High School Musical?

Movies by artists are often just plain weird. These films tend to ignore the basics of storytelling, and space and time become warped and illogical. In short, they don't make sense! And that can be - sometimes - a great thing.Take Mike Kelley's odd film Day Is Done. The 150-minute musical screening this week at 7 Dudley Cinemais equal parts Lawrence Welk and Busby Berkley. It's High School Musical after four years of detention. It's a hypnotic, unnerving, strange and lurid audio-visual extravaganza made by one of LA's iconic artists, a man who played a green-tinged water imp in Bruce and Norman Yonemoto's video Kappa in 1986, and has explored the creepy edges of childhood with a host of collaborators including Paul McCarthy and Tony Oursler.

Day Is Done began as a series of high school yearbook photos that the artist used as the basis for a massive sculptural installation at the Gagosian Gallery in New York at the end of 2005. Critically applauded (it was dubbed "a true epic" by none other than filmmaker John Waters), the elaborate installation featuring 32 synchronized video stations and sculptural elements was designed to be part adult amusement park and part "spatialized filmic montage."

For the linear version, Kelley spent a year editing together footage to follow several character types through a day in high school; some are are dressed as vampires, others as devils, acolytes and mimes, as if it's Halloween or "crazy outfit day." The sequences are numbered and vary in length and style. Some are hypnotic, like the sequence of three dancers who form a train and chug their way through the halls and past the administrative offices in the beginning; others are boring, like the long sequence in a classroom when students, again dressed in outlandish costumes, argue about their heroes.

Together, they add up to yet another example of Kelley's odd artwork, hovering in a nether region between high and low, the conscious and the unconscious, the strange and the very, very strange. The beauty of the film, though, is how it asks you to think about expectations - what do we expect of a movie? And of high school? And when these seemingly invisible structures are violated, what happens? Experience Day Is Done and find out!

the details
Day Is Done screening
Tuesday, December 9, 7 p.m.
7 Dudley Cinema at Sponto Gallery
7 Dudley Avenue, Venice
310-306-7330