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Film Fatigue
By: Ariel VeredI sat in the darkened theater, waiting for the program to begin. My eyes wandered to the bright red Exit sign above the door; I contemplated my escape. I was nearing my limit. I was experiencing film fatigue. I didn’t want to watch any more student films; I didn’t want to watch any more films, period. I was determined to watch as many as possible, for the good of my story. But how fun can it be when you aren’t even allowed popcorn in a movie theater?
Over the course of six days, I saw a boy drown his dog, a man with big ears channeling Cyrano de Bergerac, the rise of a political movement based on the philosophy of Groucho Marx, a man’s jaw fall off from excess radium consumption, and a woman with a gun stuck in her vagina. Not your average multiplex movie.
I’ve been to a lot of independent film events over the course of the semester while following independent film as my beat. It all crescendoed in the second week of April with the Tisch First Run Film Festival – six straight days of student films that ranged from inventive and entertaining to disturbing and boring. If this semester has taught me anything, it’s that watching endless movies is not all it’s cracked up to be. Especially when you are writing about film.
Writing about film is not the same as, say, writing about television. With television, you can tape a show and watch it hundreds of time to scrutinize every last detail. Watching a film in the theater means you have to take notes during the film, haphazardly scrawled across the page and with a definite downwards slant. But then you miss out on an essential part of film watching: the total absorption in a narrative.
Of course, many of the films had no narrative, or at least no narrative that was comprehensible. The short film time constraints (the running times ranged from two minutes and 53 seconds to 38 minutes) often influenced the writer/director (in most cases, they were one and the same person) to go one of two routes of creative expression: high-intensity screaming scenes or no dialogue at all.
In “Initial Conditions,” the two main characters, a glorified meteorologist and his brother-in-law science professor, engage in endless highly emotional debates about a scientific theory; I spent the whole 27 minutes of the movie not understanding – and not caring.
By contrast, “Mary, Mary” depicted an electric future, where all people are plugged into wall power sockets. Mary, the main character, chases a little boy in a tuxedo for his blue flower corsage, but it is left up to the viewer to make sense of what it all means. While looks exchanged between two characters can be rife with emotion, it is often hard to decipher meaning without accompanying dialogue.
Maybe I just didn’t “get” those films. It’s hard to judge from audience reaction, because often it was only a handful of people who were associated with the film. Regardless of my personal likes and dislikes, though, all the films were certainly a cut above the amateur videos posted on YouTube. These films represented the cream of the crop of Tisch students, the culmination of the four-year undergraduate program and three-year graduate program.
The six days of the Tisch First Run Festival allowed each of the 125 films to be screened twice at the Cantor Film Center. The most popular screenings were the evening ones, especially the 6:30 p.m. program, which showcased the films that got the highest judging scores. By contrast, I went to a screening at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. There were six people in the room, besides myself, the family of one of the featured filmmakers. I often felt like a lurker, an odd girl who took a seat near the back of the theater, but had no reason to be there.
And yet that did not stop me from unknowingly breaking the rules, by bringing in food. Once I brought in a cupcake, because I was going to watch three hours of student films on a Friday night instead of going out with friends. Twice I brought in an apple because it seemed to me a healthy snack. As I attempted to quietly chew my apple (not an easy task), I realized the obnoxiousness of my snack choice. Only on the second last day of the festival did I notice the many signs prohibiting bringing in food and drink – as I smuggled hot chocolate in a thermos.
On the last full day of the festival, New York was experiencing a re-enactment of the Biblical Flood. I walked from my apartment to the Cantor Film Center wielding a neon pink umbrella and clad in a black raincoat and black rain boots, with my jeans tucked in. I arrived at the theater soaking wet, embittered that I would be spending the next three hours sitting damp and cold. I wished for a fleece blanket, or pajamas, or a bed. My hand ached from taking so many notes. And I was tired from little sleep the night before watching movies (though these ones were Hollywood).
But I was resolved to catch as many of the films as possible. So there I was, ready to watch the next batch. Except that I fell asleep towards the end of the program. It was during a film that had no dialogue and an instrumental soundtrack. I was powerless to resist the seductiveness of a 20-second nap; there was simply nothing to keep me awake.
The next evening, there was a screening of the festival award winners. I sneaked into the screening a few minutes late to a theater that was almost to capacity, the biggest audience of the festival. And for good reason. As I watched the two-hour program of the festival’s best films, I was struck by the quality of the work, the artful manner in which the directors depicted their film worlds. Perhaps it helped that I didn’t take notes, but just sat back and let myself be transported to the worlds of a young African American lesbian’s identity crisis or a young American trying to dodge army service. It’s hard to describe what makes a great movie. The industry judges must have had specific criteria to award these films the big cash prizes. For myself, I found that I wasn’t waiting for these films to end. They presented a keyhole into a world that I would have been more than happy to peep through for a little while longer.
Princess_Ariel |
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, Apr 26 2007, 12:03 PM EDT
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