ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL

Last weekend, the West Coast entries in the Ann Arbor Film Festival were screened at the Detroit Repertory Theater. If they are indicative of all the entries, this will be a very poor year for Ann Arbor. None of the films stood out as exceptional and of the two films which were watchable, neither was exceptionally experimental, nor daring.

The best of the films was Sound of Flesh, by John Stewart, a surrealistic study of the breakdown of sex through plastic. The idea is sound and the images well chosen (a girl wearing a plastic bubble bra and a mini skirt is separated from her lover, wearing a suit and tie, by a wall of naked manikins. He attacks the wall, but failing to find anything real, turns and runs away) but the film borrows its structure heavily from Emschwiller’s Relativity, without ever achieving the shock of recognition when cutting from one image to the next one, that Emschwiller achieved with every cut.