Wisconsin Film Festival The eyes of a hooligan (AVC at WFF Day Three)

Jason: When A.V. Club Editor Keith Phipps closed his introduction to Red Riding: 1974 at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art by saying “And now I will leave you to this dark, dark world,” it was hard to imagine how right he’d be on so many different levels. (Granted, he works for the same publication as us, but hear me out a sec.) 1974 is metaphorically dark—a whodunit in which the “who” is at many turns immaterial to the psychological descent of the characters—but also relentlessly bleak on a visual level. Shot on 16 mm in northern England, it’s an ultra-violent and grim world where any hues outside of gray, and slightly darker shades of gray, don’t seem to exist.

1974 is the first in a linked trilogy of procedurals based on David Peace’s four novels, the Red Riding Quartet. (Peace? Oh, the irony.) A fledgling journalist, Eddie Dunford, is investigating a murder in which a young girl is found dead with swan’s wings stitched to her back. That one hellish image would have been enough to sustain the film’s nightmare, but it doesn’t even compare to the web of systemic corruption and destruction Dunford uncovers. About halfway through the screening, the woman behind me whispered, to no one in particular: “My god, I can’t take this anymore.” I couldn’t think of a more fitting response. 1974 is merciless, brilliant experience that’ll be seared into the filthiest corners of my memory for a long time to come.

Which also happens to be the exact opposite feeling I had after taking in the twee-assault of The Exploding Girl at Wisconsin Union Theater. Director Bradley Rust Gray’s film explores the nascent relationship between two college students. Girl included shot after shot of the doe-eyed Zoe Kazan talking into her cell phone, saying some variation of the following: “Um, yeah. So, like, um, call me back, okay?” Then she’d pensively stare into the distance as a bus rattled past. Symbolism alert! Oh, you didn’t catch that? Let’s try it again. Maybe it was my Red Riding hangover, but it felt beyond light and airy, and in desperate need of someone—anyone—in the movie receiving a gun butt to the face.

I had similar fears of a repeat experience prior to the screening of Harmony And Me, also at Union Theater. Those idiotic preconceived notions were unfounded, and proved yet again that surprises lurk everywhere at WFF. While definitely overly quirky, Harmony offered a funny and honest look into the crushing despair that comes with being dumped. Director Robert Byington was no less deft in deflecting the head-slapping questions that always seem to dog post-show Q&As. It only took three before the “How much did it cost?” query was lobbed from the balcony at the sold-out showing. Byington said, “Oh come on, that’s crass isn’t it?” Yup, it sure is. Thankfully Byington himself wasn’t crass in the slightest, and ended up coming off as no less endearing than his colorful palette of characters.

My night closed with The Scenesters, a clever satire that riffed on mumblecore, noir, CSI, Court TV, L.A. culture, and pretty much anything else within reach. Much like Red Riding’s oblique journey, the story itself took a backseat to the film industry meta in-jokes—making it an accordion of a movie constantly overlapping and folding in on itself. It was the perfect capper on a long day, and definitely kept me engaged trying to catch up with the rapid-fire onslaught of references.

Scott: It's rare that a long-dead subject beams with such presence as Igor Savitsky in The Desert Of Forbidden Art. Despite the grave circumstances that came with Savitsky's lifelong project—collecting government-suppressed art in a distant outpost of the Soviet Union—Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev's documentary often had the audience at the Wisconsin Union Theater laughing at the man's slippery antics. Voice-overs from Ben Kingsley give Savitsky a defiantly droll voice, and interviews with surviving colleagues and children of repressed artists recall him scamming authorities into funding his museum in Karakalpakstan, or weaseling his way into the confidence of a state-backed artist in order to secure his more personal, less propaganda-smothered works. "He had the eyes of a hooligan," recalls one subject.

More impressive is that the filmmakers do not let Savitsky upstage the art itself. Think Gauguin or Chagall's boundless shocks of color, colliding with the influence of Russian icon painting, the Soviet avant-garde, and the scenery of the desert lands many artists fled to in order to enjoy a last gasp of freedom after the revolution. Not only did Savitsky appreciate the grasp of colors and patterns in the region's folk art, the artists he collected absorbed that influence into paintings that challenge in their own right. Some of these images don't even seem to come up on a Google search, so The Desert Of Forbidden Art is a crucial lesson, and one that'll save you a trip to Uzbekistan.

After this tense dance of transcendent vision and gulag suffering, the risks that film critics face—unemployment, spats over theories—offered something of a chatty cool-off in For The Love Of Movies: The Story Of American Film Criticism at the Frederic March Play Circle. Our intern Mark's preview called it "self-serving" and generally seemed underwhelmed. Director Gerald Peary defended his work in a comment, saying that the film, is, in fact, self-serving, and arguing that critics are terrific essayists. Well, one of the things Peary really does right in the movie is to bask in the writing styles of different critics throughout history, via brief, voice-over bursts of reviews from the jaunty Robert Sherwood, the chaotically riffing Manny Farber, and the pugnacious Pauline Kael, among others. It's easy to stereotype film criticism as stuffy and wanky, but Peary helps us to hear fiery music in critics' prose.

Peary's also frank about how the qualifications for film critics are tough to define, and how each critic has flaws and blind spots. If you've ever seen Jamie Kennedy's Heckler—which presents itself as a documentary about stand-up comedy hecklers but is really a monumentally self-serving, admittedly interesting bitch-fest about negative movie reviews—you need to see Peary's film and get some rational balance. It even offers up some quotes from filmmakers who—gasp!—appreciate critics, including those who've been harsh on their own work. The film opens on Ain't It Cool News raver Harry Knowles, so it's clear that Peary's not afraid to consider all the incarnations of the trade in a fair manner.