WHO LOVES SHORT SHORTS? SXSW DAY 6. I THINK.
There definitely a vibe ‘round here parts with the SXSW Film Festival. But the music part of SXSW kicked in on Wednesday, and that’s when the whole town seems to be a knot of activity. I’ve only lived in Austin a little over a year, but in our neighborhood, which is a few blocks from the heart of downtown and thus many of the music venues, it becomes a bazaar of people and musicians and buskers and kiosks of food, CDs, and trinkets. Lines pour out of the local restaurants and coffee shops, and there’s just this buzz.
This afternoon I hit a short films program. For my money, a roster of short films is a film festival unto itself. You see the most amazing stuff – and if you don’t like one, just wait a few minutes for the next one. I suppose film festivals are where shorts are going to get their broadest and biggest audience, since they don’t normally find wide release. I wish more theaters paired shorts with their main attraction – and I guess that’s why more and more theater advertising is taking on that filmmaking/film short quality.
I’m just always astonished at what filmmakers can do with so little. Make no mistake, a lot of shorts have huge budgets and lengthy credits that rival some blockbusters. But they have to work in a constriction of time, and I wonder if that can’t be even more daunting than a feature length. I’m guessing too that since you’re not under the gun to sell your movie to a distributor, a filmmaker feels freer to throw caution to the wind – here’s where you’re going to see stuff that’s wilder, riskier, creativer, more out-therer, funnier and lovelier. And plus, you can see just about every genre in one swell foop – foreign, comedy, drama, experimental, animation.
In the program I saw this afternoon, a couple of shorts really stood out. The hilarious and strange The Problem With Machines That Communicate; the lovely and heartbreaking Beijing Haze; and the visually breathtaking Bachanias #5, which was what a classical musical aria music video would be like. Oh, and there was the harrowing Execution of Solomon Harris, which is eight minutes long and one continuous shot – and disturbing in its subject matter and simple delivery. The European Kid (picture) was just a pure, quirky delight – nicely done and tight script. I thrilled to the shorts today.
A guy sat beside me today that sat beside me in another screening I attended. Why, in a sparsely people theater, do some people need to sit so close to other people? On the other hand I got to see out of the corner of my eye what a soldier this guy was – on both occasions, he had a backpack with his lunch and bottled water, a flashlight for reading the program or the book he was carrying along, a sweater – who knows, maybe a sleeping bag, a collapsible chair, air mattress, harpoon – it was like a clown car, with the stuff he was pulling out and constantly rearranging. I do know that he carries cellophane wrapped sports/protein bars and he takes a really, really long time to unwrap them, so the constant, tinny crinkle crinkle…. crinkle, crinkle, crinklecrinklecrinkle…. crinkle……. crinklecrinkle noise goes on FOREVER. I shot him a dirty look in the dark which he pretended to be oblivious to but I think it did the trick.