Micro-Wave Cinema welcomes this innovative meta film about the filmmaking process
With its promotional premise zeroing in on actorly rehearsal and repeated takes of a single scene, Here’s to the Future! may seem somewhat analogous to the workings of Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day (1992). But director Gina Telaroli rebelliously transcends the imitative notion with a lively toast to all forms of cinema in this unique hybrid of essay, documentary, and narrative. The end-result is a brisk 76-minute micro-budget project, which had its world premiere at BAM’s Migrating Forms Film Festival in December 2014. Following the FREE presentation on Sunday, March 13, in 4070 Vilas Hall at 7:00p as part of the Micro-Wave Cinema Series, the director will join host Brandon Colvin for a video Q&A.
Playing a version of herself in her own movie, Telaroli calls together a cluster of friends and filmmakers in an apartment to set up a sequence from the Pre-Code Hollywood melodrama The Cabin in the Cotton (1932). As the staging plays over and over in various permutations, Here’s to the Future! simultaneously analyzes and upturns both the processes of filmmaking and performance themselves with enthusiastic exclamation. While the film may seem closed to anyone who doesn’t fancy themselves a cinephile, it opens urgently and comically in its utilization of time. Allotting a mere afternoon to complete the on-set shoot, Telaroli works against nature’s clock and the inevitable waning of daylight as she struggles to harness scripted performances with the invigorating energy of the impromptu.
In advance of Spectacle Theater‘s ‘Evening with Gina Telaroli’ last year, writers applauded her refreshingly effortless blurring of lines between the traditional movie with its own ‘making-of’ as well as the bridging of divide between “structuralist rigor and a loose hangout vibe inspired by Howard Hawks’ Hatari! (1962)” to create a strangely absorbing exercise in film grammar. Glenn Kenny of Some Came Running further commends Here’s to the Future!‘s accessibility and sense of immersion by forging “a kind of abstract narrative out of an abandoned attempt at a different narrative film.” And while it initially adopts an interrogative mode, “it gets so close to the people who are part of it… [that] it never feels hermetic or theoretical.”
- Here’s to the Future! plays FREE on Sun, March 13, in 4070 Vilas Hall at 7:00p. For more information on the Micro-Wave Cinema Series, visit their Facebook community page.