Ross Nugent isn't especially a car guy, but the two shorts he's screening at Film Kitchen betray a certain fascination.
"Hopper Repair" lovingly memorializes the rusting hulks in a VW auto graveyard near Nugent's hometown of Sharon, Pa. And the nine-minute "Tear It Up, Son!" documents Yankee Lake Truck Night, which draws up to 10,000 people to watch monster-wheeled pickups put through their muddy paces in a drained eastern Ohio lake.
"It was this controlled chaos. It blew my mind," says Nugent, a mainstay of the experimental-film scene just back from graduate studies in Wisconsin. "Tear It Up" combines crisp black-and-white cinematography — shot on a vintage hand-wound Bolex — with overheard audio. ("I just yanked some dude's bumper clean off his truck! Heh-heh!")
Also screening are two shorts by veteran filmmaker Bob Buncher, including "Pennsylvania NW," a dramatic dialogue for two top local actors, John Shepard and Robert Haley. And Scott Whiteman's four Film Kitchen shorts include: two memorably odd music videos; the darkly comic "Sleeping Pills"; and "Left Behind Like Son," a wicked mashup of two disparate films from different phases of Kirk Cameron's career.
