Educational Media Reviews Online

This collection of shorts from 1996-2003 reveals Simon Tarr as an inventive video and film maker of great range. The nine pieces consist of two documentaries and seven experimental works, both live action and animation, most shot on analog and digital video but with some Super-8, 16, and 35mm film elements included.

Tarr’s droll, dry humor is most evident on the first two works. In Growing Up Luke, he uses Star Wars action figures to compare himself to Luke Skywalker -- the bland, dutiful boy so unlike Han Solo, that cool Babe Magnet whom Tarr wishes he could be. The second short, Vow, cleverly intercuts footage of Tarr’s wedding with screen shots from Atari’s classic video game Space Invaders. These two works and the third, a sensitive (though never maudlin) documentary titled Joe’s Suspenders - about the last days of Tarr’s terminally ill grandfather - are all shot on consumer analog video, giving them the appearance one associates with America’s Funniest Home Videos and the like. But that same quality also gives them an immediacy most effectively demonstrated in Joe’s Suspenders.

The selections shot on digital video and film exhibit much greater resolution, and several are visually arresting. The Cold Sun is a black and white experimental work in which a young man dressed like a Tibetan Monk (or is it Luke Skywalker making another appearance?) roams an alien desert world. The live actor is actually superimposed over an animated backdrop, and the result is stunningly bleak. “Desert Tango” is perhaps the most polished animated piece in the collection, although much of the animation actually imparts the simple qualities of a child’s coloring book.

Extremely Bright Lights and the Sound of Explosions is an unnerving juxtaposition of two disparate elements: grainy, slow-motion Super-8 footage of “professional” wrestlers battling in the ring, with the soundtrack of a computer-synthesized voice blandly reading instructions from the book Nuclear War Survival Skills. Microcinema.com says the film “draws parallels to popular portrayals of warfare,” but it also brilliantly parallels the ludicrousness of the wrestling with the equally ridiculous instructions on surviving a nuclear war - they’re both pure fantasy. Two experimental selections, Sundog Verga Matrix and Burning Contour Mix, employ 3-D glasses - officially “Berserk-O-Matic Trance Spectacles,” included with the DVD. The glasses are appropriately named, since the effect is really not 3-D. The glasses serve more to accentuate the shimmering, pulsating quality of the images, which are the most abstract of any in this collection.

A good sampling of Simon Tarr’s recent work, this is recommended for larger academic and public library collections, especially those collecting experimental cinema. Unfortunately the DVD comes with no booklet or notes, although synopses can be found at www.berserker-rage.com/ludd.html.

NOTE: The DVD would not play on my older (circa 2000) home DVD player, perhaps because the disc may have been recorded in the DVD-R or +R format. It played fine on the newer DVD player in my office, but libraries/schools with older players may want to contact the distributor about compatibility.