Pioneering

Exceptional in its modesty, DANCE PARTY USA is, for us, an inside job. Writer / director Aaron Katz used to work at the Pioneer, and he has remained a friend to the theater.

But don't get upset that talented people have worked with us.

DANCE PARTY USA is an odd, beautiful little film - attentive to the uncomfortable rhythms at the dawn of relationships, the strange tension that exists before a couple's first kiss, the qualities of independence, and, most powerfully, the ramifications of personal revelation. Also, no literal dance parties take place in the film. Perhaps "dance party" refers to the young peoples' mating rituals. . .?

Beyond (and partially through) the Pioneer, Aaron has become part of a community of 20-something middle-class filmmakers who are creating very naturalistic, downbeat, semi-autobiographical cinema. The community includes directors Joe Swanberg (LOL), Frank Ross (QUIETLY ON BY), the Duplass Brothers (THE PUFFY CHAIR), and Andrew Bujalski (FUNNY HA HA, MUTUAL APPRECIATION). These guys are all directors, but they also often work as actors or technicians on films the others direct. Geographically they are spread out, though common points of meeting include Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, Austin (Texas, whose South by Southwest festival screens much of their work), and also Portland (Oregon), where Aaron passed much of his adolescence and where DANCE PARTY was shot and is set. Often they shoot on three-chip digital video, and the inexpensiveness of that format allows a high shooting ratio which encourages improvisation and taking chances. (Bujalski is an exception, here, as he has tended to shoot on 16mm.)

Institutionally, these guys have a lot going for them, and in time I wonder if their modesty as a "movement" will be lost, and their significance will be overstated - much as the significance of the "French New Wave" of the 60s and the "New Hollywood" of the 70s has by now been infinitely overstated. Still, like the filmmakers affiliated with those movements at their emergence, these guys are making some very interesting, modest little movies, including DANCE PARTY USA.

Check it out this week.

(As a final footnote, DANCE PARTY USA may itself some day be a footnote in biographies of Anna Kavan, the film's teenage star. Kavan has an ephemeral indelibleness that should attract Hollywood agents and casting directors.)

Postscript:
See also this, this, and this.