September 4, 2002

By Lynn Rapoport

SOMEONE MUST HAVE warned me about trains when I was little. Filed under superego are ghastly pictures of dislocated limbs, heads that really did roll, a memorial for a couple of kids from my school who got stuck on a railway bridge – disasters for the living and the dead. Those images surface first thing like knee-jerk reactions while Lee, sitting on the porch of a freight train that's tearing through the Mojave Desert, talks about "speed rushing" in Sarah George's Catching Out: The Act of Hopping Freight Trains.

"I like to think of it as one of those few genuinely American things," Lee says. "Like jazz, or having sex in cars." And there's a twisted kind of logic to that – in the United States we romanticize trains more than we use them, so train-hopping is bound to appeal to people who were born to be wild. It's also bound to appeal to people who want to find ways to live outside the system. Getting by on what other people have thrown away too soon, Lee has a well-appointed squat in the woods somewhere in northern California. His shelves are lined with boxes of tea; he has a comfy-looking bed.

Caltrain screeches past the nearest window at work, telling me I'm here too late, and the sound doesn't resemble anything I want to follow, no matter how many times I listen to the Magnetic Fields' Charm of the Highway Strip, where Stephin Merritt croons about desertion – "Baby, I was born on a train."

It sounds different to Switch and Baby Girl, two of George's subjects, who lean back against the wall and hear singing, watch the landscape speed up, slow down, get the jitters, and settle into a dream of something other people may once have viewed from a low-flying plane. It sounds different to Jessica, who hopped her first train (from Emeryville to Benicia) at 18 and is headed across the country with a traveler named Dan. In towns they see the back story of everything. Beyond the urban centers, away from much of anything that's built except the railroad ties laid down for freighters, they see what most people never will. The subjects of the film look outside their boxcars, and it suddenly seems funny. The country has so much pride in itself and is filled with occupants who don't know it very well.

Screening in the Sept. 17 program of the MadCat Women's International Film Festival, Catching Out documents the lives of people who, for long stretches or brief stints, have evaded the world where the "money system," as Jessica calls it, locks most people in, where mortgages and the lure of a regular paycheck and the need for peer approval and a million other things keep most people moving in one place. Switch refers to those people as straights. The feature-length Catching Out happens to be one of the more easily navigated selections in MadCat, a festival that gives most of its program space to short films and videos that experiment with the form, making innovative, sometimes difficult use of sound, color, editing, and narration.

Nobody warned me about experimental shorts when I was young. More accurately, I never got to see any. And when I try to think about what situates George's train-hopping documentary most comfortably in the festival, the first thing I come up with is that greater America isn't watching. The films and videos in MadCat can never completely evade the money system (no matter how good you are at dumpster-diving, some things just don't get thrown away often enough), but just as the gutter punks and hobos riding the rails, squatting deserted buildings, and scavenging at the back end of commercial zones have chosen to live their lives largely out of sight, most of these films involve choices that will keep them far from the viewing screens – not only in your average multiplex but also at your average Academy Awards and your average art house. There's just not that many places to show a work like Casey Koehler's "Bautismo," a gorgeous five-minute film in the program "Altered Realities" whose flickering, dizzying images are all suggestion of something terrible about to happen, a woman drowning not so much in water but in layers of panic, what drowning is like in nightmares.

Many of the filmmakers showing work here make use of what has been thrown away or deemed artless or discarded as a finished product or story – connecting found objects and old films and their own imaginings. A crime-of-passion tale is patched together like a botched investigation with Super 8 footage and "true crime" TV show voice-overs in Kelly Reichardt's "Then a Year." Jenny Perlin takes up the text of a century-old self-help book to draw connections between assembly-line work, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and the modern drive to succeed in "Perseverance and How to Develop It." In it a woman manipulates the skin and muscles of her jaw to the sounds of what could be deranged outbursts if they weren't the vocal exercises of an opera singer. People act out or think over their neuroses on-screen, and their commentary silently appears as subtitles. In Deborah Stratman's "In Order Not to Be Here," a camera watches other cameras watch over ATMs, parking lots, and gated communities, and a car alarm breaks through monitored silence to soundtrack an overturned shopping cart.

Elsewhere, a young woman murders her two friends and boards a train with their body parts in a trunk, which starts to seep blood, attracting flies, the authorities, and soon enough the media. Another film "ripped from the headlines," Jen Sachs's animated "Velvet Tigress" adopts a '30s aesthetic – long-legged girls with shingled hair, aerial shots of chorus dancers – to satirically retell a murder trial story that made headlines back in 1931. Addicted to novels, straightforward plotlines, and the fictional, or at least fictionalized, lives of what look like real people, I watch it twice. Other films play more seriously with animation and documentation, like "A Conversation with Haris," in which Sheila Sofian uses hand-painted animation and empathy to accompany an audio interview with an 11-year-old Bosnian immigrant. Others play more playfully with their materials. Lisa Yu's "Vessel Wrestling" begins with a clay mother calling her child in for lunch, turns into a surreal flood of human hair, and ends in midday sex between two very naked figures that literalizes the expression "I just melted when he kissed me." Shawn Atkins's "The Travelling Eye of the Blue Cat" uses photo-collage to examine the dangerous jealousy of pets. Caroline Leaf's 1976 "The Street" and Martine Chartrand's 2001 "Black Soul" paint on glass to tell stories, one small in scope, the other a 10-minute epic.

Boxcars on the brain, I keep watching shorts and imagining them as the thoughts that come as you look at your surroundings from some unseen vantage point, abandoned objects found and employed, an idea pushed out of solitary space. Like a woman deciding, after years of private, familial protest, to film her father out shooting deer and ducks with his hunting buddies (Kerry Hustwit's "The Hunter's Guide"). Like a small-town newspaper full of quietly outrageous stories that echo national discussions (Diane Bonder's "If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now"). In Victoria Gamburg's "Right Road Lost" a man named Phil Rios describes operations in the Persian Gulf where he and other soldiers buried men alive in bunkers. She films him in a restaurant, looking at a menu of margaritas. He eats chips and salsa, and Gamburg slows everything down, turning the act of chewing into tragedy. The regret carried in the voice-over and in his face feels unending. It's a scene you could witness from across a room and think you understood.

No one can, probably, but does it ever hurt to try? More than halfway through George's Catching Out, Jessica sits in someone's bedroom with two other train-hoppers, Nathan and Kelly. Not a fan of "the media," Nathan looks depressed and uncomfortable. He's worried about anything that might turn the hobo life into a hype machine. Within the context of MadCat, in a program screening on the back patio of El Rio among the trees, for people among whom many look pretty much like him and Jessica, Nathan's concerns don't seem like they're in quite the right place, but at least they stayed in the film. He has that expression on his face I know from having worn it a lot. It looks like he thinks all this is happening for the first time. He looks down on the camera but doesn't move out of view.