IFP/ROTTERDAM, POST #1

To climb on a plane again to Europe after only twenty-four hours home in New York was a combination of exciting and somehow inconceivable. The mere six days I spent at Sundance felt like a month, practically, for all that happened. And in departing on Friday evening, I was not leaving for another six days. No, when I return on 02/13, I will have been here for over two weeks.

But it’s all very exciting — just a matter of keeping the basics on target (water, food, sleep).

My first Rotterdam experience occurred not in the city itself but on the shuttle on the way from Amsterdam. I was fortunate enough to share a cab with Pippilotti Rist. I didn’t know it at the time, but she is a prolific and amazingly imaginative video and installation artist, based in Switzerland, who not only had her feature, PEPPERMINTA playing at Sundance, but had also an installation piece in New Frontiers. I missed it there, but after a swift and exciting conversation with Pippilotti on the shuttle, I was determined not to miss it here in Rotterdam.

And see it I did tonight, in a sold-out house. Prior to the screening she had an amusing conversation with a famous museum curator (so famous I forgot his name, I’m afraid), at the conclusion of which she led the audience in a rousing battle cry: “I am not alone!”

It makes sense when you see the film, which is about, as Rist puts it, the exploration (and I would add explosion) of “unnecessary fears.” Hang-ups. Social conventions. Fear of failure. “I want to show how caged we are even though we live in a free culture,” she said.

And the film bears out this radical philosophy on the level not only of content (which recalls A HARD DAY’S NIGHT in its meandering silliness), but also and most emphatically form. Reminiscent of V?ra Chytilová‘s DAISIES, which Rist cites as an inspiration, PEPPERMINTA exhibits a seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary of formal conceits, jokes and tricks, combined with an almost alarmingly free camera and pungent use of color. The end effect is to make one feel like a kid after an hour alone in a candy store: sated, amazed, and possibly a little nauseous from all the overstimulation.

But the radical message of ebullience and, fundamentally, openness to possibility pervade even the strangest moments. And came through with crystal clarity even though the film was in German with Dutch subtitles.

Check out a trailer here:

I will post more tomorrow on the panels we’ve attended so far. Some extremely interesting ideas, pushing crowdsourcing in different directions — I would argue further and in more interesting places than we’ve done in the U.S. so far.