The Worldwide Short Film Festival ended yesterday, and while I only went to see a couple of the screenings I was thoroughly satisfied. The opening gala brought together seven films from seven different countries, and I was pleasantly immersed in the bite-sized narrative worlds they successfully created and (sometimes) resolved in under 15 minutes. Only one of them sucked – a kitschy, derivative, unoriginal story about an older man in mourning talking to a boy about fishing, both of whom later turn out to be dead (seems like somebody was a little too enamored with the Sixth Sense). But apart from that sentimental treacle-trap from the UK, all of the films were smart, inventive and the perfect foil to the 120 minute narrative arcs that we’re so used to. Which got me thinking, why is it that short films as an art-form are generally considered to be ‘non-mainstream’? By ‘non-mainstream’ I mean (1) They do not occupy your regular multiplexes and most of the movie-going public has probably never seen more than two or three in their lives (2) The demographic that do go to see them tend to skew towards being more involved, marginally at least, in more serious artistic traditions (3) the films themselves often operate on more intelligent and self-conscious levels than the average movie does.
Regardless of the content of the short film, they are generally considered to be closer to gallery pieces than the type of thing you can munch a bag of popcorn in front of. Maybe this has something to do with actual form. A short film does not indulge the escapist tendencies of the audience; you cannot lose yourself in an elaborately conceived world or life-changing moments in the lives of minutely drawn characters. A short film is of necessity always going to be situated within an already operating thought-process in your mind, a sort of narrative that plays within parentheses, if you will. You approach it as you would approach a painting or a sculpture, with some sense of critical distance. This is because the traditional set-up/rising-action/climax structure is rarely employed in the successful short film – in the best of them it is always subverted. The old structure, which was once deemed universal and elaborated on in Aristotle’s Poetics, has now more or less been dismantled by the post-structuralist critiques of people like Derrida, and in many ways the short film is a unique product of our very fractured times. (I am not a neo-Romantic – I do not attach a moral repugnance to ‘fracturing’). The traditional narrative structure tends to create the discourses it wants you to understand it through within itself – it gives you the buildings blocks it wants you to use, places careful limitations of tone and scope. The short film too has limitations, of course, but there is less of a tendency for the audience to operate within it. A short film cannot make you forget yourself like a two hour movie can. Instead what it does is lodge itself in a gap between your thought, sandwiched between experiences outside of itself, and you view as you would a cut gem, turning it about and watching as the light glints off its various facets. It is not ‘limited’ in the sense that Adorno says movies are limited. A short film never pretends to be anything more than it is. Because of this it is more honest, more straightforward and less manipulative.
Yesterday’s program was a series of 22 shorts commissioned by the UN to celebrate the 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed. One of the most affecting films for me was a four minute piece called “Mobile Men” set in the back of a speeding pickup truck in Thailand’s rural countryside. As the wind roars about the camera’s mic, three young men pose and grin with increasing abandon at the viewer, showing off their street-cred: they point to their t-shirts, their DIY sneaker designs, take off their shirts to proudly display their muscles, their elaborate tattoos which one of the young men screams, “I got these to impress the girls!” Then he roars out a deafening, echoing cry to mimic the pain he felt when he got the tattoo. And that’s it. The camera is passed from hand to hand in the back of the pick-up, and these joyful, grinning young men show us a snippet of their lives. Then the film is over and I find myself grinning in the same idiotic way, and for a moment I can feel the wind roaring in my ears and my skin cooling in the late evening air. I would have screamed too, but I don’t think my friends would have appreciated getting kicked out of the cinema.
