Chicago Underground Film Festival – August, 2000

SMACK

This fine experimental feature by Toronto avant-gardist Steve Sanguedolce uses a rhythmic montage of Super-8 movies and found footage—scratched, solarized, hand tinted—to illustrate a bittersweet oral history of three brothers growing apart. The narrator describes his dysfunctional blue-collar upbringing and his mercurial relationships with his two siblings, one of whom turned to drugs while the other turned to God, and his matter-of-fact delivery makes the stream-of-consciousness memoir of childhood games, fraternal confrontations, suicidal behavior, and crack-house encounters all the more funny and poignant. Occasionally one of the brothers chimes in, giving his version of their time together, though the sad truth often seems to lie between their testimonies. Sanguedolce manages to invert the narrative hierarchy of film by using the sound track to sustain the narrative, an uncommon feat. Also on the program is Music to Watch Girls By, a short by Christine Cynn that mines a similar vein of traumatic childhood memory but lacks the apt imagery and absorbing narrative of the longer film.

The program runs 75 minutes. (TS) (10:00)

Ted Shen