Welcome to “Your Weekly Short,” a LakeFrontRow.com feature that showcases one short from a Wisconsin filmmaker all while stretching the definition of “weekly.” Brace thy face.
Junehyuck Jeon’s short films, at least those available online, present a short but complex filmography. “The Boundary Inbetween” employs rack focus for its foreign perspective and “Interfere” finds a hypnotism in the uniformity of its watery surfaces.
Junehyuck’s blending what surely must be hours of footage is deceptive because of his disciplined technique, but nowhere do his skills seem stronger than in “Surface.” Compressing 24 minutes of footage from 60 different Milwaukee locations, Junehyuck uses sound to snap the viewer from a continuous transparency of the city. The sound of a freight truck or a few flashing frames of daylight don’t belie the same synthetic qualities as a fade or musical cue, and “Surface’s” cellophane shots of clock towers and desiccated apartments roll into one another with their own organic flow.
Currently an MFA student at UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts, Junehyuck is one of many filmmakers featured in the Milwaukee Film Festival’s “Cream City Cinema” this year. While it may be a stretch, it’s not absurd see a fascination with place in Junehyuck’s work. (After all, he did help create a film exchange program between Cream City and his home country in South Korea.) A screen grab from “Surface” would double as a fine desktop wallpaper, but still frames cheat an orchestrated tumbleweed of footage out of its collective momentum. This is artifice, but it’s artifice so wholly steeped in itself that the impossible collage of locales seems like everywhere and nowhere all at once.