Independent L.A.: Doing more with less

A preview of the selections in Independent Los Angeles, a festival of local film, video and multimedia that runs today through Sunday, reveals a determination on the part of the artists to achieve maximum impact through minimal yet eloquent means, be the form animation, experimental or documentary.

Among the programs in the festival, at REDCAT in Walt Disney Concert Hall, are Jules Engel animations, a selection of shorts made by the late founder of the CalArts animation department. “Wet Paint” (1977) and “Shapes and Gestures” are lively minimalist abstract works featuring geometric forms in constant flux. “Accident” (1973) features a dog racing across the screen; his fate, as prophesied by the film’s title, is expressed through a smudging of his torso.

“Train Landscape” has a stroboscopic flourish of black-and-white images, as if sprocket holes in a film were standing in for windows in a coach car. The film expresses beautifully in an abstract manner the aural and visual impact of a train pulling out of a station and then slowing to a stop as it arrives at its destination.

Unsettling images

Simon Leung’s 23-minute “Proposal for the Side of the Mountain,” screening Friday at 9:30 p.m. in one of the festival’s Border Crossing programs, is a captivating combination of experimental film and opera that could be an hommage to John Rechy. The side of the mountain happens to be in Griffith Park, a venerable cruising ground, and the film opens with five images of varying sizes within a black matte. (One image is of the downtown L.A. skyline; the others are set in the park.)

The largest image, in the lower right-hand corner, moves; the others are still except for the next largest to the right, which moves only occasionally. A solidly built man who looks to be about 40 and has gray in his beard and hair approaches a young Latino male for anonymous sex that develops considerable tenderness and passion. A third man, possibly a policeman, appears in the next-largest frame, as do a dog and then a glimpse of coyotes, all of which creates most effectively an ominous, unsettling mood. Throughout, the lovers are singing in an operatic manner, but the preview tape is silent, which makes the film seem all the more disturbing. In a coda, Leung and Michael Webster’s opera unfolds at a gallery installation, watched by a small but rapt audience.

Life and death

Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh’s “A Certain Kind of Death” is an altogether mesmerizing 70-minute documentary that in precise, step-by-step fashion tells what happens to the corpses of three middle-aged Los Angeles-area men who have died alone, leaving no known relatives and apparently having no close friends. The sadness of their fates is offset by the meticulous and highly professional and thoroughly dedicated manner in which the county coroner’s office and public administrator’s office go about their timeless rituals of investigating the men’s lives and eventually disposing of their remains and assets.

While charting the systematic eradication of an individual, the filmmakers evoke an eternal, biblical, ashes-to ashes, dust-to-dust cycle. What’s more, they leave the viewer with the consolation that the remains of the most solitary individuals in the county of Los Angeles fall into very good hands, indeed.

“A Certain Kind of Death” will be followed at 9:30 p.m. by Billy Woodberry’s landmark 1984 feature “Bless Their Little Hearts,” written and photographed by Charles Burnett. It’s an unflinching, deeply compassionate portrait of an ordinary black man (Nate Hardman) with a wife (Kaycee Moore) and three children (played by Burnett’s own children) but no job.

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Screenings

Independent Los Angeles

Where: REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 631 W. 2nd. St., L.A.

When: Today-Sunday

Jules Engel animations, Sunday, 7:30 p.m.

Border Crossings shorts, Friday, 9:30 p.m.

“A Certain Kind of Death,” Saturday, 7 p.m.

“Bless Their Little Hearts,” Saturday, 9:30 p.m.

Cost: $8-$10

Info: (213) 237-2800 or

www.redcatweb.org/season

/film/independentlosangeles.html