Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly

Tribeca is host to a flock of promotional party invites, but I would rather ditch those bashes to see provocative, off-beat cinema that might disappear after the festival ends. Especially something as challenging to watch and digest as Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly, a fascinating retina-burner from avant-garde mainstay and retired film-studies professor Ken Jacobs (Star Spangled to Death). It's a hard sell, absolutely not recommended for epileptics (an opening disclaimer specifically insists) or anyone whose most anticipated fest film is Mission: Impossible III. Utilizing only footage from the 1929 vaudevillean serial Berth Marks, Jacobs ferociously deconstructs famed schtick-men Laurel and Hardy so that they're no longer iconic characters but contrasting, pixilated shapes. The bulk of the project strobes between two grainy stills, often a shot of a train-station pratfall and its horizontally-flipped counterpart, or two shots a few frames apart. The fractal effect will seem brilliantly hypnotic to some and off-putting to others (think cinematic noise-rock) as the pointillism of two alternating images gives the illusion of dimensional movement, spinning or tracking inward and outward. In case the festival doesn't provide ticketholders with the tools they need to do their part in Jacobs' experiment (previously shown live with two projectors), bring a pair of polarized sunglasses to hold over one eye for a simulated 3-D experience.

Lunacy

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Best known for his zany stop-motion animations that anthropomorphize inanimate objects like food, Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer's fifth and most accessible feature to date is—as he introduces it—an ideological horror film but not a work of art. The latter is a self-effacing lie, though Lunacy is exactly what it's called, raucously inventive and completely out of its mind. Inspired by two Edgar Allen Poe stories and the works of the Marquis de Sade, the story observes an impressionable 19th-century Frenchman named Jean (Pavel Liska) who is beleaguered by nightmares of bald-headed asylum orderlies. On the way home from his mother's funeral, Jean hitches a ride with his new benefactor, the maniacally prankish Marquis (Jan Triska). Before long, the troubled young Jean witnesses the wigged weirdo's sacreligious castle orgies and finds himself the butt of many sadistic jests. He's even coerced into volunteering as a patient in the local loony bin, mostly to save a thumb-sucking nymphomaniac (Anna Geislerova) from more of the Marquis' sex tortures. Svankmajer's Bunuelian subversions of nature and religion show his own trickster side. He relishes in the blatant anachronisms (a car accident in the 1800's) and sensory naughtiness, like the madhouse inmates splattering paint on a shackled obese woman. Most interestingly, his trademark animation is used for punctuated segues, each played with the same Pavlovian merry-go-round music to hilarious effect. It's in these bits that his recurring bodies-and-beef motif (the chicken that consumes itself; severed tongues in the act of lovemaking) feels more deliberately symbolic than usual: wherever we are in the cycle of life, man is still just meat.

The Case of the Grinning Cat

"Make cats, not war!" In French visionary Chris Marker's The Case of the Grinning Cat, a baffling wave of stenciled kitty graffiti throughout the streets and rooftops becomes the catalyst for scrutinizing post-9/11 politics in France. Shot over three years on both sides of the pond, Marker's self-narrated, digital docu-essay (with an acceptable voice-over in English for this release) mischievously mocks the hypocrisies of the war in Iraq, the folly of France's 2002 presidential election, and the many faces of trendy protest-march culture. But the tack-sharp digressions always come back to an arthouse game of Where's Waldo, spotting within the frame that mythologized yellow feline, believed to be a hybrid of Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat and a character from Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro. Marker's even-handedness and playful spirit tries to show that innocent art and activist politics are two sides of the same culture, even if deviant government duplicity threatens the balance between them. Extraordinarily organic and overflowing with ideas, the film comfortably illustrates the visual connect between a demonstration and a demonstator's funeral in one moment, shows a man ranting about fascism in Esperanto the next, then drolly reveals a pigeon "transforming" into a man. It may have pigeons, but this whimsical winner cannot be pigeonholed.