Recap Starz Denver Film Festival: Bruce Bickford

It’s not surprising that Bruce Bickford collaborated with Frank Zappa. The odd, aging animator and the wacky, avant-garde musician have both created striking, controversial work that heaves audiences beyond their comfort levels and throws them into a world of zany, often unsettling material—each with a wealth of talent to back up the weirdness. And although some of Bickford’s most famous works are collaborations with the late Zappa, on the afternoon of Saturday, November 15, at the Starz Denver Film Festival at Starz FilmCenter, Bickford went Zappa-less. Festival artistic director Britt Withey introduced the 61-year-old filmmaker’s work, gushing with genuine excitement about the imminent screening of Bickford’s work.

Opening the program was 1988’s Prometheus’ Garden, an edgy, disturbing Claymation short loosely—make that very loosely—based on the Greek myth of its namesake. The film follows whims more than plots, seamlessly transmuting one creepy stop-motion figure into the next. Warrior women in braids sprout naked from a congested garden; distorted soldiers melt into animals and are graphically hacked into bloody chunks of clay guts. Armed with a pointillist, science-fiction-worthy soundtrack of electronic bleeps, the film mesmerized Saturday’s rapt DFF audience.

The hypnotic, Claymation-induced trance continued with Bickford’s long-in-the-works new outburst, CAS’L’. For the screening, the dark, Denver-based Americana band Bad Luck City assembled at the front of the theater to perform their original score to the previously unscored film. Creating a haunted landscape of foreboding guitars and Kelly O’Dea’s eerie violin, BLC accompanied Bickford’s epic feature with an empathy that bordered on telepathic. Bad Luck City had obviously put a lot of time into writing the music, as their instrumental performance was perfectly synchronized to the clay transformations by musically recreating CAS’L’’s organic, rambling flow.

A Q&A session with the Bickford followed. Looking—and acting—like someone’s spindly, scraggly, hermit uncle, Bickford seemed reluctant about and uninterested in the questions asked. He explained that he doesn’t use a storyboard (which is obvious from his intriguing but mostly plotless movies), and he gave short, evasive responses to prying fans curious about the meaning of his films. Perhaps the most disappointing part of the afternoon was when an audience member asked what Bickford thought of Bad Lucky City’s compelling score. He detachedly answered, “It seems like something I’ve heard before,” with a mumble about North Carolina band Shark Quest—which scored the 2006 documentary about Bickford’s life, Monster Road. Hopefully the members of the band didn’t take him too seriously. Then Bickford disappeared to sell his self-described “clay doo-dads” in the lobby, and the puzzled audience was left with only visions of his surreal animation dancing in their heads.