These 20 short videos (some transferred from celluloid) are all engaging, and a number are excellent. Camera (2001, 8 min.) was inspired by a dream veteran director David Cronenberg remembers from his youth, in which he grew old while watching a movie. Some young kids wheel a 35-millimeter camera rig into a home and prepare to shoot a single image of a middle-aged actor; at the end, Cronenberg presents the image in all its horrifying banality, linking cinema with the process of dying. Guy Maddin’s Hospital Fragment (1993, 5 min.) is even creepier, a cryptic drama of erotic mutilation set in his usual tight, disorienting spaces. Todd Voigt’s purposely infantile Bad Mommy Bad Daddy (1995) uses exaggerated performances and minimal sets to convey the pathology of an oedipal drama in a dysfunctional family (distant father, alcoholic mother). And Mondo Ford (1965, 8 min.), by Italian filmmaker Ricardo Fratelli, is a mordantly funny spoof of JFK conspiracy theories that fingers, among others, Gerald Ford, Sasquatch, and space aliens. Other highlights include work by Noam Gonick, D.B. Griffith, S. Rothenberg, Jim Trainor, and Doug Lussenhop. The total running time of the videos is 104 minutes, but a number of live performances will push the program toward the five-hour mark.
