Award-winning, Waterbury-based photographer Peter Miller has been taking pictures of Vermonters since he bought his first camera as a teenager in Weston. Last year, he published A Lifetime of Vermont People, a gorgeous, 208-page, 9-by-12-inch coffee-table book with 60 black-and-white portraits culled from 63 years of his work. The images are accompanied by wonderfully wry and evocative essays penned by Miller.

A Lifetime of Vermont People was just named the best New England photo and art book by the New England Society in the City of New York (which, in case you were wondering, is "one of the oldest social and charitable organizations in the United States," founded in 1805 to promote "friendship, charity and mutual assistance among and on behalf of New Englanders living in New York," according to its website). 

"It's quite a surprise," says Miller, reached by phone on Monday, noting that his work had been in a pool of entries that included books published by major publishing houses, including Viking Press, HarperCollins and Knopf. 

I'm pretty new to Vermont, so, though I've reported on the Green Mountain Film Festival in print and on television now, I hadn't actually attended it until yesterday, when I drove down to Montpelier to catch a screening of A Field in England. The film, which screened in the cozy basement of the Savoy Theater, was on my short list of titles to see in this year's fest, so I'm glad I was able to catch it.

The film's director, Ben Wheatley, had a film in last year's fest, too: the dark comedy Sightseers, which apparently has the ability to divide audiences pretty sharply. So, I would imagine, does A Field in England, which is a very odd movie, indeed. Check out the trailer below.


Set in 17th-century England, the film has an admirably simple premise: Four characters wander through the titular field in an attempt to escape a raging battle; when they meet a fifth, their fortunes change, as this man takes charge and puts the other four to work for him searching for buried treasure. Oh, and, along the way, the main character, Whitehead, eats a ton of psychedelic mushrooms and starts hallucinating the emergence of swirling black planets. That admirable simplicity quickly spins out of control, as even the most mindless tasks (digging a hole, walking in a straight line, even defecating) become more and more difficult as the characters very likely go insane.

This week in movies TV you missed: Dead people won't stay dead. No, they're not zombies. And no, this is not ABC's new hit show "Resurrection," but its artier and spookier European predecessor.

What You Missed

Four years ago, a small French mountain town lost 39 children to a freak bus accident. Now, as the power grid flickers ominously in the twilight, one of those kids comes back.

Fifteen-year-old Camille (Yara Pilartz) doesn't remember anything after the accident. Not aged a day, she expects to pick up her life where she left off. Instead, she returns to a home driven asunder by grief, to parents who have split and an angry sister (Jenna Thiam) who spends all her nights at the local pub. 

Camille and her family aren't the only ones getting a rude surprise on this idyllic summer evening. Librarian Adèle (Clotilde Hesme) is about to marry her live-in boyfriend when a dead lover (Pierre Perrier) knocks at her door. An elderly man receives a similar visit from his wife, who died more than 30 years ago. And a serial killer who hasn't struck in years is suddenly active again.

For nine consecutive Sundays beginning on March 30, the Dartmouth Film Society will present "The Life Cinematic," a full retrospective of the films of American filmmaker Wes Anderson. The series runs through May 25 with a screening of Anderson's star-studded new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

One of the most stylistically distinctive of all current American directors, Anderson has built his reputation on the excellent performances he extracts from his remarkable casts, and on his oddball sensibility. The Grand Budapest Hotel, in which Bill Murray's remarkable facial hair takes top billing, has received stellar advance notices.

The series presents Anderson's films in chronological order, beginning with his first feature, Bottle Rocket (1996), and including such audience favorites as Rushmore on April 6 and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on April 27.

Interspersed into the Anderson series are two cinematic masterpieces that present stories of World War I: King Vidor's The Big Parade and Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, on April 17 and May 20, respectively. Though they have nothing to do with Wes Anderson, these films are part of a ticket-pass package that patrons may purchase from the film society.

Anderson's filmography may not be gigantic (though it does include a number of short films not presented in this particular series), but it is quite rich, and rewards viewers who take the time to dive into it .This series provides just such an opportunity.

Though many of its films come to Montpelier from other nations, the Green Mountain Film Festival is making a point this year of showcasing a small number of films made by locals.

The “Vermont Shorts Program,” playing at the festival on March 25, brings together five films: two fiction features and three documentaries. The filmmakers will be present to speak to the audience after the screening.

Michael Fisher of South Burlington might be familiar to festival regulars. He has had numerous films in the GMFF over the past several years, and his latest, “Attic,” kicks off the Vermont Shorts Program. Steeped in the Southern-gothic fiction of Flannery O’Connor and seasoned with a dollop of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, “Attic” is a moody, gorgeously shot character study.

Fisher’s approach to filmmaking is unusual, in that his output consists almost entirely of five- to 10-minute fiction films. Since these are relatively less complex to execute than feature-length works, Fisher, 36, is pretty prolific — he’s made more than 40 shorts. “Attic” premieres at this year’s fest; soon thereafter, Fisher will make it available via his website.

“Like a lot of my projects, this one started with a location,” Fisher says. “In this case, it started with my driving around Vermont with just the seed of something I’m thinking about, looking for a setting that would be interesting for that story.” He adds that “the older styles and the textures in the rooms of the beautiful old Vermont farmhouse” he tracked down in Charlotte “got me thinking about the color of the piece, the warmer tones — this hot, summery kind of thing.”

They say destruction is a form of creation, and it's hard to think of a form that would illustrate that adage more literally than found poetry. If you don't know it, found poets take other authors' writings, then remove or restructure the words and punctuation to make a new poem out of an existing work of prose. Often, that means slashing whole sentences and paragraphs.

There are no hard and fast rules about how to do it, though the general idea is to use one or more pages of a book as a starting block and pare down from there. (Author Jonathan Safran Foer, of Everything Is Illuminated fame, prefers to literally cut out his found poems.) A favorite, oft-repeated phrase on found poetry websites and blogs characterizes the form as a "literary equivalent of collage."

Found poetry has only really gained a following in recent years, says local playwright and educator James Moore, who is also co-founder of Steel Cut Theatre. Moore's book of found poems, I am the maker of all sweetened possum: poetry found in 'Scarlet Sister Mary,' was published last week by Los Angeles-based publisher Silver Birch Press.

One career ago, I was a professor of film studies. I gave that up to move to Vermont and write for Seven Days, but movies will always be my first love. In this feature, published occasionally here on Live Culture, I'll write about the films I'm currently watching, and connect them to film history and art.

Digging deep into my DVD shelves, I extracted an oddball title that I’ve owned for years but had never actually watched: the late, great Rudy Ray Moore’s fourth feature film, Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil’s Son-in-Law. Yes, I will watch anything.

Actually, this film, low-budget and silly though it may be, is completely enjoyable for all kinds of reasons. For me, the main attraction is Rudy Ray Moore himself, whose comedy I’ve always loved. Moore is best known for his “Dolemite” character, which he created as part of a stand-up routine in the early 1970s. Dolemite, whom Moore played in both Dolemite (1975) and Dolemite 2: The Human Tornado (1976), was, to put it bluntly, the baddest muthafucka on the block. He was a slang-talking, badass pimp who always outsmarted his adversaries and attracted the simultaneous carnal adoration of all the ladies he met.

The character Moore plays in Petey Wheatstraw, though not nominally Dolemite, could nevertheless be described in exactly the same way. Such characters have a really interesting place in African American folklore, which is one of the most fascinating things about Petey Wheatstraw. More on this subject below.

Vermont-based cartoonist Harry Bliss is known for his cartoons and occasional cover illustrations for the New Yorker. In addition, his comic strip Bliss runs in Seven Days and numerous other newspapers, and he has illustrated a series of children's picture books. Yesterday, Bliss learned that he's been named one of two recipients of the 2014 Maurice Sendak Fellowship. Designed to nurture the talents of artists who tell stories will illustration, the fellowship grants its recipients five weeks of bucolic isolation, the better to complete their work.

Sendak, the beloved children's book illustrator who died in 2012, established the fellowship in in 2010. In previous years, recipients would gather at Sendak's home in Ridgefield, Conn. This year, the location of the fellowship will be at another of Sendak's properties: the 150-acre Scotch Hill Farm in rural Cambridge, N.Y., located about 30 minutes from Manchester, Vt. 

Bliss says he was surprised and delighted to receive the award, for which he did not know he'd been nominated. As he tells Seven Days in a phone interview, the letter that announced his award was the first he knew about it.

As it happens, Bliss knew Sendak fairly well. "He was a great guy and a big influence on me my whole life," the cartoonist says. "In fact, we traded artwork once. He wanted a New Yorker cover I'd done, and I traded it to him for a wonderful little piece from [Sendak's 1962 children's book] Chicken Soup with Rice." Sendak even customized the piece for him, Bliss says, adding a hockey stick and skates to a character's hand, much to Bliss' delight — he's a big hockey fan. "That was really super-cool," he says. "Maurice was a special man."

This week in movies you missed: Is bluegrass the saddest music in the world? This Oscar-nominated love story from Belgium might make you think so.

First, a local note: You can see The Broken Circle Breakdown on the big screen in Burlington next Thursday, presented by the Burlington Film Society, the Vermont International Film Festival and Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center. That's March 20, 7 p.m., at the Main Street Landing Film House. $5-8, free for VTIFF members. More details here.

What You Missed

The film opens with banjo player Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) and his bluegrass band singing the standard "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" (Characters in this movie speak in Flemish and sing in English.) The next scene, set in a hospital, shows us that Didier's circle will not be unbroken. He and his wife and bandmate, Elise (Veerle Baetens), are preparing their 7-year-old daughter for chemotherapy.

Director Felix van Groeningen uses a nonlinear narrative to tell the story of these two free spirits who settled down, became parents and too quickly found themselves facing the unthinkable. From Didier and Elise tending young Maybelle (Nell Cattrysse) in the hospital, we flash back to a night that might have been her conception. We don't see the couple's first meeting — at Elise's tattoo shop — until we've grasped its long-term consequences.

The movie juxtaposes moments of bliss with moments of despair, as Didier and the volatile Elise struggle to weather events. It's all glued together by their performances of heartfelt standards — songs seeped in the faith in God and an afterlife that this modern couple finds it all but impossible to feel.

Now in its tenth year, the Found Footage Film Festival is more than just an annual showcase of the oddest oddities of America’s VHS heritage. It’s also a kind of educational program. In this year’s show, which comes to Higher Ground in South Burlington on Sunday, March 23, viewers will learn, among other valuable life skills, How to Have Cybersex on the Internet.

A video with exactly that curiously redundant title, produced by a Minneapolis video house in 1997, is one of the highlights of this year’s fest, says co-host and co-curator Nick Prueher. Prueher and his fellow host/curator Joe Pickett, both 38, travel the country every year, scouring thrift store and garage sales for videotaped ephemera that would otherwise never see the light of day. How to Have Cybersex on the Internet, Prueher says, has a unique appeal. “It’s too sexy to be informational, but not sexy enough to be titillated by,” he says. “Why does it even exist? What are we watching here?”

The traveling show presents a combination of screenings of unintentionally hilarious videos, a recounting of the stories behind them and a number of comedy bits inspired by them. Prueher and Pickett both have serious comedy chops: They’ve written, respectively, for “The Late Show with David Letterman” and The Onion, among other outlets.

Prueher, speaking by phone from New York City, sounds both proud and surprised by the fact that his and Pickett’s festival of strange videos has become a central part of the “found materials” movement that has also manifested itself in such venues as Found magazine and innumerable craft projects on Pinterest and Instructables. “We grew up in small towns and had to make our own fun, so you look at the stuff around you and make something of that,” he says. “We spent a lot of time in thrift stores in Wisconsin.”

)
Though the festival has now grown into an international phenomenon — the two curators recently completed a tour of Europe in which they both presented and collected obscure videos — Prueher, for one, finds that many of the videos they show embody a uniquely American quality. “One thing we found about a lot of the footage that we’re drawn to,” he says, “is that people had a lot of ambition, even if their talent was questionable. That’s one of our exports, and it’s true about us as a people.”

When the pickings are irresistible, the festival does occasionally curate DVDs: Prueher mentions a DVD they found in Memphis called Sing Like the King, an instructional video for Elvis impersonators. But it’s VHS, for all its analog-era imperfections, that holds the real allure for these curators. “VHS is the bastard stepchild,” Prueher says. “It’s an ugly, clunky format, but that doesn’t make the footage any less worth hanging onto.”

Though they’ve sometimes proven to have a shelf life longer than originally predicted, VHS tapes do decay, a fact that lends a sense of urgency to the Found Footage Film Festival’s mission. As well, Prueher notes, he and Pickett were startled to learn recently that many thrift stores no longer even accept the tapes as donations, since they simply don’t sell. That’s one of the reasons anyone attending the festival is encouraged to bring their own video oddities as submissions for future screenings.

Though they’ve long made their own comedic videos (which often carefully recreate the no-budget aesthetic of many of their found treasures), the festival curators recently released a video of a different kind. Bored over a long holiday in their native Wisconsin, they dreamed up a way to game local morning shows: Prueher would masquerade as a chef who specialized in turning leftovers into creative new meals.

As the author of the nonexistent book Making a Winner of Last Night’s Dinner, Prueher appeared on numerous talk shows, earnestly instructing viewers on how to make such horrific concoctions as mashed-potato-and-corn ice cream cones and blended ham shakes. Even when he straight-facedly namechecked the late shock-punk rock star GG Allin as his culinary inspiration, no one caught on to the stunt. “Nobody questioned it at all,” Prueher says. “Bless their hearts, they just kind of plowed forward. I’m surprised at how much we were able to get away with.” See for yourselves below:


Even as the compilation video of these stunts (which quickly went viral) represents a different kind of comedy than the found films themselves, the humor it embodies “has always been a part of the show,” Prueher says. “We know what the recipe is for weird, awkward footage; we know all the elements of the uncomfortable. We used some of that knowledge for this material.”

Reiterating that anyone who creates anything draws inspiration from whatever surrounds them, Prueher says that, for him and for Pickett, it’s the seemingly endless supply of oddball videos “that brings us so much joy."

The Found Footage Film Festival, Sunday, March 23, 8 p.m., Higher Ground, South Burlington. $12. highergroundmusic.com / foundfootagefest.com