Author William Burroughs dubbed this synergism The Third Mind, and from this concept came Chapel Hill's Third Mind Collective, the culprit community responsible for Saturday night's film festival at the Skylight Exchange.
Composed of artists of several media, the collective works together create and promote primarily local art. Saturday night's event was relatively small potatoes for the collective, consisting of three hours of short independent films played for an audience of about a dozen.
And the venue could not have been better suited for the show.
Walk down Rosemary Street and turn into a dimly lit alley with walls painted blood red. Enter the door of the Skylight Exchange and behold shelves lined with books, tapes, compact discs and LPs, all under the soft illumination of bulbs far from adequate to light the room.
If there were music/book stores in the medieval era, this is how they'd look. Think of claustrophobia -- but in a good way. Think of character.
On this particular evening, a wrinkled white sheet hung before a diminutive stage, providing the surface for the projector's images.
The films themselves were what should be expected from independent artists -- marked by unconventional technique, off-beat humor and vague drama conveying raw emotion more than clear, denoted meaning.
Some of the characters included a demented chicken-man, a drunken nun and a mischievous bee-girl bent on sabotaging a grammar school science lab.
To complement such characters, the artists also employed stylistic filmmaking. "Nuns Getting Drunk," for instance, mimicked archaic silent film, complete with sped-up, exaggerated character movement, a low frame-rate, piano music and text-based dialogue.
