Jeff Jackson’s Wavelengths Defies Assumptions About Local Film

“I can’t tell you how many curators I’ve talked to who try to protect their patrons from art that they think they won’t understand. Their curatorial method is protecting people from their own enthusiasm.”

And so Jeff Jackson — experimental musician, novelist, playwright and all-around wizard of avant-garde production in the Queen City — states it better than I ever could.

We’re discussing Jackson’s newest project, Wavelengths, which features screenings of classic experimental films on 16mm celluloid, presented by Goodyear Arts. It kicked off at the arts organization’s Camp North End location on Oct. 26 with screenings of two Warren Sonbert montage films, Friendly Witness and Hall of Mirrors.

Jackson is driven by his refusal to submit to the lame by protecting people from their own enthusiasm.

“[Curators] say, ‘Well I’m excited about this but people here aren’t cool enough to share my excitement.’ Fuck that! I really believe that people here are cool and open enough and savvy enough to share my excitement,” he continues. “I believe that trying to protect people from art is the most retrograde thing you can possibly do and it’s incredibly harmful to the arts scene when it’s the curators of all people who are contributing to the dumbing down of the culture.”

Among his many other ventures, Jackson was founder and curator of the now-defunct NoDa Film Festival, an explosion of film programming that rocked the Neighborhood Theatre in 2006 when NoDa still had some street cred.

After that, he and NoDa Film Festival accomplice Ross Wilbanks programmed experimental film screenings through the late, lamented McColl Center Series New Frequencies. Wilbanks is an upper echelon Charlotte art weirdo in his own right, in whose garage I once attended a marathon screening of Jacques Rivette’s 13-hour French New Wave masterpiece Out 1.

Thank the gods of cinema, Jackson and Wilbanks are at it again. They’ve marshaled significant institutional support to continue their decades long habit of showing the best, most imaginative, most technically experimental cinema from around the world.

Charlotte Magazine is sponsoring, in partnership with The Independent Picture House, an impressive and ambitious series curated by Jackson and Wilbanks and presented by Goodyear Arts in Wavelengths.

Sean Robinson, Jackson’s bandmate in genre-defying art-rock gang Julian Calendar, rounds out the trio and will be serving as projectionist for the screenings — because you must remember, these aren’t digital copies of the films but actual … film. Like real actual film that has to be run through a 16mm projector. You can’t stream these.

Wavelengths is the fruit of 18 months of planning and groundwork by Jackson and his collaborators. And while a lot of that work was centered around technical requirements and funding, a central piece of the puzzle was programming.

Jackson knows that for the uninitiated, even the term “experimental film” can be daunting, raising the specter in folks minds of impenetrable Eastern Bloc melancholia or jittery half-baked wankery. More simply put: long, slow and pretentious. (Please clap as I stop myself from ranting about the word “pretentious,” which is basically useless for anything other than identifying the user as deeply incurious, intellectually insecure or both.)

Jeff Jackson and Co. understand that there are some barriers to entry when it comes to experimental film and have taken this into consideration while programming Wavelengths. In our conversation about the curatorial thinking behind the series I am put in mind of tasting menus.

Jackson puts it this way: “We’re not looking to blow people’s attention spans out. This is not about endurance, this is really about getting a taste of one filmmaker, their greatest hits. And each evening will have a really different feel.” An additional step toward erasing barriers to entry is cost. Like all Goodyear Arts events, Wavelengths is free to the public.

There will be six screenings throughout the 2024-2025 season, each featuring the work of a single important filmmaker. The first four events of the series will take place at Goodyear Arts. Following the Sonbert screenings on Oct. 26 will be Rose Lowder (Nov. 22), Phil Solomon (Feb. 22), and Stan Brakhage (April 12).

The series concludes in the summer of 2025 with two special screenings at Independent Picture House: David Lynch’s Inland Empire (June 21) and Andrei Tarkvovsky’s Andrei Rublev (Aug. 16).

The decision to do summer screenings at IPH makes sense given the summer situation at Goodyear. The light filtering through the many windows at Goodyear is gorgeous, but during the longer days of summer light pollution becomes a real problem for screenings that start before 10 p.m. As for the heat, Goodyear is located in a warehouse in North Carolina that doesn’t have air conditioning. I’ll leave what that’s like during the summer to your imagination.

Read more: Marking Two Years at Independent Picture House with ‘The Bikeriders’

What wasn’t immediately apparent was why the Wavelengths team selected the films they did.

“We wanted to show things that showcase the theatrical experience; things that if you saw them at home versus at the theater they are two completely different experiences,” he explains. “So, David Lynch’s Inland Empire, the soundtrack is like two-thirds of that movie. It shakes the walls and shakes the seats. It’s so nuanced, it’s so detailed and you have to have theatrical surround sound to really experience it. And the film has never been screened in Charlotte.

“For Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev is on Ross and I’s bucket list for movies we’d want to see on the big screen,” Jackson continues. “It’s one of the most visually amazing films I’ve seen in my entire life. I’ve never seen it on the big screen. There’s a new 4K restoration and it’s going to be astonishing. These are ‘mic drop’ movies.”

Jackson and Wilbanks’ work screening these rare films puts Charlotte firmly in the middle of what is an international conversation about film. The 2023 showing of Harry Smith’s alchemical opus MAHAGONNY at IPH was the first screening of the film’s 4K restoration before playing in Tokyo and Paris and then eventually landing in a provincial backwater called Manhattan.

This is a big deal. For a city that can often have an inferiority complex when it comes to our culture scene, you’d think Charlotteans would be shouting from the rooftops that we are one of the best cities in the world to see movies in.

The Charlotte screenings of MAHAGONNY had audiences split between rapturous trance states and frustrated fury. And fair enough; Smith’s film can be punishing in its length and ritualized repetition, and is structured towards esoteric aims that fly over the heads or under the radar of most audiences.

And yes, I mean that literally. In addition to being a visual artist, ethnographer and the man perhaps most responsible for the folk/traditional music revival of the 1960s Harry Smith was a practicing magician who encoded occult symbolism into his work, creating films that function as spells. He was also quite the amphetamine enthusiast but honestly, who amongst us isn’t?

Jeff Jackson is careful to note in our convo that nothing in Wavelengths is nearly as difficult as MAHAGONNY and that this series has been intentionally designed to be a user-friendly and digestible entré into the world of experimental cinema that will satisfy connoisseurs while being accessible to the curious but inexperienced film lover.

Jackson does note with some satisfaction that Smith’s film, a “challenging film even for hardcore New York art goers,” sold out both Charlotte screenings and “had significantly fewer walk outs than the last time it was screened in San Francisco.”

This points to something that Jeff Jackson is insistent upon when we talk: the sophistication and adventurousness of Charlotte film audiences.

“I can be as cynical as anyone about the arts scene here, but every time I’ve shown a film in Charlotte, that I showed it selfishly, I loved it and just felt it needed to be seen, the audiences have shown up and have appreciated it,” he says. “Film audiences in Charlotte are incredibly sophisticated. One of the reason’s I’ve continued to program things is that the response from the audiences has always been so encouraging.

“Even when there is lots of red tape, when there are technical issues, when we’re rubbing nickels together to make sparks, the thing that has encouraged me and Ross has been the audience,” Jackson continues. “And so that’s why we wanted to do a year-long series, to continue developing that audience.”

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Wavelengths’ next screening is scheduled for Nov. 30, kicking off at 7:30 p.m. at Goodyear Arts and featuring the regional premiere of Peruvian-French filmmaker Rose Lowder’s legendary Bouquets series, which comprises intense miniature travelogues and nature studies bursting with bright colors and constantly shifting visuals.