Experimental Shorts (Slamdance Film Festival 2024) (Review)

Even in a festival as dedicated to the unexpected as Slamdance, there’s only one strand where you can see a film whose descriptive subtitles specify the sound of “[downpour of fish]”. It’s the experimental shorts strand, a useful opportunity to press your ear to the film-making underground. The fishy rain arrives in Neritan Zinxhiria’s Light of Light, which apparently reconstructs a series of photographs taken by a Greek Orthodox monk on a home-made camera during the early decades of the 20th century. I’m not sure I would have known that without the accompanying programme notes, but that’s not the point. Absent of the need to tell a conventional story, film-makers can take the opportunity to revel in a place, a time, a whole mood, something that communicates a feeling to the audience even if they don’t know exactly what’s going on. Indeed, you could fairly argue that the films become more potent because they don’t give up all of their secrets.

Take Sarah Lasley’s Welcome to the Enclave, for instance. Boiled down to pure plot, it sounds like the sort of thing that would make for a reasonably good Bo Burnham sketch; an online community of yoga-loving middle-class moms gets invaded by trolls, with the virtual community rendered as an animated suburb. But Lasley’s story becomes something more eccentric and unnerving in the telling. It starts as a straightforward satire about women wearing “Namaste and Chardonnay” t-shirts finding penises graffitied on their walls, and it ends up with a virtual camera hovering over a wrecked neighbourhood while a woman nearing breakdown obsessively sings ‘Coming Around Again’ by Carly Simon in her defaced living room.

Welcome to the Enclave is one of a number of films in this strand focusing on the online world. Apart from Light of Light, the only other short that looks backwards is Frédéric Moffet’s Goddess of Speed, an attempt to visualise the rehearsals for Dance Movie. Rather than a Friedberg-Seltzer parody, Dance Movie is a lost film which Andy Warhol shot in 1963 but apparently never completed. Moffet supplements scenes of Stevie Hanley playing Dance Movie‘s star Fred Herko with on-screen text from Bruce Jenkins’s writings on Warhol’s films. It’s an effective evocation of a lost era, one whose only real flaw is that the cinematography is too cared-for to convince as part of Warhol’s proudly rudimentary screen canon.

Goddess of Speed definitely provides more context for its re-enactments than Light of Light, and both of these opposing methods prove successful in their own ways. Both these instincts – to explain and to not explain – go awry in some of the other shorts. Teresita Carson’s Monolith takes on big questions of colonialism in archaeology, but it ends up choking on its own layers of imagery, as well as a voiceover that includes sentences like “The captions are a superimposition that is both destruction and fragmentation”. It might work as a multi-channel gallery installation, but it’s far too dense for a fourteen-minute short. The opposite danger, that of not explaining anything at all, is less fatal to Rajee Samarasinghe’s Lotus-Eyed Girl, which is apparently based on the work of the eleventh-century Kashmiri poet Bilhana but is more likely to stick in the mind for its imagery. I am unqualified to say what it all means to people familiar with the source poems, but the closing light-speed montage of digital mandalas overlaying a slo-mo shot of pomegranate seeds tumbling out of a woman’s mouth still hits hard.

It may simply be that I don’t personally understand enough of the cultural context behind the last two shorts, which is another area where the more – in the parlance of our time – Extremely Online films succeed. Probably everyone has the background necessary to feel called out by Luis Grané’s Nowhere Stream, in which a sleepless social media addict browses unhelpful tips for success such as “Exercise for 52 minutes a day without offending anyone”. Like Welcome to the Enclave, it makes an asset out of its lo-fi computer animation, as does Joseph Wilcox’s Nobody Wants to Fix Things Anymore, although Wilcox’s film can claim to be cutting-edge. Its voiceover and imagery are generated by AI, which places it right at the centre of the debate currently tearing Hollywood in two.

On the evidence of Wilcox’s film, AI art definitely is art – so long as it’s got an artist’s vision steering it, which is where a lot of those ugly demo videos by tech evangelists fall down. Nobody Wants to Fix Things Anymore is an old man’s lament for a lost age of handiwork which unfolds into a deliciously trivial urban mystery. It makes you want to get outside and look for the oddest everyday thing you can see, or learn a physical craft, and the film’s central gag is that it’s expressed using the least physical, least labour-intensive art form yet invented. Like a lot of experimental or gallery video, the method of production becomes part of the finished work’s meaning.

The social criticism that runs through a lot of these films – of our terminally logged-in lifestyles, of the legacy of imperialism, of how easy it is for people’s legacies to be forgotten – comes through most savagely in Calum Walter’s Entrance Wounds. It’s the longest film in the strand, and it may include the most indelible moment. A video diary that records the everyday experience of watching environmental collapse in a gun-obsessed America, it features a POV shot of the director thumbing through a copy of Guns & Ammo in a supermarket. He reaches a full-page advertisement showing an arm holding a gun extending from underneath the camera’s viewpoint. At the angle he films it from, it looks as if the arm is the director’s own, and he moves the magazine around aiming his paper gun at shelves, aisles and his fellow shoppers, none of whom appear to know they’re being filmed. It’s a truly chilling demonstration of the misanthropy and paranoia Walter detects at the heart of American gun culture. Who needs stories when you can get to the nub of the matter with one shot?

Graham’s Archive – Experimental Shorts Slamdance 2024