This is the second part of an admittedly self-indulgent but nonetheless possibly mutually-edifying consideration of film-programming: specifically, the process that created the 2009 programs for two venues I oversee at the annual Cornerstone Festival. Last week, I talked a bit about programming this year’s Flickerings. This week: the Imaginarium.
“What’s the difference between the Imaginarium and Flickerings,” people have asked me. My coy answer: at Flickerings, we screen films. At Imaginarium, we watch MOVIES. We started this venue back in 1995 at a festival otherwise predominately given over to music – and instantly had a hit on our hands. The peculiar mix of movies, seminars, activities, displays and set-dressing all drawn together around some compelling theme has evolved over those fourteen years, and when we get it right, it still seems like the luckiest accident ever. The magic, when it falls, has something to do with juxtaposition of unlikely components: something you can’t really plan other than by assembling the most promising raw materials you can and hoping for the best. There is a non-Euclidean arithmetic to programming, a two plus two equals five, a sum greater than the parts.
The surest sign the magic is working is when the moviesbegin to “talk to each other” – and talk to the seminars and vice versa, and so on until all the elements reach a critical mass and a reaction is triggered. If you’re lucky enough to have been there when it’s happened, you don’t forget it. We’ve seen many a lost fest-goer wander into the Imaginarium by accident and never leave the tent for that or subsequent Cornerstones. “I used to come with my kids so they could go to the concerts. Now the kids are grown and gone and I still come for the Imaginarium.” We get that a lot — and it’s our own story, too. Don’t get me wrong: I love Flickerings – when we started that program, it seemed like lightning had struck a second time, in a very different way. But the Imaginarium will always hold a special place in my heart. Whenever I’m there again, I pinch myself – it’s like I somehow got back to Narnia. I can’t believe I’ll get another chance, God willing and the magic falls, to go back again this July.
Over the years, we’ve gone through a wild range of themed programs: Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Frank Capra and David Lynch, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton and all their friends. We done pirates and fairies, Bollywood, Harry Potter, Star Trek, The X-Files, John Ford Westerns, Japanese anime, Dia de Los Muertos and Halloween, a bit of Bergman and Dante and a Gopher-Guts Sing-a-Long. I think I’ve driven several sets of friends crazy trying to keep up with the mystic voodoo of the programming process. There’s always flip-flops over the course of program-planning, and there’d be more if it weren’t for that deadline thing. Indeed, it’s like musical chairs: at some point the music stops and you have to sit down in the nearest available seat.
In 2009, the music stopped when we were sitting in a chair marked “Superheroes.” Not that we’ve assembled a predictable ensemble of the latest superhero movies. It’s never that simple at the Imaginarium. First of all, because most people have probably already seen the latest superhero movies. But second, and most important, there are few things more satisfying creating a program that leaves the customers unable to connect the dots until the experience connects everything for them. This year’s movie program isn’t as dizzyingly counter-intuitive as certain others may have seemed at first glance. Right way, this movie series makes it obvious we’re interrogating this notion of “Superness” from several angles.
Oh, but there’s always the “you had to be there” factor of the Imaginarium, especially when it comes to the mysteries of “between the lines” meaning. As I mentioned above, one of the great pleasures of programming is juxtaposition: the double or even triple feature. This year, there’s some combinations I’m really excited about. Opening night features a pair of movies just CRYING to be watched together: Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo and Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik. Both feature star-struck romantics whose real-life confrontation with the object of their fantasy proves a reality check for everybody involved. Our second double is almost as sublime, a combo of recent releases, Son of Rambow and JCVD. The former is about little kids dreaming of being action heroes. The latter is about an action hero caught up in real life action. Actually, those are the last features of a triple-feature that night, the opener being the documentary Confessions of a Super Hero: a look at the lives of folks who dress up like superheroes to get their pictures taken with tourists on Hollywood Boulevard. Something quintessentially American there; the cumulative synergy of this sequence should pack a real punch.
On Friday, the Imaginarium program flows temporarily onto the Flickerings schedule, as we managed to wedge an additional movie in our “Heroic Fantasies” theme inside onto the Flickerings schedule (which, I guess, makes it a film.) The independent film then,Special takes the implicit themes of myth, madness and faith and ups the ante with great tension, as a lonely meter man takes an anti-depressant that works too well, making him think he has super powers. There’s obvious connections there with the evening opener, Lars & the Real Girl, a sweet film about community that our Imaginarium community will fall in love with. The closing film for this featured series is an unjustly lesser-known Dustin Hoffman flick — Hero. For those doing the reading for this year’s Imaginarium, my text for discussion of that film will be Harry Frankfurt’s magisterial work on, er, balderdash, along with the same author’s book on truth.
The last-mentioned binary opposition makes for a terrific bridge between the “Heroic Fantasies” series and Imaginarium’s closing night early show, The Wizard of Oz. 2009 marks the 70th anniversary of what is known as the Hollywood Studio Era’s anno mirabilis (year of miracles). So many great films were released in 1939, that year towers over American film history like a lonely butte in Monument Valley. Aside from the fact that the Imaginarium is very overdue for screening the quintessential Over the Rainbow film, the implicit contrast between the drabness of Kansas and magic of Oz regrounds the week’s discussion of fantasies and ordinary Joes in some larger metaphysical themes. Our “Night at the Movies, 1939” will include some newsreels and cartoons, and a screening of another classic from that miracle year, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — one of Frank Capra’s patented testing of ideals in a world of harsh realities that belies the director’s reputation for fluff.
For the complete Imaginarium 2009 schedule, with info about the films, er, I mean movies and the seminars, see the official web site; for all those “between-the-lines” parts that make up the real magic, see us in Bushnell Illinois July 1-4 for a (knock on wood) magical week.