Why not BATESVILLE?

BATESVILLE — The exchanges loop in circular befuddlement like a "who's on first?" routine as filmed by Cecil B. De Mille: A serene, hirsute man dressed in a flowing garment responds to the question "What's your name?" with the answer "What's Your Name?" After a few repeat-after-me rounds, the robed man clarifies: "I'm known by the question." In Sean Tracey's documentary, which was shown March 29 at the Ozark Foothills FilmFest in this small, conservative river town of just under 10,000, What's Your Name is better known by the film's title, The Jesus Guy - a humble wanderer who dresses, travels and lives by the standards of Christ, seeming never to let the mask slip and reveal a performer within.

Bob Pest, the Batesville man who programs and directs Batesville's film festival and introduces each presentation personally, had good reason to believeThe Jesus Guy would play well there.

Pest, whose bespectacled face is known by viewers of Arkansas Educational Television Network for his stints on pledge drives for the public-television station that also employs him, considers his festival part of what he terms the Southern Triad of film festivals, with the other two points being the Indie Memphis Soul of Southern Film Festival and the Magnolia Independent Film Festival in Starkville, Miss.

At these and other Southern movie expos, Pest buys ads in the official programs to request submissions for screening slots at the 7-year-old Ozark Foothills FilmFest.

If a filmmaker calls Pest to pitch his movie, Pest does not ask "What's your name?" But he does have a very particular question he feels the responsibility to apply.

"I always ask, 'Does this play well in rural Arkansas, or not?" Pest said last weekend, during a break between film introductions.

But even that is not the question by which the OzarkFoothills FilmFest is known.

On the festival's opening night, the program belonged not to celluloid but to sound - the Louis Jordan sound to be exact. This year marks the 100th anniversary of Jordan's birth, and feature-film appearances and "soundies" - film shorts which the festival program touted as the first music videos - by the Brinkley native and pioneering bluesman comprised a good portion of this year's programming.

Festivalgoers streamed past Pest into Independence Hall at the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville, host for the weekend, where they would hear the band Bob Boyd Sounds pay tribute to the music of Jordan. A silver-haired man goaded his entourage, "Are we gonna sit up front, so we can get up and dance?"

Pest watched the procession proudly. "After a while you get tired of that question - 'WhyBatesville?'" he said of the general skepticism met by a thematically ambitious film festival held each year in dry Independence County, where the closing of a thermostat-manufacturing plant is much more pressing coffee-shop chatter than what out-of-town filmmakers are filling the Comfort Suites to plug their movies.

"I used to think of it as patronizing," Pest said of the defining "why Batesville" question. "But then I just realized that urban people have very little idea of how rural America is changing."

When addressing the festival crowd, Pest assumes a trademark posture. He holds a microphone in his right hand, tucks his left hand into the pocket of his bluejeans, and rocks his weight back and forth between his feet, which are shod in his signature red Converse sneakers. (He likes to say that, on the occasion of his midlife crisis, he took up red shoes instead of ared Porsche.)

But Pest occasionally surrenders the microphone to others. For a question-and-answer session after the screening of The Jesus Guy, Tracey, who traveled to Batesville from New Hampshire to share his film, assumed Pest's usual spot at the foot of the screen. A woman in the crowd stood and asked how What's Your Name had reacted to his portrayal in the movie. Tracey replied that his subject expressed discomfort at being shown in the un-Jesus-like situations of speaking on a cell phone and haggling over a contract a businessman wanted him to sign. In a familiar refrain for anybody who has heard a reality-show star complain about caricaturization, Tracey's subject felt the activities had been taken out of context.

Similarly, when it comes to reconciling the quirky charms of the Ozark Foothills FilmFest with the question by which it is known, a little context is in order.

SUNDANCE IN INDEPENDENCE COUNTY

For a Little Rock filmmaker who goes by the single name of Merritt, the question of "Why Batesville" is answered - at least indirectly - because, it's not Little Rock.

Merritt's projects include supervision of a group of aspiring young filmmakers in a documentary about Little Rock's former black high school, Horace Mann, and a short he is writing and directing titled Shirts, in which he employs a succession of low-wage, fast-food-service uniforms as chapter dividers accenting the financial instability of his protagonist.

Rather than viewing films in Batesville, Merritt peered into the viewfinder of his video camera, filming a documentary about the Ozark Foothills festival, to which he became attracted after becoming disenchanted with what he called the "pressure" associated with the first installment of the Little Rock Film Festival held last year.

"Budweiser is its sponsor," Merritt said, indicating what he interprets as the Little Rock festival's overreach right out of the gate. (Budweiser Select was one of 20 sponsors credited for the 2007 Little Rock Film Festival; for the 2008 lineup, set for May 15-18, a complete roster of sponsors hasn't been announced.)

"It's 'Oh, has your film played anywhere else?'" Merritt added. "You hear people like Robert Redford say that's why they started Sundance - for something that's different from Freddie Krueger 26."

Ah, Sundance. The name of the Park City, Utah, film festival has, as Merritt suggested, come to stand for a certain expansiveness. But it's not necessarilyone that implies an assembly of films representing a wide range of skill levels and film-establishment stamps of approval. The festival Redford named for his character from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has also ripened to evoke Hollywood stars playing at ski-bum culture for a few days, trussing themselves in puffy coats with furrimmed hoods and ducking out of the snow and into VIP suites sponsored by top-shelf vodka brands.

So, is the Ozark Foothills event Arkansas' Sundance?

Yes and no. It does offer a collision of cultures more sharply defined than, say, in Hot Springs, which contains a resort-town air and tourist-oriented dynamism that makes it welcoming to the documentary film festival staged there each fall in the historic Malco Theater. (Pest avoids Batesville's own historic downtown cinema, the Melba, for the roomier college auditorium. During festivalweekend, the Melba, situated on a one-way street, offered locals the time-travel sci-fi action movie Jumper, or the children's fantasy film The Spiderwick Chronicles.)

At times the festival and the town proper can seem not to collide but to coexist in a sense of mutual oblivion. On the festival's opening night, as Bob Boyd Sounds played the songs of Louis Jordan, a couple was led to a table in the nearly empty Jalapeno's Cafe, a Mexican restaurant attached to the Holiday Inn. They wondered aloud why the cafe and nearly every other restaurant they'd driven past were so quiet. A few tables were pointed toward large-screen televisions broadcasting the games of NCAA March Madness basketball. No one ventured forth with the idea that the film festival might be occupying the habitual Friday night dining-out crowd.

But the festival also has its regulars. "I'm a fixture," said Mike Cumnock, the salt-andpepper bearded director of the Arkansas Sheriffs' Youth Ranches, which provide homes for abandoned or neglected children. The complex is located just outside Batesville.

The ranch run by Cumnock, a place of rolling acres where children who might have been left at rest stops or sheriffs' offices care for horses, collect eggs, bale hay and carpool to town jobs behind fast-food counters, sounds like a documentary in progress, and it is. Each summer, Pest introduces children to filmmaking through an Ozark Foothills FilmFest offshoot called T Tauri, an astronomical reference to the birth of a star and enrollees often film at the Youth Ranches.

"You missed Roadkill!" Cumnock called out to a friend who'd arrived too late to see a documentary about transportation workers who clear dead animals from roadways and an artist who creates sculptures out of carcasses left from car collisions.

Breezing past on his way to another film introduction, Pest gently corrected Cumnock with the film's proper title - Caught in the Headlights.

OUI - WHAT'S UP?

Pest prefers to integrate festival guests with Batesville culture in a way that he feels shows the town at its best. For a Saturday morning mixer between the filmmakers and locals, he chose MorningSide Cafe, a homey coffee-and-pastry shop where ukulele players entertained the crowd. Businesses along the route include Do-You-Right Transmission and a two-chair barbershop operating from a narrow box-shape berth with three wood-paneled walls and a fourth of plate glass, makingthe operation seem more like a diorama showing how men in the 1950s got their hair cut than an actual working business.

Pest praised MorningSide for its cosmopolitan flair. "They're very nice people, but they're Canadian, you know," he said of the couple who run the cafe.

"This," he said, referring to transplants' contributions to the town, "is the story of Batesville."

So is this: "When we came here to retire, I couldn't even find shrimp!"

That's Janine Winters, the proprietor of Janine's Cafe and Cooking Secrets, a gourmet foods shop and lunch counter that, despite its outward appearance as a roadside fish shack, is inside a cheerful gastropub with French blue walls, wild salmon and baby greens on the specials board and wheels of Cotswold and slabs of serrano ham chilled for inspection.

Winters - born in Morocco, reared in France and deposited in Batesville by her late husband, a doctor who moved the family to his native Arkansas - affects a warm if exotic purr when she addresses customers at her cafe. The accent is equally winning whether directed, as it was the Saturday of festival weekend, toward a clutch of Mennonite women sipping the cream-ofmushroom soup of the day, or two documentary filmmakers who had slipped away from the festival.

Approach the woman whose white smock and perfectly highlighted blond bob suggest an air of gastronomical erudition, ask "Are you Janine?" and you are likely to hear, by way of affirmation, "Oui. What's up?"

Back to the seafood deficit: "I ordered shrimps at what was the Harvest Foods," Winters, taking a spindle-backed seat in the dining room, said of her early days in Batesville, before she established the cafe and beganan herb-growing business that eventually supplied Wal-Mart.

"They sold me these little shrimps for fishing," she recalled. "I was so frustrated!"

Having operated restaurants in Montreal and Winter Park, Fla., Winters decided to inject Batesville's chain-restaurantheavy casual-dining industry with a gourmand's sensibility.

"After my husband passed away, it was a matter of making a difference in my village," she said.

Small-town life in Arkansas need be no different than if she had retired to the French countryside, she stressed. "I like the kindness here, I like the gentleness. You drive two hours from here, and you feel there is aggressiveness. I don't want to grow old with aggressive people around me."

Winters hosted a reception for filmmakers and festival sponsors the Friday night of the festival, and fed attendees throughout the weekend. She didn't get to see any movies. "I want everything to be good," she said of her purposeful absence from the festival scene afew miles away.

BAYOU TO BATESVILLE

Of course, not all the filmmakers who pass through Batesville for the film festival fly in from elsewhere.

One of the most celebrated auteurs at this year's festival was Phil Chambliss, who merely had to drive in from the small south Arkansas town of Locust Bayou. Chambliss' cockeyed and moody narrative films began to garner international attention from followers of outsider art after they were discovered and brought to the attention of filmworld insiders by the Nashville singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.

Williams, celebrated in her own right as well as the daughter of Miller Williams, one of Arkansas' pre-eminent poets, had been turned on to Chambliss' work when he sent her the unsettling soundtracks he arranges and performs to score his own films. The music complements themes of masked, marauding hatchet-wielders, corrupt clergymen and, in one unforgettable tableau, a minion of Satan who operates in a clearing in the Arkansas deer woods, entrenching his devilish workspace with an office desk and metal filing cabinet dragged out into the wild. Chambliss often conceived the imagery for his movies while working as a night security guard.

No sooner had Chambliss arrived at the festival to take in a few screenings before his own films would be shown than he chastised himself for forgetting to set the VCR in his hotel room to tape the evening's public-television rerun of The Lawrence Welk Show, one of his favorites.

Chambliss was visibly cheered when Pest appeared with a cardboard box containing DVDs of festival films. From it he produced a copy of Emily Cries, a 33-minute Polish film Pest knew Chambliss had been anticipating but whose screening he'd missed. (After flirting with color film, Chambliss plans to return to black and white, and Emily Cries was one of the festival's rare black-and-white entries.)

Chambliss, whose films are still packaged and passed around Locust Bayou in hand-labeled storage cases with each film's title and running time noted in block-letter ballpoint pen, accepted the DVD case and held it underneath a potholder-sizemagnifying glass for examination.

"Oh, man, this is professional, too," he noted, somewhat despondently, of the case's graphic design. "Everybody's professional but me."

Talk turned to the films of Luis Bunuel, the surrealist filmmaker to whom Chambliss has invited comparison. Pest described a signature scene of Bunuel's, in which an extreme close-up of a human eye suddenly culminates in violence when the flesh of the eye is slashed with a razorblade.

"Good night," Chamblissexhaled.

Immediately after the Batesville festival, Chambliss would pack up his films and get on a flight to Los Angeles, where a film group had arranged to screen his movies at a former silent movie theater.

"What time," Chambliss asked sincerely, "does it get dark in LA?"

WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?

While the subjects of Chambliss' films are unmistakably Southern if not particularly Arkansan, one of the closing festival presentations told a decidedly homegrown tale.

Dennis Mohr and Hava Gurevich, respectively the producer and a consultant on the in-progress documentary Disfarmer: A Portrait of America, showed portions of a film they are making about the Heber Springs photo-studio operator and the controversy surrounding the curatorial and commercial fervor his revelatory Depression- and World War II-era portraiture has attracted in New York art circles.

The film - which will premiere on AETN and is anticipated to get a national PBS airing - presents both sides of Heber Springs' to-sell-or-not-to-sell division over the spike in Disfarmer-portrait value. East Coast art speculators quietly deployed middlemen to buy up Disfarmer originals, many of which were fished from inside gold-plated picture frames and from behind the sticky cellophane of family albums. Some town residents feel the art world took advantage of them, while others shrug and say the unexpected windfall from a 50-year-old snapshot afforded them luxuries like a new recliner.

The film, even in its raw stage, is conducted expertly even if its accompanying question-and-answer session was not. Mohr and Gurevich havenot mastered the film-panel trick of repeating an audience member's nonamplified question into their microphones for the benefit of audience members who could not hear it.

A man seated near the front of the auditorium asked a question that went unheard by most of the audience. Occasionally, when this happens, the audience can divine the question from the answer, but Mohr's response, at least at first, didn't illuminate what curiosity he was attempting to satisfy.

Mohr spoke of the globalizing effects of World War II, of farm boys sent overseas who returned home and swept up their mothers to pose in Disfarmer's studio alongside their sons in uniform, of a generation of women who didn't own mirrors and stood for portraits stoop-shouldered and slack-jawed, and the generation of women who replaced them, soldiers' girlfriends who draped themselves across tables like they'd seen Betty Grable do, in snapshots they tucked into letters addressed overseas. Viewed as a visual progression, Disfarmer's pictures tell the story, he said, of a small town tearing down the walls that isolated it.

Finally, it emerged in retrospect that the man had asked why the filmmakers had subtitled their movie "A Portrait of America" and not "A Portrait of Arkansas."

As a movie buff like Pest would tell you, good filmmaking answers a question the viewer didn't catch or even know he had. As the festival drew to a close, Pest stood before the audience and once again answered the question that he himself kept inserting into the conversation.

He thanked the crowd "for making this the festival that people ask, 'How do you continue to do this in Batesville?'

"The answer to that question," Pest said for the last time, or at least the last time that weekend, "is always, how could we not ?"