Grits wows with Vishniac

by Jimmy Gilmore, Senior Staff Writer

Festival director Andy Smith called it, "an experiment." A fusion of recorded images and live music, of disembodied sounds and microscopic organisms, the Indie Grits's Bickel Avec Vishniac event represented everything that makes this festival stand out. It's also the reason why it demands to be taken seriously as a growing art festival.

Roman Vishniac was a pioneering micro-cinematographer who discovered new ways to film microscopic organisms. His work might be most familiar to you from PBS documentaries about the life of such creatures. Fifty minutes of "outtakes" from the University of South Carolina's Moving Image Research Collection's Vishniac Collection, edited down from hundreds of hours of footage, puts the focus on movement. Tiny creatures blown up on a big screen. Pulsing, gyrating, mutating. Behind them, Chris Bickel performed improvised sound mixing and effects based on his conceptions and interpretations of the footage. Some effects came pre-prepared; others culled from his existing library; others still made up on the spot; all of it fused together as a live performance. Bickel admitted afterward it was the first time he had seen the footage all together.

Perhaps Bickel felt a tinge of David Lynchian atmosphere to the proceedings. Dressed in a simple black suit with black tie (a la Lynch's Dale Cooper from television series Twin Peaks) and pushing his straight up akin to Jack Nance's famous Eraserhead character, Bickel stood on stage beneath a projector. The audience could watch him watching the screen, performing his every move. The eerie music, the images of unrecognizable images -- it all felt like it was taking place somewhere other than "here." Sure, it's not quite a Lynch dreamscape -- where objects take on new meanings, music decentralizes a sense of space, and performance reigns over all -- but it's the closest metaphor to describe the event.

Dr. Mark Cooper, director of USC's Moving Image Research Collections, spoke before and after the film. Contextualizing Vishniac's career, he was also sure to echo Smith's description of this as an "experiment." Cooper called this a merging of interests and communities that explored the relationship between image and sound.

Of the images themselves, it was hard not to be constantly at awe with the detail, the texture, and the movement of the critters as they loomed across the screen. Sitting towards the front of the theater, feeling almost enveloped by their presence, the Vishniac screenings provided an equal amount of exploration in addition to experimentation. Rachel Allen, a fourth year media arts and film and media studies student, edited the footage and joined Cooper and Bickel after the screening to discuss the process. She alluded several times to ideas about motion and evolution, where sifting through the footage became a process more about finding sections and trying to highlight Vishniac's fascination with these creatures' movements.

So why do I say this is a defining event for Indie Grits? On the one hand, it lets the MIRC showcase its collection in a daring new way. If Indie Grits is about giving a space for local and regional filmmakers, then it should provide equal space for such important collections as those at South Carolina. Thankfully, it does. It networks different institutions and gives academics like Cooper and performers like Bickel a place to converge in dynamic ways. Such a unique program idea -- live performance mixed with archival outtake footage -- is daring at least and brilliant at best.

If you want a film festival (or an arts festival, as programs like these are about destabilizing notions of "film screenings" to provide a much more actively performative take) to truly stand out, you organize things like this.