The Los Angeles Filmforum’s Film Registry show was one of the better programmed nights of film I’ve seen in a long time.
Among the films on the program, one of the weirdest was Sally Cruikshank’s Quasi at the Quackadero. Cruikshank was an animator on Sesame Street. Otherwise I know very little about her and won’t pretend I do. However, Quasi at the Quackadero was an amazing film, and I am glad to have seen it on 16 mm. Cruikshank has her own YouTube page with a number of her animations on it, so why not just go watch it (and some of her other totally bizarre animations featuring Quasi and Anita)?
An interesting thing I learned at the Film Registry show was that the Library of Congress doesn’t necessarily do anything after naming films to the National Film Registry; filmmaker Janie Geiser, who was at the show, said she wasn’t even informed that her film The Red Book had been included; she learned about it when friends of hers congratulated her about it.
Irwin Swirnoff came down to Los Angeles from San Francisco and showed some of his work: A collection of pieces named I wanted everyday to last forever. Shot on Super 8 but finished on video, with sound collaged from texts written by the artist to original music written for them by a variety of musicians, the films work together to create a dreamy and nostalgic celebration of little things. I don’t automatically equate Super 8 with home movies but, in this case, Irwin seemed to take the history of the medium as a starting point and a source of inspiration to create a collection of very slight, but wonderful, short films.