Light is Calling / Instruments: 21st Century American Short Films
“That one is predetermined. That one, it finds another. This one comes in one window; Sliding out the other.” Thus begins Fugazi’s song “Instrument”, the second-to-last track on their third album In On The Kill Taker. It is a howl rather than a song. A song of anger at having seen the flames. A song about the weight of loss. That’s when the feedback kicks in –propelling us out of the storm with the strength to battle on, in the abrasive calm of the moment. This same wind that blows through the American short films of the past twelve years is more timely than ever.
Darling Darling by Matthew Lessner (USA – 2005)
Twelve years of trauma, post-9/11, post-war and post-antiterror laws, post-Katrina, post-subprimes… Twelve years of stagnation, doubt and reflection, but with an ability to lead still there, to get back up again, without ever toning down the causes and consequences. Like the child waking from a nightmare and demanding a story, in David Lowery’s Pioneer, subtly told by Will Oldham, aka Bonnie Prince Billy. Like the rock energy of Lilah Vandenburgh’s furious, infatuated Bitch. A desire like no other for cinema, coming from a country as large as a continent, a desire that has always been able to influence all others. An eternal spark that proves, if proof was needed, that the United States is not just the land of GI Joe and other Avengers.
RIP Rich by Yoram Savion (USA – 2009)
Twelve years that have seen the borders of cinematic creation between short forms, television and sacrosanct Hollywood get ever more blurred. Short films and tv series are embracing their role as a testing ground for new talent, visual innovations and scriptwriting risks. And this fertile ground spans the distance among genres. Before going on to star in Juno, for example, Michael Cera already displays candid awkwardness around a mime horse (!) who happens to be her fiancée’s father, in Matthew Lessner’s Darling Darling (2005). After pounding the pavement in Baltimore for David Simon’s television series The Wire, J.D. Williams finds himself pushed into the violence of despair in John Magary’s 2007 short The Second Line. Much like what happens in Treme, another of David Simon’s series, The Second Line takes the pulse of a devastated New Orleans, full of tattered shacks, but with no intention of sinking into the debris. Themes and actors crossover, but so too do economic stakes, to such an extent that it was HBO that decided to produce Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, flouting a certain institutional overcautiousness. This overlapping conveniently allows creators such as Bill Morrison, Keith Bearden, Jonathan Caouette and David Russo to transport the formal experimentation and narrative questioning of their short works into feature-length films.
The Marina Experiment by Marina Lutz (USA – 2009)
Descendants of a long tradition, these new explorers of the seventh art are going at it with all cylinders firing. The results fly in all directions, from the experimental to the comedic, from intimate confession to hardboiled mysteries, from choreographed music videos to the disenchanted portrait of youth on autopilot… Sometimes the road less travelled winds, as it were, from the beach in Barton Fink to the snowy mountains of Twin Peaks, evincing a clear-sightedness that is by turns ironic, argumentative, poetic… “We need an instrument – to take a measurement. To find out if loss could weigh” Fugazi sang in 1993. Sublimely accompanied by the images of Jem Cohen. An instrument to take a measurement. Measuring, surveying. In their diversity, the forty-one films in this retrospective of American shorts are in a sense that, an instrument to take a measurement. An open window onto the inventories of time and place. Loss carries weight. Building means rebuilding oneself. It takes a mix of humility and pride. A rebellious will to create. A pioneering spirit.
Xavier Fayet
