imagineNATIVE 25 FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW! Prepare to have your eyes deafened and your ears blinded by filmmaker Fox Maxy’s Guts And Glitz, one of the best experimental features I have ever seen. Using a decade of footage taken anywhere and everywhere, Maxy weaves past journeys to make a whole new quest. This is more than poetry on the screen; these are images projected on poetry turned into light and sound.
Blood runs out of a man’s nose (Sergio Mejia) in the city back east, then a deer runs with a ghost and her dog out west. G.G. (Fox Maxy) has been walking a path of pain she did not invite, yet had to endure. We hover back to the two gothed-out sisters, Veronica (Virginia Aguiliar) and Amber (Avellakaa Aguilar), both totally gypsied to kill in the finest black while sitting in a car, talking boys.
Meanwhile, the white-clad Ghost (Fox Maxy) drifts through abandoned dusty rooms, lingering in the spaces where the memories were left behind. These are cut with distorted clips of Tyra Banks’ landmark interview with Naomi Campbell, utilizing a screw down that butches up the audio. However, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Masks dance across the screen with no warning, some with an eerie Bauhaus glow, while others are blatant pumping heart faces. A surreal lit stage with an oozing background is cut to with women in a spooky performance. The invisible man cackles over analog eyelashes while rows of slot machines shine into infinity.
A trance-like moment in Fox Maxy’s Guts and Glitz, where silhouettes dance through glitchy neon light and immersive analog grain.
“Maxy weaves past journeys to make a whole new quest.”
A crumbled-up flaming hot bag in the sand watches planes in the stratosphere, then we are suddenly in an orange metal tunnel filling with smoke. In this unusual masterpiece, the past is cut up, loaded into a rocket, and sent into the future.
The list of successful experimental films with a feature-length running time is much shorter than the list of successful experimental shorts. This is due to how long your senses can be electrified before the stimulation loses its spark. Even the best-known experimental features usually need help from cannabis supplements to sustain engagement with the non-linear material.
Guts and Glitz never stops sparking, as it maintains an unheard-of momentum for a non-traditional sensory experience. How Maxy achieves this is a mystery—the same one that seeks the answer to where great art comes from. Her instincts on how to arrange and rearrange her material are uncanny, each choice working perfectly without any tangible explanation.
Not only is Guts And Glitz never dull, it is also ripe for rewatching. While the first view will be a tidal wave of fascination, there are clues of deeper themes—organic to the material and its re-contextualization through the editing. Maxy revives the underground worship of imperfect image textures, using some of the most gorgeous analog grain seen this season. This is a monumental achievement, hinting at an unseen evolution of the form. Maxy is the new queen of the impossible.
Guts And Glitz screened at the imagineNATIVE 25 Festival.
"…one of the best experimental features I have ever seen."
