere," Dai said.
Sometimes it's better to be a little square.
Editor's Note: A previous version of this story mistakenly named Alicia Van Couvering as "Alice Van Courvering."