Moving Pictures
Rewind/Fast Forward Festival offers a look at a bygone era

Blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It, the 1956 movie that will be featured at the retro-tinged Rewind/Fast Forward Film and Video Festival

Jayne Mansfield, Little Richard, Fats Domino and The Platters will rock out—in Cinemascope.

Charlton Heston and Richard Harris will spar on the frontier in an epic Sam Peckinpah western.

Conni Gordon, who set world records and taught millions to paint on TV, will throw an in-person painting party for students and fans.

Dr. Paul George, Miami’s walkingest, talkingest historian, and Helen Kohen, historian of art in South Florida, will tell incredible stories from South Florida’s past—and both will have film that proves the stories are true.

Budding filmmakers will make animated films using not cell phones or handicams, but hand tools. Video art unseen for 25 years will reappear, restored and remastered.

And it will all happen during four days in August at the 2008 Rewind/Fast Forward Film and Video Festival.

In less than a decade the festival—known to insiders as Rewind/Fast Forward—has established itself as one of the most eclectic and wide-ranging cultural events in South Florida.

“Rewind/Fast Forward is never the same old thing,” says Don Chauncey, director of the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives. “We’re not only a film festival and we’re more than a series of community events. It isn’t easy to describe Rewind/Fast Forward in one sentence.”

The festival’s center is the Wolfson Archives, which produces Rewind/Fast Forward. The archive’s collections, ranging from home movies to TV news footage, are the basis for most of the festival’s events.

Miami Beach art instructor extraordinaire Conni Gordon in the 1950s

“Everything we do comes back to the history of South Florida—of all of Florida—and the reflection of that history on film and video,” Chauncey says.

Rewind/Fast Forward deals with Florida history; a certain eccentricity is to be expected.

Case in point: “Invasion of the Historians,” which lets local historians loose in the archives to find visual evidence of Miami’s past.

“’Invasion of the Historians’ is as close as we get to an all-access backstage pass to the archive,” says Barron Sherer, an archivist and curator for Rewind/Fast Forward. “We invite an historian to look through our film and video and research an event or topic that interests them. We never know what’s going to turn up.”

This year two historians will talk audiences through film clips they’ve found. Kohen, director of the Vasari Project, researched the infancy of Miami’s art scene and found TV news footage dating to the 1950s.

Among her discoveries: 1960 footage of the Miami Museum of Modern Art, housed in an antique mansion on Bayshore Drive; and the adventures of warlock/magus/sculptor Van Dercar, who, in between sculpting and spells, offered to repair the Arch Creek bridge after it collapsed in 1973.

Dr. Paul George invaded the archives looking for evidence of Interama, the grandest, gaudiest international meeting place never built in South Florida. George found film of workers creating elaborate clay models of the site and footage of several directors of the project. Each promises to build a magnificent gathering place of the Americas; not one of them got it done.

But Florida-centered, Rewind/Fast Forward isn’t Florida-obsessed. The festival will screen two restored feature films that aren’t connected to Florida at all.

“We’re showing the features to highlight film preservation,” notes Chauncey. “That’s what the Wolfson Archives does, and it’s what makes the festival possible.”

Sherer gets a faraway look in his eyes when he talks about this year’s feature films.

“You can get these films on DVD, but it’s not the same. Both of these movies are in ‘scope, and when you see them in a theater with an audience, it’s great. The films engage your peripheral vision and draw you into the story. They’re big, visually and emotionally.”

“Wild About Widescreen,” the Festival’s feature-length component, debuts on Friday, August 22 with The Girl Can’t Help It, starring statuesque Jayne Mansfield and directed by Frank Tashlin, who got his start making animated cartoons at Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Studios.

4.1 Neon by Mike Burger, part of Video South Florida, a collection of remastered video artworks that will be shown during Rewind/Fast Forward

Tashlin’s animation experience shows in the cartoonish Girl, not least in its eye-poppingly brilliant color (by DeLuxe). For present-day viewers the film’s silly story is less interesting than its jaw-dropping parade of mid-century musical talent, including The Platters, Fats Domino, Julie London, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Cochran, and Little Richard, whose howling rendition of the film’s theme song embodies the threatening sexual energy of first-generation rock ‘n’ roll.

Closing the Festival on Sunday, August 24 is a screening of Major Dundee, directed by “Bloody Sam” Peckinpah a few years before his ultraviolent epic The Wild Bunch redefined movie violence.

Set in the waning days of the Civil War, Major Dundee follows the alpha-dog rivalry of Major Amos Charles Dundee (Charlton Heston), a by-the-book Union cavalry officer on the trail of renegade Apaches, and Captain Benjamin Tyreen (Richard Harris), a showy Confederate with a plumed hat and a courtly manner.

Rewind/Fast Forward will screen a newly restored version of Major Dundee which replaces thirteen minutes cut when the film was first released in 1965 in bright, newly struck prints.

One famous Floridian who will appear at Rewind/Fast Forward is Conni Gordon. An artist and art instructor who holds a number of world records, Gordon taught untold numbers of people to paint and to think creatively through television shows and personal appearances.

Gordon will host a painting party at the Miami Beach Regional Library on August 23, leading one of her trademark art classes in the midst of an exhibition featuring Gordon memorabilia and paintings created by Gordon and previous classes of her students.

Ad for the 1965 film Major Dundee, which will be featured on the big screen on the last day of the Rewind/Fast Forward Festival

Also on Rewind/Fast Forward’s schedule is a “Restoration Premiere” of “Video Art South Florida” at the Bass Museum. A selection of video works curated by South Florida artist Victor Velt, “Video Art South Florida” was first exhibited in 1983. Now the video artworks in the show have been restored and remastered.

The Festival will also host “Cut, Scratch, Splice and Spool,” a workshop for young people who will make films by scratching, bleaching, splicing and manipulating film stock. The films will be screened on the following day.

Another event, “Moving The Images: From Archive To Screen” will feature South Florida filmmakers in an informal discussion of making new films using archival film and video materials.

A few Rewind/Fast Forward events are free of charge; most have admission fees and some require registration in advance. For more information visit the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives website at www.wolfsonarchive.org or call 305-375-1505.

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