Tone Glow Presents: Arrivals – Regional Spirits

(Various Filmmakers,1979-1983, approx. 62 min, 16mm and digital)

In the busy, fragmented, coastally-dominated landscape of American independent cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, regional voices like Chicago’s Allen Ross and Alabama’s Peter Bundy might have been hard to hear. Whether due to their location, to the economy of their means, or to the boldly personal and formally challenging quality of their films, Bundy’s minimalistic landscape works and Ross’s elusive portraits have never enjoyed national visibility. “Arrivals – Regional Spirits” seeks both to embrace and to correct the perception of these two undersung artists as “minor” figures. While their reflective, often melancholy works linger on the minute details, small gestures, and modest lives that manifest regional identity, they also express the grandest aspirations of experimental cinema: that potentially anything and anyone is worthy of devoted attention.

Perhaps Allen Ross’s most abstract and tender film is TRYST (1981), which conjures the flush of infatuation through an elusive series of skyscapes, close-ups, and city views. TRYST builds on the elemental themes and tinting experiments of THE GRANDFATHER TRILOGY (1979-1981), finding poetry in the interstices of the local, the cosmic, the concrete, and the ineffable. In A WEDDING (1982), Ross’s striking and disorienting cinematography warps the familiar contours of the American wedding ritual, while his elliptical sense of time transforms the documentation of an event into a memory of a lost feeling. 

Films screened:

ROAN MOUNTAIN EULOGY (Peter Bundy, 1979, 4 min, 16mm-to-digital)

FOUR CORNERS (Peter Bundy, 1983, 15 mins, 16mm from the Walker Arts Center]

SUMMER SKETCH (Peter Bundy, 19XX, 4 mins, 16mm from the Walker Arts Center) 

TRYST (Allen Ross, 1981, 14 mins, 16mm from Chicago Filmmakers)

A WEDDING (Allen Ross, 1982, 25 mins, 16mm from Chicago Filmmakers)

About the guest curator:

Joshua Minsoo Kim is a music and film critic, film programmer, and educator based in Chicago. He is the editor-in-chief of Tone Glow, a publication dedicated to experimental music and film.

Tone Glow Film Festival:

Tone Glow Film Festival (TGFF) is a Chicago-based international film festival committed to showcasing the best in experimental film. Eschewing traditional submission-based programming, TGFF instead hand-selects works that highlight the ingenuity, originality, and radical possibilities of independent and avant-garde filmmaking. Its mission is to provide local audiences with the chance to see masterworks both new and old, inviting contemplation on the cinematic form’s history and future. TGFF is co-presented by Chicago Filmmakers.

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