Paint It Again / Grandpa's Wet Dream (Brockway)

Two Films Take Center at The Tropic
By Ian Brockway

Paint It Again / Sasha Wortzel
Grandpa's Wet Dream / Chihiro Amemiya

Tropic Cinema and Ibis Bay will  show two films among several others by Sasha Wortzel and Chihiro Amemiya in a special event that although very different in tone, speak about intimacy and the expression of desire. First Sasha Wortzel documents her multimedia exhibition in the short film "Paint It Again" which details the life of two artists, Aileen and Florence, and the house they shared. In the installation, a typewriter is attached to a video-screen allowing the participants to peer and observe various objects and spaces throughout the house. The interfaces themselves, with an old fashioned typewriter attached to a screen, possess a whimsical melancholy and it would not be surprising to see a curl of a sunflower bend through the screen like an ear to hear what the participant is thinking.

Florence loved gardening, while the spunky Aileen is an assemblage artist. In her toughened salty speech, Aileen is a human incarnation of a Segar creation. In her eyes, Popeye himself might feel at home, but you definitely feel the touch of her partner Florence with flaming monochrome hair who lives on behind  Aileen's smoked sunglasses, despite her passing from cancer.

In Wortzel's exhibition, the hybrid screens recall Terry Gilliam but the artist's use of pattern and design put the viewer in charge as creator and provide the ingredients for a Proustian collage of the synthetic and the organic, between garden dirt and desire.

Next, Chihiro Amemiya's  "Grandpa's Wet Dream" packs a punch, telling the story of a 75 year old man in Tokyo who has a suitcase of secrets that only the nerves of his body can reveal. The man, Tokuda Shigeo is a respected family man with a wife and daughter. Shigeo is unassuming and pleasant, very much a man of patterns. Like the intersecting lines on his sky blue shirt, he follows along a path.

Shigeo lives in a rectangular apartment and compulsively collects vintage Japanese cinema posters from the 40s and 50s. His surroundings are cluttered but calm within.

One day while at a hotel, a porn film catches his eye, seemingly by chance and he resolves to acquire them.

Since he feels that he would be too ashamed to publicly buy them from a video store which resemble fleshy yet faraway space stations, Shigeo goes to the head office directly to purchase the DVDs. Mr. Tsukamoto, the head of the company, propositions Shigeo to appear in  the porn films for he says, "the dirty look in his eyes". Shigeo, is presumably not the man's name. Tsukamoto invented his name because as he explains  it "means nothing".

We watch as Mr. Shigeo crisscrosses the urban neon geometry of Tokyo: an errant diagonal being of tranquility and gentle smiles on his way to his participation. He slips behind a rectangular door and submits, simply lying still, creating pixels of synthetic sex for those anonymous-screening eyes. Boxed in his rectangular and confined world of steps, doors, windows and walls, his occult occupation gives Shigeo  a non-linear stance of freedom, a second-life to experience a lusty bestiary apparently without consequence. But at the end of the day, he snaps back to his other self, without a thought--- winded but tranquil--- to become once more part of the urban  grid.

A friend asks Shigeo if his family would care about his appearances in adult films. "Maybe I shouldn't care about others," he states with a smile.

With her facile direction that moves with an oxygenated quickness though the claustrophobic corners of a 21st century Tokyo, Chihiro Amemiya has given us an expansive and immersing portrait of one hidden man of action and the path that he takes. Amemiya's  film is a fully complete realm and seems much bigger in scope than a mere 16 minutes. Around the edges of this over-bright city,  we see the full detail of a man in outline.

Both films enfold upon the other and relate like origami, seeming to talk to one another. Each story holds squares of memory. In " Paint It Again" Wortzel offers the squares on a screen that lead to a projection of intimacy. In Amemiya's portrait, the square is a door that one unassuming man must pass through to act on a libidinous dream. Both films also ultimately complement and create in mixture, provocative parts of a whole.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com