Kill your darlings: Music Box series invites filmmakers to show a new movie once, then destroy it forever

CHICAGO — On Tuesday night, at the Music Box Theatre in Lakeview, a most alarming affair unfolded in front of a near-full house of movie lovers: Local filmmakers, Chicago directors, each of some distinction, discussed the films they just completed, then, one by one, they destroyed those films. They showed the works first. They’re not nuts. But if you were not in that audience on Tuesday night to see those works, unless someone was shooting the big screen with a phone — a fair possibility — you are fresh out of luck.

Poof.

Or rather, swoosh, sizzle, crackle, poof. Gone forever. The method of destruction was blowtorch. “Destroy Your Art,” the title given this extreme annual celebration of the impermanence of art and the fickleness of audience memory, was created in 2017 by Rebecca Fons, director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and Jack Newell, her husband, a filmmaker himself. That first year, the films — shot on SD memory cards, and not pricier, combustive celluloid — were ground up inside a shredder, but for an audience, it proved anticlimactic. They switched to crushing films in a vise, except not every director is strong enough for that. They considered acid and liquid nitrogen. But they wanted to make sure when a film was destroyed, it was gone.

So, blowtorches.

As the audience filed in, filmmaker Blair St. George Wright, a Chicago artist and projectionist (who uses “they” pronouns), sat in their seat, wearing a pink bucket hat, looking at peace with what was about to happen. A friend tapped their left shoulder: “How you feeling?” Wright nodded. A few seats behind them a couple of women settled into their seats and noted several blowtorches and a black welding helmet waiting on a table in front of the stage. One of the women said she was surprised to see it, and also kind of relieved: “I was wondering, what are they going to do? Screen the film, then drag and drop a file, erase — that’s it?”

Oh, no, no.

Fons climbed on stage and noted that the first couple rows of seats were strangely empty: “If anyone wants to come up front here ... All the better to witness the burning ...” She called on the first director, Ariella Khan, a recent Northwestern University film graduate whose work often deals with her Pakistani American roots. She explained she is a “coming-of-age, dramedy kind of person,” and this was a switch, a horror short. “I am excited to see it, and I am excited to burn it,” she said. And it was impressive, patient, controlled, vaguely John Carpenter-esque, more mood than narrative, shot late at night at a Libertyville gas station, with actors, a crew of a half-dozen, even a few special effects.

It was a slow burn — “Don’t destroy it,” someone shouted after — then a real burn.

Khan worked the blowtorch around the memory card as if it were a marshmallow. And the card, dangling down from a long metal arm, burst into bright orange streaks and the audience whooped. “OK, whenever you want to stop ...” Newell said jokingly from the wings.

Khan clicked off the torch.

“I didn’t know I’d be sad,” she said, staring at two smoldering weeks of work. (After the screening, Khan said she spent around $500 on her film: “I don’t want to add it up.”)

The point of “Destroy Your Art,” Fons said earlier in the day, was not to make anyone question the quality of their films or feel nihilistic about the vulnerable state of film itself, but to get them thinking about the perishable nature of art and how people consume it.

In other words, as the great sage Barbie said this last summer, does anyone ever think about death? Moreover, does anyone ever think about what lasts and how little — other than Shakespeare and Barbie — actually does? “I am a film exhibitor and my husband is a filmmaker,” Fons said, “and I talk a lot about film in terms of booking films, how much a movie will make, and for Jack, it’s a lot of ‘When are you shooting?’ or ‘What are you working on?’ It’s not a lot of art, it’s a lot of business. So we wanted an antidote, to encourage people on both sides — artists and audiences — to see something singular. We constantly discuss the life span of films, but maybe knowing a film will be gone unlocks a part of a filmmaker’s brain that lets go? That doesn’t need to be precious about everything? And if a film is impermanent, does that change how an audience sees it? You know people who pull out their phones the moment a movie starts? What are they doing? What if they had to pay attention? What if once a film screened, that’s it?”

If the films on your Netflix watchlist were vanishing forever, you’d have a shorter list.

Likewise, if filmmakers knew their work disappeared after one showing, if there was no going back to tweak or retool, they might take more chances. At least, Fons said, that’s what she and Newell have seen from filmmakers who take part in “Destroy Your Art.” The quality, she said, rarely looks rushed, and new muscles get flexed. A filmmaker of dramas might try a comedy. Once, a local director who participated asked a few friends to tell secrets for a film, understanding the secrets would be erased, along with the film.

Fons and Newell got four filmmakers to destroy work this year. Michael Glover Smith, a local filmmaker who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, ditched his deliberative style for a one-minute animated laugh. Ines Sommer, who teaches film at Northwestern, eschewed her usual social issues for a lovely documentary on summer.

Anyway, all that work — gone now.

When Fons and Newell ask filmmakers to shoot something to destroy, they give a single directive: Make it five minutes or less. They provide the memory cards. But nothing else. They get a range of responses: “Some say, ‘No, you have to pay me’ and ‘I won’t destroy my work,’ but then some, you get a ‘(expletive) yes!’ They want the experience.”

Smith introduced his film with a beer in his hand and a smile and said he approached the work “as a kind of Buddhist exercise in letting go of material things.” He teaches film history and “in the back of my mind, I hope my work will live on, but if I’m realistic, it probably won’t.” Blair St. George Wright made a visual poem about nature and the soul, using an anecdote from their life, repeated by friends in a variety of languages; because they sent specific parts of the anecdote to specific friends, and because each narrator spoke in a different language, only the filmmaker knew the whole story.

The film burned in long pedals of flame. Newell asked how they felt destroying it.

“Pretty good,” the filmmaker said.

No one, of course, broke ground here. The history of culture is full of self-inflicted demolition. Radical edits, so to speak. Franz Kafka torched manuscripts seen as not Kafkaesque enough. Jasper Johns, at 24, destroyed almost everything he had painted up to that point. Claude Monet slashed 15 of his waterlily paintings just before an exhibition. Nikolai Gogol, convinced that God disapproved of his sequels to “Dead Souls,” burned years of writing. The Minneapolis band the Replacements, angry with their record label, tossed master recordings into the Mississippi River. A Banksy painting, having sold for $1 million, revealed itself to have a shredder hidden in its frame, destroying the work in front of a stunned auction house. Even Hollywood directors unsatisfied with their films have a formal way of distancing work: “Directed by Alan Smithee” is an agreed-upon credit for a disowned movie.

Sommer wasn’t disowning her film, shot on Lake Michigan and at an Italian festival in Niles. She stood against a wall and watched it play, one time only. She felt “bittersweet” burning it, she said.

Then she burned it, really good — “like I’ve been burning films all my life.”

If you’re wondering how Fons and Newell ensure once a film is burned, it’s gone — well, they can’t. They ask each filmmaker to sign a contract, drafted by a lawyer. “But it’s possible some of these filmmakers save a copy,” Fons said. “Still, I doubt it, and if they do, they’re missing out on an experiment.” Before home video, it was not an uncommon occurrence to catch a film one time and then never again have access to it. The film might not have been destroyed, but for a chunk of the audience, it could definitely seem like that.

That world is gone; much of the history of cinema is a click away.

“But these films really are gone,” Fons said, “and you know what? I remember every single one.”