[Frameworks] cat films

[Dave Tetzlaff]

> What else could we shown in a Cat Film Fest?

As Ekrem mentioned, there's Cat Cradle and Fuses. Dunno if the amount of kitteh-kontent is high enough for a feline fest, but the presence of the pussy... er, scratch that [Meow!] I mean the context of the cat, is the unraveling intertextual ball of string tying the two works together, or maybe being batted away from StanCat by CaroleeCat, or maybe the mirrored meowser is Schneeman's way of saying, 'my little furry pet is purring because she just pounced on some wee bit of pickle, and by the way, did you know that cats are independent creatures who do their own thing instead of licking their masters fantasy boots, and cats have really sharp claws they can dig into your untutored eye if you piss them off by mixing up which human is owned by which cat, and somehow indicate you think you own even one cat much less two, so go pine in the pines with your poor putrefying pooch and leave my kitty alone!"

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You could show Marker's 'Case of the Grinning Cat' which also might be a little light on actual kitty-kontent, but again the cat-concept is pretty important, and any excuse to show Marker is always a good excuse.

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Or you could go conceptual rather than representational:

I read somewhere that felines large and small are "creatures who spend most of the time sleeping between brief bursts of activity."

So I'm thinking you could show all 5 hours and 21 minutes of "Sleep", in a room filled with sofa and actual cats, so after puzzling over what do do with themselves for awhile, instead of getting annoyed and heading to the box office in angry mass protest to The Management, the viewers would figure they can emulate the cats and sooner or later pretty much the whole audience would be sleeping along with John Giorno, curled up on a couch like Giorno, but with cuddling kitties, sometimes coming and going but mostly sleeping as cats mostly do. Taking the cat cues, they might conclude that 'Sleep' is not the title of a 'movie' you 'watch' but might be a gentle imperative, like a Yoko Ono instruction, to stage the most simple and mundane action as a form of Art. Or not. Either way, they're in cat-mode, so it's basically nappy time whenever they feel like it no matter what else is going on in the room, and from time to time they'll wake up, yawn, stretch, look around a little bit — maybe watch the screen for awhile, maybe watch the other people sleeping, maybe think about how many hours John Giorno has spent sleeping since 1963, maybe wonder how many hours of sleep they'll have before they join Warhol in eternal slumber, maybe think about what a room of people sleeping because a silent black and white film of a man dozing on a couch can't keep them awake means in light of Warhol's claimed intent of documenting sleep for historical purposes since no one slept anymore due to the miracles of modern chemistry. But, being cat-people for the evening, they wouldn't think about those things too long or too hard before slipping back into a REM state with a dreamy revelation that the proper nouns 'Walter' "White' and 'Warhol' all begin with a 'W'. Then, maybe 90 minutes later, they wake up since the man-cat on the next couch is shattering the silence with loud irregular apneas and hypopneas because he didn't think to bring his C-PAP to a film screening, only, on awakening, they don't dig out their cell phones to check how much longer the film is going to run, they just realize they're hungry, and the smell of chicken and fish is coming from the lobby. So they amble out of the screening room and over to the concessions area set up especially for the screening, where they get served sashimi and/or poulet kabobs, (or Tuna hot dish if it's at The Walker), and at this spot there are benches set up by big picture windows where they can sit awhile and watch birds fly back and forth from the feeders outside, but the benches aren't that comfy so they head back to the couches in the screening room soon enough, tummies full and fall back into the rhythm of "Sleep"s sleep. When they wake up again after a big orange Maine Coon cat licks some hot-dish off their cheek, they sit up, the cat hops onto their lap and starts to purr, they reach down to pet it without thinking about it. Then it dawns on them that since they're doing the stroking and not getting stroked, their personal cat analogy is breaking down, and they start thinking like a human again, but still retaining a kind of felinious disposition. Some thoughts that might follow: Andy Warhol was like some kind of mutant future-cat, since he maintained a feline indifference and inscrutability while never sleeping and working constantly; "Sleep" is celluloid-projection-as-cat since it has 'bursts of activity' mixed in with the sleeping, and combining the two is pretty much the only way to make it from beginning to end (though 'sleeping' might be more figurative than literal); why am i able to look at the screen now for awhile without getting annoyed?; "Sleep" is celluloid-projection-as-cat since it's indifference to you is nevertheless amiable enough; hmm, I notice most of the other people are watching now too, I wonder what they're thinking?; and so on. The film ends. The lights come up, and the audience makes its way out through the lobby, passing posters with cat adoption info from the local shelters and half a dozen monitors of different types and sizes playing the Turn Down For What Cat Video on an endless loop. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yfGA6pBFVI) Once the last patron has gone, and the program committee is emptying the litter boxes and rounding up the cats and putting them back in their carriers, someone will say, "Folks, I think we've just set the all-time record for the most people who began a screening of 'Sleep' being present at the end." And someone else might reply, "Yeah, but Andy might ask 'What fun is that?'" Then they get distracted by a tuxedo fighting with a tortie screaming bloody murder while a midnight black long-hair rubs against their legs. And when they return to the question later, they hear the question Warhol might have asked in the deadpan tone with which he would have asked it, which wasn't a tone expecting an answer, or maybe suggesting that any answer would do. "Sleep" doesn't tell you how to watch it, because it doesn't care how you watch it, or how you watch it, or what you think about it, or anything else. It just presents you with an experience you probably can't process within the headspace you brought into the screening room. There must be SOME metaphysical significance to what happens after that, but I'm too tired to think about it, and this activity burst has come t...   zzzzzzzzz.