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Talented Monkeys and Mad Professors
What more could a person want? Thank you, Rooftop Film Series
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Monkeys and Brooklyn rooftops are two of my favorite things. At long last, they’re coming together in one grand event: “Capucine: Filmmaking Monkeys and Other Renegades,” presented by the Rooftop Film Series.
Before the screenings, though, Professor Neito, the world’s most famous mad scientist filmmaker, will attempt to reanimate a chicken. Yes, you read that right. Before you scoff, know that in the past, the Professor has taught Brazilian bugs to play soccer and created mice that multiply like earth worms when cut in half. The man is brilliantly insane.
As for the films, the event consists of seven short films, all about remarkable rebels:
Renegades (Jim Hosking | Los Angeles, CA | 12 min.)
Oh them renegades…pleasuring themselves again…waiting for the mighty rain…to purge their souls of all their pain.
Eyelashes (Marcel Hobi | Switzerland | 7 min.)
If an eyelash falls out, lay it on the back of your hand, make a wish as you blow it away—and your wish will come true! Or so popular belief has it. But wishing is not easy if everything is already perfect. The squiggly-animated Wanner’s life is perfect. All the same, Wanner is constantly endeavoring to optimize his everyday life with an eyelash, a balancing act between the ideal and reality.
Wasp (Mari Jaye Blanchard | Brooklyn, NY | 2 min.)
In this lovely and haunting animation, a dour little girl innocently traps a potential threat, but isn’t prepared to deal with the ethical consequences of her actions.
Dead See-Quence (Fabio Scacchioli | Italy | 4:10 min.)
A sensual experimental film-hand-drawn animation on 3770 frames of vintage pornographic found footage-about the vanishing of an image, a naked body, the most tangible and real thing for a human being. But this is not a body; it is the image of a body. In this gap lies the principle of disappearance: between the object and its image there is a distance, a limit, a separation. This distance is seen here in as the original sin.
Blood from a Stone (Bill Palmer | Los Angeles, CA | 8:21 min.)
Before Jason Bourne insisted that action cinema start taking itself seriously, there was a time when muscle-bound macho men would break arms, sever limbs and spit one-liners without ever hesitating to muse about rules, consequences or ethical behavior. That time was the 1980s. Those men had names like Arnold, Sly, Dolph and Chuck. PG-13 was not in their vocabulary. And you can bet your ass it’s not in Sean Sharpstone’s either.
And the main event:
Capucine (Luis Nieto | France & Japan | 43 min.)
Capucine traces the adorable but sometimes frightening modern history of primate-human relations as service animals to the disabled and in on-screen appearances in Hollywood. Nieto discovers an amazing cinematic aptitude among these Capuchin monkeys, and with the right film school training, one monkey auteur manages to accomplish what few human filmmakers can-his film is accepted to a prestigious European film festival.
The fun begins Thursday, July 29, at 8 p.m. on the roof of Brooklyn Technical High School (29 Fort Greene Pl.). Tickets cost $10 and can be purchased here. For more information, including the full list of Rooftop events, please head to rooftopfilms.com.