Filmmaker in person for all shows Thursday-Sunday! This spring Anthology pays tribute to underground filmmaker Jim Finn, whose films, both shorts and features, qualify as some of the most uncategorizable works in contemporary cinema. A fixture of the New York Underground Film Festival-now transformed into Migrating Forms, which immediately precedes this series - Finn is a disarmingly original and gifted artist. Staking out a thematic territory very much his own, he has devoted himself to recreating the visual texture of various communist societies: Soviet Russia, the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru, and the North Korean state. Diving into the morass of 20th-century political and social ideology with exquisite grace and a sophisticated sense of irony, Finn has made a series of films that somehow steer a course between strident anti-capitalism and reactionary anti-communism. These lovingly hand-crafted films-which have been called "utopian comedies" and "trompe-l'oeil" films-exude both a yearning for the idealism buried in the depths of the communist project and a recognition of the (often tragic) absurdity into which so many of these societies have degenerated. Combining stock footage, note-perfect recreations, witty texts, haunting scores, and even full-fledged musical numbers, they are nothing short of wondrous. Finn has been treated to retrospectives in Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Venezuela, and Chile, but this is his first such tribute in the U.S. "The evidence that current filmmaking is brimming with original, standard-breaking creations has to include the work of Jim Finn, whose brilliant The Juche Idea...effectively completes a trilogy of ultra-compact features that boldly upturn notions of documentary and fiction, propaganda thought, reality and restaging, and even what an ‘experimental film' actually is. To say that these films open up new possibilities for satire, ideas, and language isn't an overstatement." -Robert Koehler, Variety

Featured Works:

Short Films (1999-2009); Interkosmos (2006); La Trinchera luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (2007); The Juche Idea (2008, pictured)

Program information:

Utopian Comedies: The Films of Jim Finn

Related Articles:
Fun With Monoliths by Ed Park posted Feb. 01, 2010