NY Underground Film Festival

Two weeks after 9/11, a friend said two things that lodged in my mind and never left. The first was that he couldn't decide whether the elapsed time felt like six months or one very long day. The other was that he felt a mix of emotions he'd never experienced before?rage, shock, grief and awe?and yet, despite his insomnia and dislocation, he didn't quite want those feelings to pass. I knew what he meant, and I still do. It's not at all morbid to wish for some way of remembering, physically, the visceral emotional force of that day, if only to stop it from becoming an abstraction: three digits, split by a slash.

This year's New York Underground Film Festival screens a compilation of shorts that will help you remember. And I don't mean "remember" in that phony, MSNBC, slow-mo-news-footage-plus-flag-imagery-plus-music-from-Independence Day way. "Six Months Later," which screens March 10 at 7:30 p.m. and March 11 at 5:45 p.m., doesn't reek of spin or syrupy sentiment. It's jagged as razor wire.

The program begins with a blast of helpless rage: "A Message to Bin Laden," videomaker Monroe Bardot's three-minute record of a rant by 83-year-old World War II veteran Wesley Payne, who stands in front of a wall-mounted Old Glory and yells that he's gonna rip the Evil One with a chainsaw, string him by the balls and let Afghan women oppressed by the Taliban chuck rocks at his remains. He then performs the National Anthem on his harmonica, and Bardot dares record the whole thing with conspiratorial empathy and zero condescension. No, it's not constructive, but it's honest.

Next come fear and awe: "First Person 911," in which videomakers Luke Joerger and Ray Mendez edit together first-person camcorder footage taken by Lower Manhattan residents. The shaky, blown-out, prismatic snippets don't just remind us that 9/11 was the most comprehensively covered violent incident in human history; it was also the first collective record of Americans grappling with two mutually exclusive modern urges: to get the shot, and to save themselves. (A young father taping the collapse of the first tower from the roof of his apartment building has to be cajoled into retreat by his wife; standing in an elevator, he lets the camera dangle limply, taping his own shoes as he stammers, "Holy shit, man.")

The 9/11 collision of reason and fear gets a striking elaboration in Scott Pagano's five-minute short "Everything Will Be Okay," a collage of first-person closeups of a random man (Pagano?) reading from a religious pamphlet, while multilayered, ghostly images (fleeing citizens, rescue workers, rubble) flicker over and under his blank face. The collage is punctured by printed therapeutic messages ("just stay quiet") that expand and contract, shifting in and out of focus?a visual representation of fear pulverizing language.

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As always, this film festival's schedule is notable not just for individual works, but for common themes, images and ideas that recur in different works or on different nights, reinforcing one another in surprising ways. One of these is the idea that certain chapters in American history have long-term repercussions we aren't aware of until it's too late. In "First Person 911," a couple of young black men walking through ash-choked streets near Ground Zero recite a laundry list of foreign and domestic enemies, each of which has a specific grievance against the United States. "The government knows what's going on," says one, "and it's up to them to rectify their mistakes." This grim hint of karmic payback also crops up in the brilliant documentary "Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story" (March 8, 7:30), by writer-director Garrett Scott and cowriter-editor Ian Olds. At first it seems a straightforward account of a 1995 rampage by suburban San Diego resident Shawn Nelson, an unemployed defense-industry worker, ex-soldier and methamphetamine abuser who stole a tank from a National Guard armory and drove it through his neighborhood, mashing cars and lampposts until cops took him down.

While "Cul de Sac" periodically revisits police helicopter footage of Nelson's epic flipout, the documentary goes far beyond clip-job exploitation, placing Nelson's fury in a political, economic and social context. Newsreel footage of fat, happy San Diego in the 50s and 60s is juxtaposed with 90s images of shuttered defense plants, jobless blue-collar suburbanites and police on patrol. Statements by cops, historians and real estate agents sketch the rise and fall of a Pentagon-fueled boomtown, then point out that amphetamine use first became common during World War II, when the U.S. government supplied the drug to servicemen (especially bomber pilots). Some ex-soldiers who got work in defense plants after the war kept taking the drug so they could work longer hours and earn extra overtime. In the mid-90s, the government contracts dried up, General Dynamics and their ilk fled San Diego, "outsourcing" their manufacturing to rival states and foreign countries, leaving neighborhoods full of loyal working-class Americans with nothing but unemployment checks, nostalgia and drugs. Each time "Cul de Sac" revisits Nelson's low-speed tank chase, he seems less like a standard-issue nutjob loner and more like a military/industrial Frankenstein's monster, haunted by (and hunted for) other people's sins.

There are dozens of features and shorts on the schedule, and it's impossible to give the interesting ones the thorough examination they deserve. But here's a shortlist of stuff worth checking out:

? Giuseppe Andrews' "In Our Garden," an overlong (87 minutes) but fascinating video in which two residents of a Ventura, CA, trailer park reenact the director's crude, vulgar, strangely touching romance script. Beware: it starts with a man fishing in a toilet, hoping to catch "the brown-eyed grouper."

? Joey Garfield's "Breath Control: The History of the Human Beatbox," a laid-back musical history that links the art form to centuries of oral music around the globe. The film seems to confirm what I'd long suspected: beatboxing is hiphop's real musical marvel. It's worth seeing just for an early 80s clip of Regis Philbin interviewing the Fat Boys. (March 9, 9:15 p.m.; March 11, 9:45 p.m.)

And last but not least:

?"Standing by Yourself," Josh Koury's dark, intimate portrait of himself, his brother and their friends growing up in Clinton, NY, in the late 90s, as part of a working-class group of 40-swigging, potsmoking troublemakers in a suburb full of college-bound kids. This is an era when teens are more comfortable with cameras than ever before, and Koury quietly takes advantage of that fact, honestly recording the class resentment, alienation and rootlessness of his family and friends. Grim, funny, scary and often moving, it's the kind of feature Kids director Larry Clark might make if he quit exploiting teens and tried to understand them.

The New York Underground Film Festival runs March 6-12 at Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave. (2nd St.), www.nyuff.com.

Framed

40 Days, 40 Nights is pretty much what the ads lead you to expect: a twentysomething ripoff of the Seinfeld episode "The Contest," wherein digital-media whiz Josh Hartnett pledges to go the titular time period without sexual gratification (or self-gratification) of any kind. When he meets the girl of his dreams, he considers abandoning the plan, and because there's no good reason why he shouldn't?beyond the fact that all his friends have placed bets on whether he'll cave?the film lacks both suspense and common sense. It's basically a showcase for Hartnett, a young male lead who's such a likable, unaffected actor that he's bound to be written off as artless.