Blog 5: Extra Credit: Flaherty NYC 17, 2014, at Anthology Film Archives

Jamilla Schuster

4/12/14

Media 160

Laura

Extra Credit: “Flaherty NYC March 17^th, 2014 at Anthology Film Archives”

     So, when I got to this independent film festival, I saw a bunch of unique films, most in which I could not even grasp the concept, but I did my best. The films that I remember most where “Four Boys, White Whiskey, and Grilled Mouse,” “Pigs,” and a film with no name by directors “Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Lee and Ernst Karel, which was about waste at a recycling plant.

    

     In the first film, “Four Boys, White Whiskey and Grilled Mouse,” the boys sat on a table playing some sort of game I think, and were all taking swigs to drink from this one little bottle of whiskey and were all eating the same one grilled rat. I remember this one specifically because they were having normal everyday conversations just like any other group of friends would, only they lived in the middle of some field, just this huge vast land of empty space, with this one lonely table and some kind of roof awning built on top of it. There were flies buzzing all around them and over the rat, and they were still eating it and sitting there like it was nothing. They looked like they hadn’t bathed in a few days and had no shoes on. They passed out and woke up with the same agenda, to do nothing but sit there and drink all over again for the rest of the day.

     After seeing the film “Pigs,” I’m not sure if I even want to eat bacon anymore. To be honest I’m not sure what the story was behind it, or if there was one, but I know there were a bunch of pigs hurtled together in this one pen, literally crawling on top of one another just to talk around. Some were sleeping and there other pigs were using the bathroom on top of them and just walking all over it like it was no pig deal. As the day when on the pigs just got dirtier and dirtier. Then the slop came, or their food, and it was like World War III. They were squealing their heads off, and pigs were standing on top of other pigs heads just to get some of the food, and some of the pigs didn’t even end up getting anything to eat. Ultimately, that film just grossed me out. Bacon never looked so unappealing after that.

And last but not least the waste film. I actually kind of grasped the concept for this film. My brief analysis of it was, this is were all our waste goes on a daily basis and it never even occurs to us, what the procedures are for its disposal, or if it even gets disposed of for that matter. I personally thought it was slanders consumerism is a way, but only slightly.  I don’t really have much to say about this film, it kind of showed the same clips over and over again, but it did make me become more concerned about where the hell my garbage goes now. When I go out to throw away my recyclable clips of that film sometimes pop into my heard and I ask myself, “well obviously recycled material can be reused to make new items which is great, but the why don’t they just burn the rest of the trash and just call it a day, or do that already do that, hmmmmm?”