Experimental short films at Café Kino (Tuesday 18 October 2011)
After the delight that was “Closure of Catharsis” by Rouzbeh Rashidi with actor James Devereaux, it is with great interest that I attended the evening of Experimental Film Society shorts, organized again by Juan Gabriel Gutierrez at Café Kino in Bristol.
This time we were treated to nine shorts by a panel of filmmakers belonging to the EFS. The similarity of goals with the remodernist ideas was very quickly apparent: authenticity, low or no-budget, lack of linear or obvious plot, use of a deeply cinematic language, exploration of various levels of human consciousness and playing with time. As these films are created to leave much freedom of interpretation to the viewer, I’ve allowed myself here to give my personal understanding of them.
In “Padded Sleeve” a middle-aged man applies himself to building a wooden birdhouse. He places it in his garden with great care and sits on a bench waiting for the birds to come. All around him, the rustling of soft wind in the tree branches, the play of sunlight through the leaves… We are in the garden with the man. It feels deliciously peaceful. But the man gets up and looks for the birds that have not yet deigned to grace his birdhouse. He can hear their singing but they remain elusive. His disappointment is palpable, genuine and child-like. Something we’ve all experienced.
In “Toutes ces choses N°1” by Bahar Samadi, the capture of a moment in time, individual yet universal. A game of dice, hands and faces of two men, a silent choir and orchestra on the TV in the background… Until TV, film and the audience (us) briefly combine when we hear a few bars of music, the finale of the concert played by the orchestra. To me, it seemed to say that every moment is as important as the other: that these men’s game of chess in their flat has as much value as the televised, grand concert in the background.
In “A&B - Situations series” also by Bahar Samadi, the screen is divided into two screens. Two people, one on each screen. A man and a woman. The way they are portrayed suggests a conversation, yet they are filmed in different ways: different parts of their faces are focussed on, different angles… The conversation appears disjointed; it is soundless but for a sort of hissing.
We think we can communicate but we all come to it from our own very personal angle. And yet we do come together, we meet. The two screens finally portray the same scene…
“The Good Man has no Shape” by Kamyar Kordestani was the first of my four favourite shorts of the evening. An older man goes to a younger man’s house. They talk but no dialogue is heard. We can hear a man speak on the TV, but when they sit in front of it the screen is blank. The scene then changes to the same layout but the two people on the sofa are the young man with a young woman (whose shoes we saw in the entrance hall at the beginning of the film). Moreover the light is red. We can see the reflection of the TV flicker in the dining room window. Same absence of communication, but their sitting stance reflects each other. The young woman gets up and goes in the kitchen to clean. The young man leaves to get some cigarettes. Later on he comes back and the old man comes back into the main room. They sit again side by side on the sofa in front of the TV. We see that what they’re watching on the TV screen is the young woman. Our sense of reality is challenged. The real and the unreal intertwine. Is the TV more than a sort of smokescreen that isolates the characters from each other? Does it represent the projection of their thoughts? Between the three characters, no obvious communication, and yet...
In “Something Fishy” by Hamid Shams Javi, the second of my favourite films, the black and white images are poetic and beautiful. There’s a story, but “not as you know it”. An attractive young woman wakes up one morning with a deep sense of foreboding. A voice-over (her voice) tells us what she’s thinking: “It seems something’s fishy”. She gets up. The camera follows her in the kitchen, lingers on everyday objects, on their inherent beauty. A milk bottle, framed in a way that changes it into a work of art; the milk coming to the boil on the hob… The sound of a distant radio, the songs of bird… We feel the texture of reality, but in a way that we rarely experienced, we are tuned into its intrinsic beauty. It’s like a rediscovery of the value of everydayness.
The young woman has her breakfast, without appetite, dunking her biscuit in her milk. Her eyes absent. Cut to a shot of the outside. There’s something brewing.
A phone call interrupts the quietness. The sense of foreboding increases. Then another call. Beauty of the patterns made by the milk she spits out in shock on her glass table. Something’s happened.
Blank screen. Later on, the young woman at her breakfast table is now joined by a young man. Silence. Then “What’s happened to him?” The young man slides towards her on the table a box of cremated ashes: “He wanted us to cremate him”. “How?” She asks. ”He set himself on fire in his flat.”
We focus on the young woman’s eyes. All becomes red, the colour of fire. In a rectangular shape (the shape of the box of ashes), we see flames, and behind them, the figure of a man. All that’s left? A last word repeated several times, like the last line of a poem: “Cartilage!”
“Where to?” by Michael Higgins is a comedic study of time, repetition, ritual and circularity. This black and white film has a circular structure. It’s very pared down in terms of set and protagonists. An almost empty car park next to a closed warehouse. There are two camera points: a wide angled one embracing the whole car park and a close-up on the car. A man A in a white shirt comes out of the warehouse. He climbs into his car and stays in the stationary vehicle with his arm outside of the driver window. Close-up on the car. A different man in a cap, man B, is now in the car. He starts it and leaves the space. The space remains empty. We hear the man drive around the car park and see him return to his previous space. Man B changes into man A, who leans against his car, taps on its roof and goes back into the warehouse. The same actions are repeated three times with very minor variations until the last time, when an old fashion jazz soundtrack is heard and the camera goes into wide-angle. Man A drives around the car park several times then parks back in his old space. The end or is it?
The penultimate of my four favourite films of the evening was “Homo Sapiens Project (1)” by Rouzbeh Rashidi. This film was beautiful and seemed to be about capturing the magic of a few moments, a few memories. The beginning is a series of flashing, blurred images in mute colours, with a sort of deep and brooding ambient soundtrack – like a deep, universal breath. It’s as if we have to readjust the way we are seeing or are plunged into another level of experience/consciousness. A young woman is alone in her kitchen. The images are interspersed with moments of black screen, like the blinking of our eyes. The same young woman is alone on a bench by the side of an urban river. We go back inside. It’s dark. Someone opens a window. It’s sunny again, green trees are swaying gently in a light wind. Then the atmosphere changes as the brooding soundtrack changes into an old fashioned paso-doble. We’re then in a park where couples are dancing in a big bandstand. Gradually the deep ambient breath reappears in the soundtrack and, once the dance is finished, eventually takes over. Cut to the round visor of a camera through which a man’s legs and feet are seen to walk or do some dance steps on a deep red carpet. Last glimpse, like a signature, gives us the identity of the man: Rouzbeh Rashidi.
The last film (and the last of my four favourites), “Hereunder” by Maximilian Le Cain (with Vicky Langan), I experienced as a twisted, music-less ballet version of a dream or of someone’s inner landscape. I interpreted the title as meaning “what lies beneath”. The beautiful and dreamlike imagery of a woman in a derelict workshop exploring various cubby-holes, full of old junk, while being haunted by images of water and by the fear of drowning, suggested to me both powerfully and poetically a journey into one’s psyche. (Water being the element of femininity but also of the unconscious; and cubby-holes with doors being a well-known metaphor for the various parts of the memory and of the brain.)
In conclusion, another great evening of films that make you think and feel in a way that is truly creative and beautifully free. As with the remodernist films and the wonderful “Closure of Catharsis”, it was an inspiring antidote to the artificial, formulaic and mind numbing mainstream films.
Thank you Experimental Film Society people. We really do need you!
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Véronique Martin” is an UK-based french author and writer.
