Wisconsin Film Festival Potentially lost arts (Mini-Fest #4)

The Wisconsin Film Festival's five-day, 192-film schedule can be tough for any one person to digest. To make it a little less overwhelming, The A.V. Club put together a few mini-festivals centered around strangely specific and not-so-obvious topics.

Plenty of weird jobs and hobbies get the documentary treatment—competitive Donkey Kong, urban chicken farming, telling the same joke over and over. But what happens when these odd trades and pastimes face the possibility of extinction? Can a documentary be the Hail Mary a subculture needs to save its obsessions? The four films in the “Potentially lost arts Mini-Fest” all ask the question of what to do when jobs and hobbies face an uncertain future—and how those people react to the changing times.

Typeface: April 18, 11 a.m., Monona Terrace Convention Center
Synopsis: Artsy designer-types have a tendency to mythologize the antediluvian techniques that have now been replaced by iMacs. In Typeface, the anachronism du jour is woodcut type, a printmaking process that uses wooden typeset letters to print banner and poster ads. Filmgoers get a brief window into how the process works via footage of woodcut printing still being taught in select art programs, but the film ultimately aims to pulls folks into a larger discussion of the future of keeping the trade alive.
How it fits: The film finds its center at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum of Two Rivers, Wisc., a warehouse filled with trays of wood-type on display for curious onlookers. The main character is director Greg Corrigan, a designer-turned-curator tasked with sorting through piles of discarded woodcut letters, and interrogating 80-year-old retired typesetters to divine the trade secrets held in their geriatric brains. He bears a weight that the designer-tourists who visit his museum don’t seem to feel, as a hobbyist who’s taken his interest to the level of a moral imperative.
If you're obsessed with a potentially lost art, you’ll like this because: Director Justine Nagan might inspire you with guilt, especially if someone has dedicated a life to building a museum catering to your bizarre interests.

Special When Lit: April 17, 1 p.m., Chazen Museum of Art
Synopsis: Mercifully, one of the numerous pinball fanatics in Special When Lit makes the cliché reference to “Pinball Wizard” all on his own, rather than forcing filmmaker Brett Sullivan to shoehorn it into this doc on pinball history. The obsession often takes its form in collections of machines stuffed into every room of their owners’ houses. Competitive players bring their own quirks to the film, each in some manner suggesting with vague sexual overtones that the “machine is alive" as they thrust at the flippers.
How it fits: An elite few appear to make a trade out of the dying industry of pinball, but they aren’t generally designers of new machines—they’re fringe suppliers. We meet one collector who quit his job and now works maintaining his machines and selling extra parts from the broken ones to other collectors—a career that requires owning hundreds of pinball games in various states of disrepair.
If you're obsessed with a potentially lost art, you’ll like this because: Sullivan found pinball fanatics from all walks of life who seem to leave their basements only to replenish their Mountain Dew supplies. This means we’re laughing at weirdos for being weird, not for having an obscure hobby. This could bode well for your next Star Wars memorabilia dinner party.

Waking Sleeping Beauty: April 17, 11:30 a.m., Wisconsin Union Theater
Synopsis: Do you remember the 1985 Disney classic The Black Cauldron? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. And it’s the reason why Disney brought in new management for its animation department: to shepherd the animators from quickly fading relevance back to critical stardom. To get there, it took growing pains as Disney’s corporate face and culture changed, and the old guard gave way to new, inventive whippersnappers like John Lasseter, Tim Burton, and many other familiar faces.
How it fits: For a while in the late ’80s, it seemed like being a Disney animator meant unemployment was just over the horizon—after all, they got kicked out of their own building as the new corporate blood made changes. But Waking Sleeping Beauty is actually a story about people who kept doing and believing in what they loved, even when those who paid the bills doubted it had any value. Their passion convinced corporate disbelievers like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner to stick it out, leading to some of the greatest films in Disney history, including Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King.
If you're obsessed with a potentially lost art, you’ll like this because: Director Don Hahn knows that everyone, especially pursuers of obscure and dying arts, loves a comeback story.

For The Love Of Movies: The Story Of American Film Criticism: April 16, 7:30 p.m., Play Circle Theater
Synopsis: For The Love Of Movies features interviews with film critics past and present, including an interview with Roger Ebert before he developed cancer. It covers criticism from the nascent days of film in the ’30s, all the way to the present. While reviews of silent films weren’t much more than advertisements, critical schools of thought like auteur theory allowed writers to separate directors like Hitchcock or Godard—whose visions left a clear marks on their films—from the generic dreck Hollywood consistently produces. In present day, the interviews turn to talks about this newfangled thing called “the Internet” which threatens professional film critics’ jobs as more filmgoers turn to unpaid bloggers for advice and reviews.
How it fits: We get interviews with a broad range of influential critics both working and retired, from the Village Voice’s auteur theory champion Andrew Sarris, to current New York Times critic A.O. Scott. Their advice for getting into film criticism? See a lot of movies, debate movies, and write about movies. They might argue on the particulars, but the basic consensus is that film critics are simply obsessed and more informed film fans.
If you're obsessed with a potentially lost art, you’ll like this because: Director Gerald Peary is a film critic for the Boston Phoenix. The lesson: You too can make a self-serving documentary should your hobby be threatened by the Internet or Kevin Smith.