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Cathy Lee Crane's Experimental Films

The best experiences are often unanticipated, and definitely unhyped. In our age of marketing bloat, with everybody and their corporation trying to brand themselves indelibly upon humanity's collective brain, it is rare to experience art without expectations. We were lucky enough to catch Crane's 18-minute film, "The Girl From Marseilles," inspired by Andre Breton's Nadja, one of my favorite true fiction books, on its way to the Vienna Film Festival in October. Ostensibly from Nadja's point of view, and making reference to her mythical lost journals penned in the madhouse, this gorgeously photographed film poem, with its compelling sound design effectively communicating the narrator's "interiority," blends archival footage with contemporary footage shot in Paris. Crane's films made me realize anew the poetic beauty of black-and-white deep-focus photography. Crane also showed two of her older works to round out the showing. The second film of the evening, "Not For Nothin'," (1996) featured a transvestite artist, Rodney O'Neal Austin, giving extraordinary karaoke-like performances of amazing songs such as Lonesome Little Raindrops and Donna Fargo's "The Happiest Girl in the USA." The film's "plot" involves the singer quest for love, which takes her to a mysterious harem-like interior. The third film (1994) was beautifully filmed in New York City and Arizona. I liked the films so much I called up the filmmaker and got the following information: bio: born Phoenix, Arizona in the early Sixties. Studied undergraduate film at Sarah Lawrence College under Marjorie Keller, who introduced me to Maya Deren who deeply impacted my style. After graduating got my first Bolex and taught myself how to shoot, also working for others. Finished "White City" at an editing class at S.F. City College and used it to apply to the M.F.A. Program at SF State, getting that degree May 2000. "Not For Nothin' was my first-year film at that program. The "Cabaret" section was shot by Wayne Schotten, a local filmmaker. It won an award at the Cork, Ireland, Film Festival that year. With the help of my art directors Rodney and Diane Hopkins I staged the harem scene in the soundstage at S.F. State. I feel my relationship to Rodney is kinda like John Waters' relationship to Divine. Rodney is an artist who performs with the band Mini Pearl Necklace. () The Girl from Marseilles (2000, 18 minutes). A fictional memoir of Nadja, the woman who haunted Andre Breton, who wrote an account of meeting her in 1927. This film gives a voice to Nadja, constructing her life from a matrix of archival images and film clips from Paris. She speaks to us from the Vaucluse Sanitarium as World War II approaches. The war is a key element of their reality. Everyone was so devastated by World War I that they could not believe it could happen again, and so soon. So a deep level of denial plagued Europe...which we call hedonism! Not For Nothin' (1996, 29 minutes) starring Rodney O'Neal Austin singing the title song. I call Not for Nothing a sensualist's dream which follows Louise Brooks lookalike Rodney O'Neal Austin on his search for the Beloved. We researched that film by looking at everything Louise Brooks was in, and ripped off Joseph Von Sternberg's Blue Angel--the entire backdrop for cabaret is a painting of the backdrop for that film, which was painted by Meg Mack, visual artist (does sculpture, paintings). () White City, shot in New York City and Tucson, AZ (1994, 11 minutes). WHITE CITY was inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's poem, "Lament." It was basically just a personal film to evoke the landscape of loss in the age of AIDS--there are images of a friend who passed away to whom I dedicated the film. This one is most deeply influenced by Maya Deren; visually the handing of the wine glass across the cut to myself is very much like "Meshes of the Afternoon." If you read Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, that's actually where The Girl from Marseilles comes from. Why couldn't Breton's alter-ego be a girl from Marseilles? Andre Breton's collage self-portrait, "Automatic Writing," shows him looking thru a microscope, with a girl behind bars behind him. That image is on film for 24 frames, exactly one second, and is central to the idea of the film.

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