Astounding and Confounding
by Andrew Collins
For the first time ever, the 2013 Sundance Film Festival has chosen a dozen of the top short film submissions and presented them to the wider world via YouTube. Aside from length, short films have far fewer limitations than feature-length films, for it is nearly impossible to subject them to genre, plot, or any other sort of categorization. These twelve from Sundance greatly expanded the plane of what I thought human creativity could summon.
Indeed, it astounds me what some filmmakers manage to come up with, and more often than not in these films, it confounds me as well.
The Apocalypse
The Apocalypse experiments in the grotesque, shocking, and absurd. How do people respond when everyone’s heads start exploding? There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, and no category in our thinking of how to deal with an apocalyptic scenario where the heads of man and beast alike begin to explode at random. In the midst of it all is an innocent seductress, clad only in a towel, who manages not to be fazed by anything, distracted by simple little things like how she is so drippy from the shower. All we know is that with the world becoming a living hell, she remains dumber than a pigeon.
Broken Night
Few things are more terrifying than the person who can face human suffering with complete indifference. When a mother driving with her young daughter tries to avoid a deer in the road and ends up stuck upside down in their van in the middle of nowhere, two young men, mute and expressionless, mysteriously find them in the middle of the night. Without a word, in the face of frantic pleas for help, they cut the daughter loose from her car seat and leave the mother. I could not find a way to place these two men in a wider context and struggled to arrive at any conclusion other than that they must be part of some sort of freakish cult, perhaps even serial killers. It’s hard to say. And like any good, suspenseful film, the unknown leaves us frightened.
Catnip: Egress to Oblivion?
Ok, I don’t even care about the rest of the film. What’s the deal with the mustache at 1:20?
In all seriousness, though, one would have to be on something like catnip to appreciate this documentary about the catnip herb and its varied, unpredictable effects on cats. It’s a surreal work that hearkens back to old druggie films, full of grainy footage and distorted, colorful images. Not my thing, I confess (the meme world has me burned out on cats), but to each his own.
The Event
I will grant the possibility that there could be something brilliant here, but I don’t see it. The Event chronicles a relationship, telling the story in reverse by recounting the days backwards (On day five we did such and such. On day four such and such happened. And so on). It comes from a poem of the same name by English poet Tom Chivers. The filmmakers merely created a visual interpretation of the poem using a literal reading that comes across as nonsensical and bizarre. The text of the poem is available here. In fact, I recommend reading the poem once or twice first and pondering it for a few moments before watching the film.
Irish Folk Furniture
Shot entirely in stop-action, this series of anecdotes from rural Ireland about old pieces of furniture absolutely charmed me. The doors, cupboards, and flour bins are nearly as old as their elderly owners, who recall how they faithfully performed their duty to the household for generations. The stop-action method must have been painstaking, but it is effective, subtly mirroring the tender care and lengthy life of these sentimental pieces of furniture and anthropomorphizing them as they move through the fields and meadows of the Irish countryside. This makes it seem like they have a personality of their own.
Marcel, King of Tervuren
This one does its best to make a story about chickens interesting, yet it succeeds only in part. It dragged, buoyed primarily by the narrator, who in her accented, grandmotherly voice recounts the story of the rooster Marcel as he survived both plague and foe. Despite the animation, which twists and evolves in an imaginative series of pastel images and transports us back to rural Belgium, I can’t help but feel that I would have been even more enchanted watching the narrator tell the story. It makes me want to sit at grandma’s feet and listen to her on the back porch on a balmy evening, imagining the scene in my head.
Movies Made From Home #6
Here’s one from the dusty family archives — but with a dark side. What kid never played hide-and-seek out on the farm? And who didn’t envy the one who was best at hiding? The entire film consists of one shot of several children playing hide-and-go-seek in a corn field. It takes me back to summer vacations at my grandparents’ farm in Minnesota, where I would play hide-and-seek with my brother and sisters. In this case, Harper was the name of the kid who could never be found. However, her mastery of this juvenile sport only turned out to be a tragic foreshadowing of her ultimate fate. (Note: This video has been removed from online publication.)
The Roper
This short documentary tells the true story of Kendrick, a black cowboy. Somehow, in six minutes, The Roper manages to mix in a little gangsta, a little spaghetti Western, and a little small-town sports drama. It takes these elements and cooks up something fit for a prime-time profile — a solid piece all around, even for someone uninterested in the subject.
Seraph
The title comes from the biblical angelic beings of the highest order, said to surround God in constant worship. Seraph is weighty and symbolic as it explores the spiritual ideas of sight, exposure, shame, and redemption. In the film, the seraph described by the protagonist’s father has six wings, two to fly, two to cover his body, “because the body is unclean,” and two to cover his eyes, because no one can look at God. The animation, pacing, and soundtrack combine for a compelling little story as the protagonist engraves the memory of his sins on himself, eventually finding healing through an act of sacrifice.
(Warning, this film is probably NSFW. One scene has many animated nude figures — the exact purpose of which escapes me.)
What Do We Have In Our Pockets?
I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite of these short films, but What Do We Have In Our Pockets would make the short list. Don’t think Bilbo Baggins and Gollum. This short is something like a clever adult version of a Dr. Seuss book, or perhaps the children’s classic, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It settles comfortably and self-consciously in the wistful protagonist’s hope for an absurd twist of fate in his favor. Why carry so much crap in your pockets? Well, you never know when the love of your life will walk by and ask for a stamp.
When the Zombies Come
Like the people interviewed in this film, I’m a fan of The Walking Dead, but some folks have too much time on their hands. I say that for two reasons: one, this kid thought through every conceivable detail of his zombie contingency plan (“What happens if it rains?” for example); two, someone made a film about it.
In other words, this is the documentary I would have made in high school had time and inspiration allowed. Good for a laugh or two, and absolutely nothing more.
