Film prof. earns elite honors in Ann Arbor

Out of 2,500 submissions to the 49th annual Ann Arbor Film Festival, UCF film professor Christopher Harris was one of 100 films chosen to be featured.

His film, 28.IV.81 Descending Figures, had its world premiere at the March 26 festival that typically features avant-garde and experimental, story-based narratives, documentaries and animations.

The improvised, double-projection film, shot at Orlando's Holy Land Experience, is the second installment in an ongoing series based on a book by poet Nathaniel Mackey. The book, Bedouin Hornbook, is about the metaphysics of making music.

It uses light metaphors to describe those metaphysics and each film in the series is inspired by a line from the book, said Harris.

28.IV.81 Descending Figures is inspired by the line: "The ‘descending figure came in to remind us that a sparked or incendiary ‘someone' … repeatedly flared only to flicker and fade and die down again."

The noon and 5 p.m. performances of Behold the Lamb — Passion Drama were condensed to separate 100 rolls of film and simultaneously projected side by side.

"My film was a great success," wrote Harris in an email. "I got lots of very positive feedback from audience members, fellow filmmakers, curators and it even won a jury award, the Double Documentary Award."

Along with being awarded about $200 in cash prizes at the festival, Harris hopes his film leaves viewers thinking about the way religion and matters of faith are represented. He also hopes that audience members recognize the performance he filmed as a particular way of representing what is essentially "unrepresentable."

Harris, who was first inspired to go into the film business while taking a film class as an undergraduate at Northwestern University, attended Ann Arbor as a spectator when he was a graduate student at the School of Art Institute in Chicago in 1999.

When he took the class, he thought it would be "entertaining, but not especially difficult." What started out as an easy A turned out to be a revelation as Harris learned that films have meaning beyond entertainment, an idea he found fascinating.

"I always say that experimental film has the worst of both worlds," Harris said. "It is esoteric. It has little to no box office value in the commercial cinema world, and because there is no original object as with painting or sculpture, it has no market value in the art world."

According to senior film major Jon Perez, Harris' films are far from commercial.

"His films are very personal with singular production. He's the person with the idea, he's the person that shoots his idea, he's the person that edits his idea, etc. He does it all," Perez said. "He operates more like a traditional visual artist than what most of us think of as a filmmaker. The films are statements about himself by himself."

Perez said that he likes that Harris isn't afraid to challenge his students' thoughts.

"He's the kind of teacher you want to have if you're interested in growing,"  Perez said. "He is a serious artist who happens to be a teacher as well … his office has film everywhere; it even smells like film."

"In the classroom I ask students to question their own preconceived notions of what films are," Harris said. "I try to do the same thing with my own work. I have taught some the same techniques that I use on a limited basis. I expect to teach these sort-of techniques more often in the future."