Aarhus Day 1

Day One, Friday the 21st, includes Thursday the 20th, when I flew from Berlin to Copenhagen with one Sergei Prokofiev. He didn't look like Sergei Prokofiev--his lips weren't nearly as wasp-stung, and he didn't look quite 115 years old--but he answered to the name when paged by the airport employees and confirmed that a stray bag was his. Nobody involved in this exchange seemed the least bit fazed by his resurrection.

In Aarhus the opening night party was in progress when I arrived. The festival director picked me up at the train station and drove me the two blocks to the bar, where over deafening electronic music she shouted introductions to various festival volunteers and to my roommate, a Los Angeles filmmaker named Zebediah Smith who had a short called "Andorra" in the "Too Much To Dream" program. After dropping off our things in a small room in a large suite right in the center of town, we set out for food and found the only place in Aarhus that served food past 10PM. It was good food, and good conversation, and we discovered that we had a number of mutual friends, including Squeaky Blonde.

The next morning I had some butterflies in my stomach, not because my movie was showing but because I was supposed to talk. I write for a reason; talking is not one of my strengths. The "Convergence of Image and Sound" symposium was at the music conservatory, a bit of a cab ride from the center of town. Immediately some volunteers apologized for what was anticipated to be a thin crowd. I sat in the back of a medium-sized classroom that couldn't be darkened sufficiently and watched the students trickle in. In the end the room was about half full, with about 25 of us. Not exactly a sell-out crowd for the European premiere, but it was critical mass.

Comedy is said to be uniquely difficult among the arts but it has the benefit of producing audible results. When the movie succeeds in being funny, you know. So I could tell that this crowd liked the first 20 minutes, which has virtually all the laughs. (I've never thought about this until now but the movie is a bit sugar-coated in that way, lulling the audience into a comfort zone before socking it with martyrdom and gore.) The rest of the movie seemed to go over well, except with one fellow sitting a row ahead of me, just to the left, who spent much of the movie shuffling through his papers and scribbling notes and missing crucial text plates and turning me into a nervous, resentful wreck.

The movie finished, the audience applauded, and Bartos was introduced. Before delivering his paper, he said some nice things about the movie. One quote--"One of the best movies about music I ever saw"--is going up on the Web site the hour I get home. Forty-five minutes later Bartos had delivered his paper and the panel discussion began. I felt a bit at sea for the first part because the topic was sound design in the movies, a subject about which I have strong but totally uninformed opinions. I took a pass on the first question. I managed to take a few stabs at other questions, but only got to yammer on at length when they opened the floor to questions and people asked me about the movie.

After the panel, Bartos and the others were going to lunch but I excused myself so that I could catch the last part of the noon screening of Apparition at Ost For Paradis (East of Eden), the dilapidated multiplex downtown. Zeb came with me and so was there to witness my face falling like a Danish souffle as the festival volunteer advised me to go to lunch and skip the screening and the Q&A--there were two people in the theater where my movie was showing.

Zeb and I found a charming little cafe where we watched the rain and contemplated our fate. Two people! His movie played later that afternoon in a small subterranean theater with a forty-person capacity, which was, with us, a tenth full. The other audience members were an English filmmaker and her soundtrack composer.

So suddenly the morning's audience of two dozen conservatory students seemed like a mob and a blessing. We started hearing stories about movies playing to entirely empty theaters. Dark questions began suggesting themselves--was this an actual film festival that had lured us to the damp realm of eastern Jutland? Or were we ensnared in some kind of elaborate farce designed to qualify the organizers for state arts funding? A less sinister but equally dismal question: What if you put on a film festial and nobody came?

Not very many hours passed before I regretted not staying for that 2-person screening. First of all, I would have boosted attendance by 50 percent! But more importantly, I remembered how Hedwig responded when faced with the audience of one, up on the sound stage by the Porta-Potties at the Menses wimmin's music festival in the rain. She gave it her all! That scene is the most poignant example of grace under pressure, generosity in the face of disappointment, that I can think of on stage or screen, and I wish I could have drawn from its example in a more timely manner. At the very least I walked away from my first day in Aarhus with an important lesson--that even an audience of one is worth waiting around for--and with a killer quote from Karl Bartos.