Due to the recent unpleasantness, Baton Rouge has eclipsed New Orleans as the largest city in Louisiana. Is the city destined for greatness? Scenic Highway is the name of US Highway 61 as it passes through northern Baton Rouge. It is also this trip to the city – and such landmarks as Huey Long’s art deco State Capitol building and Buckminster Fuller’s hidden geodesic dome. This darkly affectionate memoir is also an exposé of the city’s colorful history – told through the use of animated motion graphics, archival Super 8 footage, and re-created & faux-created elements. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2006, 18:15) Read More
VIDEO: 39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale of Interminable)
39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale Of Interminable) is an experimental film that challenges and subverts the typical elements of documentaries, thus making us all reflect upon important questions in documentary filmmaking such as What material can be trusted, can the voice-over narrator be trusted, where does documentary end and fiction start? Besides these questions, that the film raises, it has managed to convince the jury by it’s unusual and alienating collage of super 8 footage, by its investigative style and suspense. The film is putting audiences continuously on the wrong track yet consistently intriguing, leaving the viewer bewildred and pensive. Through its hybrid form, 39-A: A Travel Tale Of Interminable is showing inventive ways of dealing with documentary footage and transforming reality into film. – Webcuts.11
Weirdest of all is 39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale Of Interminable), which seems specifically designed to make the viewer feel as if he or she is experiencing some abnormal brain activity. In the short, Old Super 8 footage of a trip to the Kennedy Space Center is overlaid with an animated roadmap and a narration track that sounds as if it’s been run through Babel Fish half a dozen times. It’s proof—if more were needed—that finding the festival’s hidden treasures sometimes requires a little digging. – The Onion A.V. Club
… a high brow spoof on art theory, deconstruction, documentaries, and reality itself. – D Magazine
Evan Mather’s short film is one mindfuck of a travelogue. – Film Threat
In this insightful autobiographical mashup of Super-8 home movies, vibrant animated cartography, and Dutch pidgin-speak, a family’s 1981 vacation to the Kennedy Space Center is chronicled in exquisite detail. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2010, 7:24)
Read More »