Movies and their makers

Hollywood has conditioned most moviegoers too well. Offered productions within familiar limits -- about two hours in length, recognizable character types, lots of dialogue and action sequences -- audiences often overlook the power of film as an interpretive art form.

Several short films produced by U.Va. faculty and students and screened in early December demonstrated how the medium of moving pictures can do much more than simply entertain.

Assistant art professor and film producer Kevin Everson opened with “Spicebush,” a 68-minute film that he likened to a collage. Black-and-white footage shot in a Mississippi elementary school alternates with an Ohio warehouse. Scenes at a highway rest stop cut to a toddler in a darkened room watching threatening TV episodes of “Get Christie Love.” Honeybees and ladybugs do cameo stand-ins as state insects.

“I like to use reality as a device,” the filmmaker cautioned an audience gathered in a large Campbell Hall classroom on a Friday afternoon. While some of the television shows and other found footage -- snippets of a basketball game at an integrated high school, for example -- present as reality, other scenes are shot to resemble found footage, just as many contemporary scenes are shot in black and white to give an archival feeling. Long, unedited sequences of a principal’s monotone morning announcements -- “If you have candy money, see Miss Brown,” we are informed -- come off as ordinary and thus truthful parts of his poetic mix.

“ ‘Spicebush’ uses a false narrative,” Everson explained, referring to the way his film unfolds with numbered chapters like a novel. He added that the film, which was featured at the 2004 Virginia Film Festival, is really “a longer version of my other work.”

Everson, now in his fifth year at the University, outlined his ongoing themes as luck (exemplified in “Spicebush” with some overly-cheery Ohio lottery announcements), black America, education, landscapes, manual labor, jobs and the passage of time.

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Together with Corey D. B. Walker, religious studies professor and director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, Everson presented the second film of the afternoon, “Fifeville.” A 15-minute film, shot by students in Everson’s advanced film class, it combined unedited shots and interviews to create a portrait of the Charlottesville neighborhood in the manner of German photographer August Sander and African-American photographer James Van Der Zee.

Walker explained how the directors and students “did not want a documentary like PBS, with a talking head and a god-voice,” but hoped rather to evoke the Holsinger Collection photographs of early Charlottesville and to capture “the beauty of everyday life.”

“The film provides us with one lens of how to present the community,” Walker added, noting “there are many Fifevilles.” He is pleased that despite the particularity of the community, the film speaks to other neighborhoods, too; after showing “Fifeville” in Norfolk recently, he was told, “You all could have shot this on Church Street.”

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Two student films -- “Mixed Messages” and “Checkout,” created specifically for the Film Festival’s Adrenaline Film Project -- plus U.Va. art professor’s Bill Wylie’s “Grassland” rounded out the film screening.

Wylie, a former resident of Colorado who now teaches photography at U.Va., created his approximately eight-minute film by excerpting segments of almost an hour’s worth of 35mm film shot for a convention center expansion project in Denver. His images of the state’s eastern plains use a fixed camera position and ambient sound. “Grassland” images register only small changes, like wind blowing through trees or clouds on the move, capturing the feeling of looking out a window. His longer film versions will ultimately play out on a high-definition television screen inside one of 12 elevators in the new 30-story building.

“I think it’s a really fantastic idea and concept,” said Wylie, who is curious to see whether having moving images on a 52-inch flat screen on the rear wall will affect the way elevator riders orient themselves. The footage, shot during two separate days with crews from Dewey-Obenchain Films, was funded by Denver’s “1 percent for art” requirement for public construction.

The project became “a good transition for me from still photography to cinematography,” he said. The convention center elevators are to be operational by 2006, but in the meantime Wylie hopes to gain permission to showcase variations of the films at other shows and galleries.