Program Diary I: Competition program
When we say competition, implying a list of titles that survived the selection grinder and got a chance to reanimate the sleepy-hollowish Student Centre cinema den, by no means are we talking Olympic arenas, pre-duel glove slapping or any kind of battlefield strife. Cherry-picked artistic works, often accompanied by their makers in flesh and blood, are again this year divided into five blocs – five weeds in a screaming polyphony.
This is a step to making their individual conceptual and aesthetic preoccupations intertwine into a mesh of powerful impressions outliving by far the four days spent in the darkness of the cinema auditorium. The competition at hand is less antagonistic and more orgiastic in nature.
“All hail the new flesh,” rumbled the anatomically undone (gifted?) James Woods in D. Cronenberg’s tech masterpiece Videodrome, sounding like a spiritual leader to our short film pals. 25 FPS competition entries, just like Cronenberg’s flesh, are in eternal transition. Some try to categorise it thematically – artistic creativity spill into materialism (An Old Dog’s Diary), cinema auditoriums become parking lots (E), wild natural landscapes transubstantiate into a dark spot on the entire nation’s conscience (489 Years); some use it as a structural principle – genre qualities give way to the information surge (B-Roll with Andre), myths and canonical artistic pieces are caught in the mechanisms of their musical and cinematic re-interpretations (The Boyg, Scenes from a Sketchbook), as a psychotropic death labyrinth infinitely pulsates and regenerates on the extreme margins of sci-fi imagery (The Mess).
Perhaps the point of this entire mega-transitional constant lies in the striving for what the protagonist of one of the ‘competing’ titles calls ‘a medium capable of taking it all’, a medium which does not need resolution and which exceeds itself. If that is indeed so, then all these films in fact compete with themselves. And why not? The medium of film might be defined by its limitations, but ever since the human race has pursued film, it has also, quite naturally, tried to surpass these limitations. Either way, our expanded film colleagues should be the ones to tackle this matter, while we are about to take a moment to reflect on people, their nature and limitations, as the most interesting side-effects take place here: from the psychological-optical ones, by way of which glittering moving bodies all of a sudden make us joyfully coo before the screen (Something Between Us), while the next moment we shudder at the sight of existential abyss (Navigator), from glitches producing cinematic ‘ghosts’ in the very act of projection, without a camera or film (Not Even Nothing Can Be Free of Ghosts), to the history of intolerance leaving its impress on the very technological mechanism of film production (Lili).
In any case, open up your mind and bring a broom to sweep it off the floor after the screenings. See you at the 12th 25 FPS!
Danijel Brlas
Photo: Navigator