​Monteith Mccollum

 

Slamdance Strikes its claim at the Silvermine - 

 

-   And what about the docs?  Well three documentaries screened in competition with the narratives, and one of them Monteith McCollum's Hybrid, took the Grand Jury Award for Best Feature.  When you consider a film about an Iowa farmer who revolutionized a way to hybridize corn, you may not rush to see it.  But Hybrid is such a revelation in so many ways.  The film itself is a hybrid of documentary, animation, and experimental, and McCollum has a seemingly in-exhaustive arsenal of artistic sensibilities to render the ordinary and mundane - and you don't get much more ordinary than a cornfield - into something extra ordinary and astonishing. Shot in grainy 16mm black and white, Hybrid weaves together footage of Milford Beeghly, the subject of the film (who also happens to be McCollum's grandfather), Beeghly's family and archival footage of Beeghly plugging his agronomical innovation on local television.  And there's also the grimly impressionistic vistas of farmland right out of a Hopper painting, seamlessly juxtaposed with footage  from Pare Lorentz's The Land and The Plow that Broke the Plains and the time-lapse animated sequences of corn growing, popping and dancing, and yes, mating.  McCollum also composed the music, a melancholy chamber work that recalls Bartok.  Hybrid impressed the Slamdance jurors so much that they did away with the Best Doc category, at least for this year, when they voted the film Best Feature.