Her name is provocative, its simple conceit. Filmmakers invited to participate in Destroy Your Art must adhere to only a few requirements.
“The only request we give to filmmakers beyond, ‘Hey, do you want to make an original film and destroy it?’ it has to be five minutes or less,” says Rebecca Fons, who co-founded the event in 2017 with her husband, Jack C. Newell.
A filmmaker’s goal is usually to make a movie and then run through it endlessly; Nowadays, audiences expect to see on demand, the idea that something might not be available to them is almost incomprehensible. What if these assumptions were set aside?
“There are two things we care about: One is, what would this do to the director?” says Newell, himself a filmmaker and program director of the Harold Ramis Film School in the Second City. (Fons is director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center.) “How would you make a movie if you knew it was only going to be shown once to this specific group of people, and then you were going to destroy it?”
“The next question is, what does the audience do, knowing they’re going to watch something that this is the only time they can engage with it?”
At Destroy Your Art, which takes place this year at the Music Box Theatre, on Thursday, August 25, at 7:00 p.m., the four invited filmmakers will each show a film they have made especially for this event; after that, they will burn the hard drive it is on in front of the audience using a lighter.
Past methods have included shredding (which required an industrial shredder rented from Iowa) and destruction via a custom-made contraption attached to a table; in 2019, the last year the event was held before the pandemic delayed its fourth edition, the method was also burning, which Newell says they returned to because it’s fundamentally primal.
Indeed, the event itself is a response to more structured viewing methods, which are often given to passive viewers, taking their attention away from what is happening in front of them.
“Inviting an audience to really be present was exciting,” says Fons. “What does such a goal do? How does that change that experience and that transaction?”
Among the participating filmmakers, all based in Chicago or nearby, their responses ranged. Lena Elmeligy, writer-director of the web series Ghareeb (available to watch on Open Television), was drawn to the idea for fundamental reasons related to her love of filmmaking.
“What I’m most excited about being a part of Destroy Your Art is the fact that its permanence allows me to return to the aspects of filmmaking that I enjoy most,” she says. “I’m less concerned that this is a reflection of me and my career. I’m more invested in the process itself and how it feels, and am I having fun doing it.”
Christopher Rejano, who primarily works as a cinematographer (he shot Jennifer Reeder’s film Signature motion AND Knife and skin), was also inspired by experiences related to his craft.
“When we’re on set and we’re stuck somewhere where we can’t disconnect, we tend to look at our phones a lot,” he hints at the inspiration for his film, a kind of experimental narrative, “and the phones become our windows into what it’s happening where we are.”
Two of the filmmakers, Dinesh Das Sabu and Yanyi Xie, were affected by the pandemic, which has loomed large over personal events like this one.
“Like a lot of filmmakers and just people in general, I’ve just had a pandemic of profound unproductiveness,” says Das Subu. “I thought this might be something to shock me out of that and get me out into the world and doing things again.”
This “thing” sounds quite ambitious. Although I was careful not to learn too much about films, I was particularly intrigued when Das Subu, a film professor who previously worked for Kartemquin Films (he made a feature-length documentary, Unbroken glass [2016]under her care), said that his lot “will be [like] if Chris Marker was reading some of the [the] phenomenologists, theorists of the kind of digital technology.”
For Yanyi, who recently graduated from Northwestern’s Documentary Media MFA program and whose work explores gender, queer identity and feminism in her native China, it’s a kind of exorcism. Her film does not use any new footage; instead, it’s drawn from her personal archive of images captured during the pandemic.
“It’s a very unique experience because I’m an international student,” she said, “and because of the pandemic I haven’t traveled home for the past three years.”
She elaborates that she feels like she’s been living in a transitional phase for so long. “Maybe if I put it in a project and destroy it, then it just becomes a short thing,” she says. “It’s like a solution for myself as well.”
One line in the filmmakers’ responses to the request is a relief that the goal isn’t to create something that’s intended to be “profitable or marketable,” as Elmeligy puts it, or even exist after that one night.
“I think having the stakes a little lower allows me to get back to that part of weaving a story together that felt so good in the beginning,” she says.
Yanyi, who has recently started incorporating more experimental aspects into her practice, notes the opportunity to participate and do new things. “I really like the performance nature of the event,” she says, “and I really like how experimental it allows me to be in creating this piece.”
Destroy your art
August 25, 7 p.m.; Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport
General admission $15, discounts for Music Box members
www.destroyyourart.com
musicboxtheatre.com/films/destroy-your-art
The relationship between filmmakers and viewers is complicated here. The inherent permanence of the project means that the dynamic is not guaranteed to be mutually satisfying, as commercial filmmaking strives to be.
“In many ways it’s been liberating because I don’t have to worry too much about what an audience will care about,” says Das Sabu. “I can only disappoint an audience with this thing. It’s freed me to pursue ideas and styles and take risks that I probably wouldn’t take in my more casual professional work.”
After all, the experience is the thing – that what the filmmakers create and what the viewers see will cease to exist afterwards. The concept still blows Fons’ mind.
“We are the ones in 2022 who see these four films and no one else on the face of the planet will ever see this Dinesh film again, including Dinesh!” she said. “It gives me goosebumps.”