"Consiglio and Angels," courtesy of R D Zurick
Even the most enthusiastic fan of cinema would be forgiven for the need to a catch a breath, to mentally decompress and maybe stretch out the ol’ back and knees after the 10-day St. Louis International Film Festival. Roy Zurick was among those who took in as much cinema as possible, deferring on one interview request late last week, due to the fact that at the time suggested, he’d planned on sitting in a darkened hall, taking in the SLIFF experience that, for him, almost amounts to an annual week-and-change holiday.
“I will be off to the movies by 3:45 p.m. today,” he wrote us back, with a sly sense of humor that’s Zurick’s calling card. “It's film fest time.”
Undaunted by timing, though, Zurick is bringing a multimedia, multi-video show to life in a couple weeks, just enough time for St. Louis’ cinematic smarties to ready themselves for the new and the interesting, with Zurick’s video works set with, and against, the musical output of longtime local guitarist and songwriter John Consiglio, a Webster Groves native who cut his teeth in important, young, post-punk bands like the Oozkicks and A Perfect Fit and is currently manning the guitar slot in Black Market Peace.
The event created by the two, simply titled The Consiglio-Zurick Show, is a one-and-done offering at the Hi-Pointe on Sunday, December 11.
We’ll let Zurick explain the basics:
“R D Zurick, long a local film and video artist, whose work is also produced and shown in Bangkok, Thailand, has for the fourth time teamed with composer performer John Consiglio and the resultant works have been so satisfying that three of them will screen as a tribute to the musician. Zurick may be best remembered for a couple of video art shows at the Moore Auditorium, Arty Movies by R D Zurick and last year’s E-Mails From Bangkok. He has also created installations for the St. Louis International Film Festival, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and was included in a number of video art and music programs by the New Music Circle and HEARDing Cats Collective.
“Zurick and Consiglio’s first collaboration was a magical mergence of sound and vision on a haunting Thai-themed piece called Ancient City, which will open the show. This video weaves together the whole of Siamese culture, allowing their ghostly spirits to visibly rise on many occasions. A premiere screening of Butterfly follows. Zurick says his ‘videos, although sometimes running over 20 minutes, have no stories, no characters, and no words. They are universal images that move like music, sometimes very meditative, sometimes persistently rhythmic, and although they may begin from a point in reality they inevitably wind up taking the viewer through an excursion in abstraction sometimes so radically that they may resemble an action-abstraction painting in constant movement.’
“Ending the show, Consiglio takes the stage and performs an additional improvised layer of live sound with Zurick’s Reality Truncated, or How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love St. Louis. This new piece is a revitalized exploration of civic festivals around St. Louis, shot in a visually rhythmic manner, and first edited 30 years ago. The piece now takes on a retro film look, and its energetic rhythms fleetingly reveal a myriad of familiar local faces cavorting in the crowds that swarm these festivals of old. Everyone from Mickey Mouse to Stan Musial seems to be glimpsed as the piece dances to Consiglio’s improvisation.”
And even as Consiglio and Zurick are clearly the stars of this show (did you catch the name of the event?), there’s a third player involved: the Hi-Pointe Theatre itself. The classic, single-screen house is one of the few, loved, throwback movie venues in town. You always get the sense, when sitting in the Hi-Pointe, that you’re “going to the show,” as if dialing back the clock. The angled seats, the muted-but-slightly-funky coloration, the old-school concession stand and ticket booth... all add to the magic of this special place.
Though we missed on specifically talking to Zurick, person-to-person, he did supply some thoughts on his venue for this show, as well as various other things of interest. Let’s let Zurick take it away.
“Specifically, the reasons for the Hi-Pointe show are:
1. I want to show the most beautiful work I have created yet on as big a screen and as publicly as I can. (That work is called Butterfly, and it is available for pre-screening. It was produced in 2011, and is 22-and-a-half minutes long.) It’s made in St. Louis, although I am known for being enamored with exotic Thai imagery for the last few years.
2. I want to pay tribute to a wonderful man, a musician whose music I have used for four videos now, and to exemplify how he makes music the same way I make videos. In other words, I want to show off our 'perfect match.'
3. I want to show how the medium of film provoked one kind of musical rhythm because of its basic nature. While I’m now creating in digital video, the basic nature of that medium has dramatically changed the rhythms of my pieces. This will be best exemplified by the inclusion of a revived 30-year-old film that John will accompany live at the Hi-Pointe.
4. The particular three pieces we have chosen for the show privilege the music and put the music upfront by presenting them as a complete unit.
5. I love to show my videos. That is my thrill, not the money that might be gained from it. In fact, we are just charging $5 a head, which may not even cover our costs. We just want to have fun. Which leads me to the last and maybe best reason for doing the show...
6. We want to have a party at 5 p.m., and then go eat.”
Having seen Zurick’s work on the big screen of Webster U.’s Winifred Moore Auditorium in the past, it’s safe to say that he’ll start out the show with a funny, quirky introduction of some sort, with many nods to his collaborator Consiglio. Having seen the latter’s work in a public, accompanist setting, it’s also safe to assume that he’ll take the cue from there, bringing quiet-to-energetic waves of sound to the hypnotic videos that are Zurick’s stock-in-trade.
It should be a good time. And it sounds attendance might just mean a slot at the dinner table, post-show.
The Consiglio-Zurick Show happens Sunday, December 11 at 5 p.m. at the Hi-Pointe Theatre at the corner of Skinker and Clayton. Admission is $5. For more information, call 314-546-2200.
