NEIGHBORHOOD NARRATIVES REVIEW - 9/28/08
VIDEODROME: Jessica M. Fenlon - The new yinzer

Our local filmmakers are providing us with some new stories. Lets put that albatross of "Pittsburgh being defined by what it has lost" behind us, shall we? Pittsburgh Neighborhood Narratives film festival opened Thursday, September 25th with its first screening at the Regent.

Project coordinators Andrew Halasz and Kristen Lauth Shaeffer solicited filmmakers from all over Pittsburgh, blanketing the city with postcards inviting people to participate. I found cards all over the place. I gave them to friends who work in narrative video. As someone who makes what generally looks like nonsense, bizarre, or strange (i.e. "art" video), narrative film isn't my thing.

As they wrote on the project site (a nicely-dressed affair with requisite Flash opening) "Inspired by the way the neighborhoods of Paris were celebrated in the film Paris Je T'Aime, we thought it would be really cool to see the diverse neighborhoods of Pittsburgh celebrated in the same way."

I was a little nervous going to see a 90-minute program of separately-produced films edited into one larger piece, but it works. Halasz and Shaeffer stitched together the films in a screening order that make sense. Transitions between each film, buses naming the next arriving neighborhood, are a perfectly appropriate conceit.

The stories bubbled up from our very Pittsburgh neighborhoods, each little community woven into the next by bus lines and through streets. Sometimes they talk to each other, sometimes they argue, sometimes they make up.

Watching each piece I realized that even how they were made said something about the neighborhood in which they are set. In Lawrenceville, we have Mombie, an excellent take on that neighborhood's hipster-feminist population, a story told in the hippest genre of all, Pittsburgh's rich tradition of zombie films.

Bus Stop, for Downtown Pittsburgh, is an engaging story drawn from the lives of twentysomethings who leave and come back - or never leave to begin with. The narrative features departure and return in our vernacular. It also features the spectacular views that helped seduce me into moving here in the first place.

Fussy neighbors in gorgeous houses in Regent Square are in attendance, with new transplants meeting the old guard and their well-worn habits. The past collides with the present in Homestead's library, and generations with parallel concerns intersect on screen. In each of these pieces, the consequences of these meetings open an unpredictable dance. The freshness of this work, the original solutions to traditional narrative structures make the work well worth seeing and seeing again as it is screened throughout the city.

Sometimes a neighborhood's realities overwhelm the filmmakers. The filmmaker who created a work for Mt. Oliver pulled it from the festival because he found his own work too depressing. We all struggle to remake this city.

This film shows exactly how art can best help Pittsburgh. Not in providing beautiful murals that create an environment where, perhaps, fewer muggings will happen (though that's a part of it). This art is not the work of physical gentrification. Art itself can't do that. Only real political leadership, real jobs for the real workforce still seeping away can do that.

This art is the work of the psychological transformation that precedes any other new growth. These filmmakers created a window through which the viewer can catch a glimpse of the Pittsburgh that is between, that is growing. All the small stories that go into that growth. Like Slavic's paintings, the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Narratives provide new openings for seeing our relationship to the present.

Artists can't and don't save the world. For the most part, people tend to see artists as strange and vaguely useless or dangerous creatures. But, perhaps the world is not a problem to be solved. Artists create. On good days, that means other people in the world are given a new perspective.

Source: http://www.newyinzer.com/19_2.html
© 2008 The New Yinzer & respective authors

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