Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 7:30pm
Michael Almereyda's Another Girl Another Planet
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
Another Girl Another Planet
Michael Almereyda, 16mm, 1992, 55 mins
Light Industry presents a rare screening of Michael Almereyda’s Another Girl Another Planet. Set in the cramped apartments and dusky dive bars of the early-90s East Village, this deftly realized interior drama was the first feature shot entirely on the Fisher-Price PixelVision camera.
“The story of two messed-up young men and their involvement with perhaps too many young women, the action was confined to two apartments, a stairwell, a roof. My downstairs neighbor consented to play a version of himself and supplied most of his own dialogue. Otherwise, professional actors were recruited. Everyone worked without pay.
The pixel camera forces you to be reckless and original. If you're shooting at a distance, detail goes out the window. So it's necessary to compose shots with an eye towards compressed space, to stage action with an awareness of how silhouettes register and relate to one another, and to favor close-ups, which the camera delivers with startling, telescopic detail. Correspondingly, since everything the camera takes in is slightly, shimmeringly out of focus, near and far objects seem to share the same focal plane; you have the illusion of infinite focus. All this makes pixelvision inherently ghostly and fun to watch, but also qualifies it as a medium sensitive to actors and to their essential business: the transmission of moments of true feeling.”
- Michael Almeredya
“Another Girl Another Planet vividly evokes a particular form of youthful alienation. Each girl who visits planet Bill has been marked by an encounter with death; all are given to unanswerable musings.
The movie is as contrasty as a Balinese shadow play; the low-definition image, re-enforced by the ubiquitous cigarette smoke of the twenty-something characters, creates a form of electronic pointillism. Taking advantage of the form’s excellent sound quality, Almereyda employs all manner of creative voice-overs (it’s unfortunate that he writes such strong dialogue) as well as musical accompaniment.
...The most haunting leitmotif has Nic and, sometimes, Prudence, his aptly named wife, showing their first-time visitors a 1935 Max Fleischer cartoon called Dancing on the Moon. The fantasy of a lunar nightclub patronized by zoo animals grows increasingly poignant as it punctuates Bill’s amorous adventures; it also serves to establish a counterpart, formal no less than dramatic, to the abstract quality of the pixel image.”
- J. Hoberman
Followed by a conversation with Almereyda.
Tickets - $7, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.