The Chicago Underground Film Festival, which takes place Wednesday, June 6, through Sunday, June 10, celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. We take a look back at some notable features that screened in previous editions of the festival, movies demonstrating that “underground” is a happily elastic term.
Migrating FormsChicagoan James Fotopoulos directed this stark 1999 drama in which a man and woman meet repeatedly in a mostly bare room for nearly wordless and apparently passionless sex, filmed in low-contrast black and white. Usually when they commence, an electronic screeching begins and Fotopoulos cuts to the man’s cat, which appears to be watching the action with greater affect than either human displays. The woman has a grotesque growth on her back, and soon the man is infected by it. A few mundane incidents, such as an exterminator wanting to spray the apartment for roaches, take on wider significance later, as when the man finds a roach and myriad dead flies. Flickering white and shots of water open and close the film, enclosing the action like a prison cell; Fotopoulos seems to suggest that life itself is a form of disease—hopeless, meaningless, and ugly. 80 min. —Fred Camper
Two Years at SeaThe first feature-length effort (2011) by noted experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers demonstrates such mastery of the image that it’s worth seeing for the textures alone. Shooting on black-and-white celluloid, he creates a hazy, granulated look that suggests an old daguerreotype come to life, which feels appropriate considering his subject is a human anachronism. Former sailor Jake Williams (whom Rivers first documented in the 2006 short This Is My Land) lives a solitary life in the Scottish wilderness, scavenging for food and constructing items from industrial refuse. This is filled with gorgeous natural imagery, but it isn’t an environmentalist statement or even a straight documentary: in one of the more audacious sequences, Williams gazes in wonder as his trailer floats to the top of a tree. 90 min. —Ben Sachs
