At Cat Video Film Festival, Stars Purr for Close-Ups - New York Times

MINNEAPOLIS â€" You could hear the meows nearly a block away, and also the “awwws.” The laughter too.

On Thursday evening the Walker Art Center, one of the nation’s most prominent institutions of contemporary art, hosted the inaugural Internet Cat Video Film Festival here. An estimated 10,000 people turned out for an event that was, from its inception to its closing credits, an online meme made flesh (and fur).

The crowd â€" easily double what organizers expected â€" packed the lawn outside the museum, spilling onto the sidewalks across the street. There were local cat lovers and out-of-state fans of Fluffy; many wore kitty-theme T-shirts or simply ears and whiskers. Some took real cats on leashes. A few dogs came, for irony.

They all settled in for a screening of cats behaving badly, or cutely, or mysteriously, sometimes all at once. That much of the audience had already seen the clips on YouTube did not seem to diminish the enthusiasm. Quite the contrary.

“People watch them, and they watch them over and over and over again,” said Gretchen Sealls, 65, a retired banker who drove five hours from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I think you’re going to see a lot of copycat versions of this,” she added. “No pun intended.”

It is an axiom of Internet life that the cat video is king, so perhaps it was only a matter of time until something like this sprang up. Museum officials were quick to note that it was a playful, not curatorial, offering, less Cannes than I Can Haz Film Fest, as the Lolcats might have it. But the festival did feed into the desire, driven by social media, to translate digital culture and create community offline. It explored the ways that august institutions can employ the Web as they seek new audiences. And it highlighted an age-old rift, bringing some potentially embarrassing behavior out of the shadows.

“A lot of people have cats, but I don’t think they talk about it as much â€" it’s not as visible as the dogs are,” said Vicki Lowell, senior vice president for marketing and operations at the cable channel Animal Planet, which approached the Walker to become a sponsor of the event. Ms. Lowell was diplomatic about any “inherent dog bias in the culture” but did allow that cats are “natural stars.”

The idea for the festival came from Katie Hill, 28, a program associate at the museum, who suggested it early this year as a sort of joke. By spring her bosses came to believe that it would be a good fit with the Walker’s Open Field initiative, which calls for experimental public programming, often free, on the lawn.

The populist ethos extended to the festival’s choices: submissions were crowd-sourced, and even that process went viral: 10,000 videos from around the world were nominated within months. Ms. Hill watched every one, convening a jury of more than a dozen colleagues to help narrow the options to 79 videos that were shown in 75 minutes on Thursday. Some were just a few seconds long but still displayed the genre’s signature aesthetics: the surprise ending, the shaky camera, the piles of kittens.

Ms. Hill, affectionately referred to as the Walker’s “crazy cat lady in residence,” found there were things she didn’t know about the world of viral cat videos.

“I learned that cats have agents,” she said, when she was contacted by a representative for Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat, two of the most famous online. In exchange for some cross-promotion, he wanted his clients flown to the festival (inasmuch as they could be: Nyan Cat is animated). Ms. Hill gently explained that the nonprofit Walker did not have that kind of budget.

“I was, like, ‘This isn’t actually like a Hollywood film festival,’ ” she said.

Maybe not, but it did have celebrity attendees, like Lil Bub, a petite, smush-faced “perma-kitten,” owned by Mike Bridavsky of Bloomington, Ind. For two solid hours his pet was surrounded by fans seeking photos, as well as by a video crew from Vice magazine. (“Bub takes it all really well,” Mr. Bridavsky said, “but she also can’t talk, so she can’t let me know when she’s had enough.” Eventually he hid her in a bag.)

In the style of other film festivals, the clips were grouped into categories: documentary, foreign, art house and lifetime achievement, which included the 6-year-old girl of “Kittens Inspired by Kittens,” who narrates a picture book in quotable style â€" or at least, this audience could quote her.

As in life, very little separated comedy from drama, mostly musical tension: would Snooky the tabby vanquish the metronome or merely continue twitching in evil rhythm? (Oh, that metronome went down.) The crowd applauded Maru, from Japan, known for a love affair with cardboard boxes, and gasped at fat cats underwater. Videos like “Kittens Riding Vacuum” were self-explanatory.

The Golden Kitty award, chosen by visitors to the Walker’s Web site, went to Will Braden for his two-minute opus “Henri 2: Paw de Deux,” about the existential angst of a black-and-white French puss. “This goes to show that the shared love of cat videos isn’t just a virtual thing, isn’t just a matter of a few clicks, but actually something people can share in real life,” Mr. Braden, 32, said. “I think this legitimizes it.”

A filmmaker from Seattle, he now makes his living from Henri, le Chat Noir, as he’s called. There is an online store that sells $1,000 worth of T-shirts and mugs a week, he said, and a book â€" the philosophical musings of Henri â€" due from a Random House imprint. Still, Mr. Braden was circumspect about his good fortune.

“This is so surreal,” he said, looking out over the huge crowd.

Organizers from the Walker, too, were stunned by the turnout and pleased by the event’s ripple effect on social media. “Cool cats are skipping Romney speech to see International Cat Film Festival @walkerartcenter,” the mayor of Minneapolis, R. T. Rybak, wrote on Twitter, referring to the counterprogramming of the Republican National Convention.

And festivalgoers, especially those younger than 30, seemed eager to embrace the communality. “It’s like an inside joke that we all are in on,” said Laura Larson, 26, who works in sales here and wore a T-shirt bearing the image of Morris, the old 9 Lives spokesanimal â€" “the original viral cat,” she said.

John Rust, 29, an information technology specialist, said that if the festival were held monthly, he would come monthly. There is no limit to the popularity of cats on screen, agreed Bill Grant, a 23-year-old software engineer. “I’ve seen probably hundreds of them, and I’ve just tapped the surface,” he said.

In kitty ears and painted-on whiskers, Lindsey Frey, who is in her late 20s and works in marketing, sensed inspiration. “It’s definitely made me feel like my cat does things I should go home and videotape,” she said, adding, “The more videos you’ve seen, the more ‘queen of the cat ladies’ you feel, so it’s nice to see that people are with you.”