[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Author of the popular blog Art Fag City, Paddy Johnson is a writer and artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Her writing has been recently been featured in the New York Observer, Flavorpill, and NYFA Current.]
Over the last year, MonkeyTown has received a lot of attention for the successful combination of an innovative performance and screening venue with some very fine cuisine. Assuming you don’t mind sitting on couches designed for the rare few who enjoy awkward posture, the attention is well-deserved. The primary viewing and dining space in the back of the restaurant boasts four giant projection screens that flank the walls of the room, an open center space which is often used for performance and a rather fancy sound system (6.1 surround sound, for those who take stock of such things.)

Largely because we like MonkeyTown, this Friday we attended its SloMo Video screening, with the intention of determining whether 100 One Minute Long Slow Motion Videos is the best or worst curatorial film concept of the year. Contrary to what you might think, there are a lot of reasons for this project not to suck. In addition to having the reputable backing of MonkeyTown, it is conceived and curated by Ryan Junell, who is responsible for all kinds of great work you’ve probably seen or heard about, without knowing who’s behind it. For instance, he has directed brilliant videos for high profile indi bands such as Spoon, Gravy Train!!! and The Soft Pink Truth, is the director of See The Elephant, an experimental documentary on the 2004 presidential election, and the event director of Webzine, a 2005 conference on an independent publishing on the Internet.
With this background in mind, perhaps it is not overly surprising that SloMo Video defies expectations and is not an exercise in self-inflicted pain. Outside the quality of video submissions, the largest contributing factor to this is that Junell works with the understanding that the novelty of the slowed down human voice very quickly wears thin on an audience. For the most part the mix of sounds throughout the screening is tolerable, and on the rare occasion is even excellent. This may not sound like a ringing endorsement, but it is important keep in mind that there is only so much a person can do to a slomo compilation without entirely altering the soundscape of the project. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that everyone who came to the screening stayed for its completion is a feat in and of itself. (It should be noted here, however, that the screening unexpectedly turned out to be a popular date movie, so our analysis of audience attention span should probably take into account such things as “the cuddle factor.”)

A still from Calling All Occupants, one of the featured films in the SloMo Video series
Date interests aside, the most engaging videos in the series were usually the ones that employed sound in unusual ways. For ten bucks, you too can watch the limited edition DVD and learn that squeaky dog toys have a fascinating pitch in slow motion, as do kids screaming at the top of their lungs (Internet nerdocracy alert: There are less than 400 DVD’s left of the original 1000.) Made by Junell himself, this particular video is arguably the best in the series. Other standouts include a humorous alien dance video (we all hate the hipster alien, but multiply this species, film in slow motion and suddenly it’s entertaining,) and on the more disturbing note, a video of man pushing a safety pin through his eyebrow in slow motion, proving that videos under a minute can still be way too long. The man playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun also proved this point well.
The only real caveat with this touring film festival is that even at an edited-down 120 minutes, there is still far too much material to truly keep the audience’s attention for over an hour and a half. The show could benefit from shaving twenty videos from the roster, and the first piece I’d chose to go is the slow motion animation of the mullet man beating a woman to death on the beach. With the amount of good material already in the screening there is no need to water down the screening with videos that excel in the arena of bad gender politics and poor taste.
Click here for a complete list of SloMo Video’s 85 participating filmmakers.

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