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The Ann Arbor Film Festival Newsletter May 2008 Edition Warhol Grant Leads to Festival Changes PLAYstation - Animation Highlights Filmmaker Focus - Libbey White Projections - The Journal

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is proud to announce that it recently received a grant from the New York-based Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The award supports the festival over a 2-year period with $80,000. Following on the footsteps of the festival's successful Endangered fundraising campaign, support from the Warhol Foundation strengthens the AAFF to enhance the role it plays in showcasing artistically-driven, experimental, independent filmmakers and media artists.

Concurrently, festival leadership is changing roles to expand artistic capacity. Christen McArdle, the AAFF Executive Director for the past 3 years, will become Artistic Director. Her focus will shift to working more closely with filmmakers and festival programmers, international expansion of the AAFF tour, and planning for the 50th anniversary of the AAFF (which will take place in 2012, for all you Mayans out there!).

The festival's Director of Community & Development, Donald Harrison will become Executive Director. After 10 years in San Francisco as a filmmaker and serving in leadership roles at the Film Arts Foundation, Harrison returned to invest in his native habitat of Michigan in 2006. "I am proud to represent this passionate community," stated Harrison, "and build creatively on a remarkable cinematic legacy here in Ann Arbor."


This year the filmmakers participating in the festival were some of the top artistic talents in the world. And, thanks to our friends at the PLAY Gallery, our audience had an opportunity to make and watch their own animation at the 46th festival through the PLAYstation. You can watch spontaneous creativity and free speech at its finest by checking out the highlights here.


The AAFF is committed to championing bold, pioneering, artistically-inspired filmmakers and connecting them with audiences. For this edition of Filmmaker Focus we hear about a new project in development from Libbey White, whose memorable found footage film Evilution! screened at the 46th AAFF.

As a kid, I used to worry that at bedtime I'd accidentally start thinking about thinking, and would be unable to fall asleep. That bottomless iteration was so beguiling it would sometimes take me an hour to let it go. Now that I've grown up I can manage thinking about thinking a little better. My new film project will represent my current take on it-- it's a meditative short film on fractals and how much they have in common with our states of mind and personalities. My intention is not to give a neuroscience or math lesson, but to illustrate the patterns in detail and let the associations speak for themselves.

The research I've been doing for this project is fascinating -- I love reading books that contain figure captions like these: "Oscillations of a hosepipe," "The pace of the camel and the bound of the long-tailed Siberian souslik," and "Various states of the catastrophe machine." I'm not making these up! But I really find it to be very inspiring and profound content to sift through. In both fractal geometry and our daily lives, there are these dramatic points of instability, where a system's behavior becomes unpredictable in the details while remaining part of a consistent pattern overall. These bifurcation points are extremely sensitive to tiny fluctuations in the environment, and what happens at them is partly determined by a system's history.

Every decision we make, from choosing a yellow windbreaker or a black one, choosing to shake hands or just nod, to eat French toast or an omelette, to move halfway across the world or to stay put-- I think these bear more than just a passing resemblance to bifurcation points. My goal is to explore and reveal that relationship, along with a few others, in the film. I can't resist holding these precise, mathematically-defined axioms and systems up to our messy and deeply personal experience of consciousness.

There are several challenging aspects to this project-- limiting my scope, first of all! And also striking the right balance between character-driven scenes and fractal scenes, creating an aesthetic style that pulls both sides together and makes the whole thing feel cohesive, and deciding how explicit I want to try to make the connections. The next step for me right now is to narrow down the list of emotional states, decisions, and/or thought processes I want to portray, and figure out what I want them to look like in 2D or stop motion animation.

I hope one of my current projects lands me back at the Ann Arbor Film Festival-- I had a wonderful time there, met so many inspiring people, saw amazing films, and felt recharged and energized when I left. Keep up the great work!


Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal by Ira Konigsberg, Professor Emeritus of Film at the University of Michigan. Projections explores the ways in which recent advancements in fields such as psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, genetics and evolution help to increase our understanding of film, and how film itself facilitates investigations into the nature and function of the mind. The journal will also incorporate articles on the visual arts and new technologies related to film. The aims of the journal are to explore these subjects, facilitate a dialogue between people in the sciences and the humanities, and bring the study of film to the forefront of contemporary intellectual debate. Click here to learn more about Projections or subscribe to the journal.