Local film spotlight: 'Dried Up' and 'Triptych'

July 20, 11:53 AMKansas City Indie Movie ExaminerZach Hoskins

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    A scene from the KCAI senior thesis stop-motion short Dried Up,
    playing this week at the K.C. Fringe Festival with Rossana Jeran's
    Triptych; image courtesy Dried Up.

Like most of its predecessors, this year's fifth annual KC Fringe Festival is brimming with exciting performances and exhibitions by local artists in just about every medium imaginable. One area where the lineup is noticeably lighter in quantity, however, is the moving image - which makes it even more important to spotlight the two films that are representing Kansas City's "fringe" film scene alongside all of this week's more plentiful theater, dance, and visual art. They are two films that in many ways could not be more different: one is a stop-motion animated short produced as an art school thesis project, while the other is a feature drama by a Kansas City film veteran working with an interdisciplinary crew of fellow filmmakers, visual artists, photographers, writers, musicians, and actors. But their shared roots in Kansas City, and the K.C. art scene, make them a surprisingly complementary double feature, revealing the breadth of creative moving image work in our modestly-sized metropolis.

First, Dried Up is a brief (six-minute) short, made while its creators were students in the Animation program at the Kansas City Art Institute. Those for whom "student film" is often read as a pejorative term, however, should take note: Dried suffers from none of the stereotypical excesses of aspiring filmmakers' early work, but is instead an astonishingly beautiful, meditative, and thematically cohesive work in the regrettably fading medium of stop-motion animation. On the surface, the film tells the story of a quiet old man who attempts to bring joy (and rain) to his desolate, drought-ridden town by assembling a gigantic pipe organ out of materials from the local junkyard. More compellingly, though, the young filmmakers actually practice what their puppet protagonist tacitly preaches: creating their own art from real-world found objects, and achieving on an undoubtedly shoestring budget the level of obsessive detail and organic beauty found in all of the best stop-motion work. The soundtrack by local laptop DJ Max Justus is also no slouch, beginning calm and contemplative before building to a stirring crescendo that somehow mixes electro with Johann Sebastian Bach. In short, Dried Up is just the kind of film you'd want to see at the Fringe Fest: unique, lovingly crafted, and fully grounded in local talent from multiple artistic media.

Also fitting that description - albeit, as mentioned before, in a very different way - is Triptych, the latest from veteran K.C. artist/filmmaker Rossana Jeran, a.k.a. Blurgirl Productions. At first glance, Triptych may appear to be quite a bit more conventional than Jeran's last feature, 2006's more explicitly experimental Fringe Fest alum Godhead; but as the teaser above suggests, there's more than enough of her usual conceptual and visual flair to dress up the narrative of a friendship and budding romance threatened by the appearance of a mysterious woman in a Midwestern arts community. In fact, the film seems virtually tailor-made for a venue like the Fringe Festival: it was filmed in Kansas City, it draws both within the story and behind the scenes from a multitude of artistic pursuits (theater, photography, etc.), and it is truly a "fringe" production, with the Kansas City Star reporting a budget of no more than $500 for the full production (!). The fact that a feature this ambitious was shot for such a pittance puts Triptych alongside recent movies like David Lynch's Inland Empire in revealing the vast untapped potential of consumer-grade digital video for independent filmmakers; and it's especially great, at least for this writer, to see a local artist working successfully in the emergent aesthetic.

So yes, in one respect it's a bit of a shame that this year's Fringe Festival is so light on film and video content, and yes, I am hoping that next year's will be able to offer us more than a single program in the medium. But Dried Up and Triptych make up for the lack of quantity by embodying all of the qualities of the festival and the artistic community they represent: both are creative, ambitious, and defiantly interdisciplinary, revealing the latent connections between media that my sometimes genre-crazed profession can all too often ignore. So while you're checking out all of the great art on display around town this week, be sure to make some time for some equally exciting moving-image work; if there's one thing that Fringe Festival teaches us, it's that regardless of the labels we put on art, ultimately it all comes from the same place.

Dried Up and Triptych are sharing a program at this week's Fringe Festival; there are screenings scheduled from Tuesday, July 21 to Saturday, July 25 at 7:00 p.m. each night, and on Sunday, July 26 at 3:00. All screenings will take place at the Off Center Theatre on the third floor of Crown Center. Admission, as with all Fringe Fest events, will cost $5 for a festival button, plus an additional $5 for tickets to each screening. See the festival website for details and ticket sales.