For 12 years the Revolutions per Minute Festival has been quietly showcasing experimental short works by local filmmakers, retrospectives of genre visionaries and artist showcases. This year, RPM hosted works by puppeteer and filmmaker Janie Geiser; Kathy Rugh, professor of film and photography at Kean University in New Jersey; and 10 works by longtime Massachusetts College of Art professor and filmmaker Saul Levine.
A presentation on Sunday, “Behind the Scenes,” showcases the long-labored works of four RPM curators.
Those sharing are Wenhua Shi, festival founder and director and a University of Massachusetts at Boston professor; Brett Melican, a cinematographer and production staffer; Homa Sarabi, RPM and Salem Film Fest programer; and Robert Harris, a faculty member at Fitchburg State University.
Highlights of RPM’s Sunday slate are Melican’s “And Then,” a Burroughs-esque “cut-up” of conversation between the filmmaker and MassArt roommate and sculptor Ronan Ellis as they intentionally get lost in Boston at night and meander the streets. Melican, who helps program the short film packages for the Independent Film Festival Boston, hopes to shoot his first feature, “Stranger Danger” on Cape Cod this summer.
Iranian-born Sarabi, who studied under Levine at MassArt and is an employee and instructor at Emerson College, has two films – the poetic, luminescent “Choreography of Light” and “Tan/Vatan,“ co-directed by Meenakshi Garodia, which frames an intimate conversation between two women about past loves.
Harris’ “Nam June Paik: Violin Dragging” is a “Fluxfilmconcerto for piano, head, violin, asphalt, water, & grass.”
Shi, just returning from a residency in Germany, has two shorts on the docket: “Monosabishii,” a visual poem about a space when no one is at home, and “Concréte: Boston City Hall,” which challenges Frederick Wiseman’s four-hour 2020 documentary “City Hall” with a meditative architectural contemplation about the iconic brutalist structure.
The program runs roughly an hour, with filmmakers in attendance.
RPM, which Shi began as a community movement at Colgate University in New York and relocated to Boston, partners on resources, facilities and screening space with UMass Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Goethe-institut Boston, The Brattle Theatre and Harvard’s Chinese Art Media Lab. The festival also hosts screenings at Boston City Hall as part of the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture. Beyond ongoing programs and filmmaker spotlights, it has an annual fall festival in September that is open for submissions through July 1.
Sarabi described RPM as a long-running passion project, “a crucial platform for contextualizing, exhibiting and archiving forms of experimental cinema that might otherwise be pushed to the margins.” Boston is its perfect home, “considering the area’s long legacy of local institutions and artists” such as Goethe-institut, MFA, Institute of Contemporary Art and MassArt.
There are no rules to experimental film, which spans animation, documentary, musicals and broad bendings of narrative structure and distortions of point of view; most are deeply personal and a reflection of the artist and their views. You could think of experimental film as cinematic essays that engage emotionally through visceral sensation. It’s what Shi, Sarabi, Melican and Harris will bring to the screen Sunday – though this time, instead of hosting a Q&A with a revered filmmaker, they will be the ones to take the bow.
“RPM Fest Presents: Behind the Scenes,” at 2 p.m. Sunday at The Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Harvard Square, Cambridge. $15.
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