Celluloid Ivy

A Preview of this Year's Ivy Film Festival

BY JOSH BAUCHNER

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photo courtesy of ivy film fest
Man in suit

THE STATE OF CINEMA is often up for debate during film festivals, especially those festivals looking to include a wide range of genres, styles, and nationalities. Such debate was evident at the New York Film Festival in October of last year, where films by old giants such as Jean Luc-Godard and Eric Rohmer stood by works of the younger, and decidedly less French, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul and Jonathan Caouette. During one open question session with Godard, an idealistic young student asked whether digital video could save the cinema. Only silence was offered in response, a move that many read as either the onset of senility or just plain arrogance. But a more favorable interpretation is to see Godard as turning the question back at the student, challenging him to determine the answer himself.

The upcoming Ivy Film Festival ideally offers students a space to respond to the filmmaking giant's challenge, a chance for a new generation of directors to sculpt where the art form of cinema is heading, whether by digital video or not. Taking place on Brown University's campus between April 15 and 17, the student festival is in its fourth year, offering a program of film premiers (Murderball), industry representatives (Damon Dash and Rob Friedman), and 25 student films. The Indy was provided with 14 of the 25 films in this year's program, a sampling from the seven categories of Comedy, Drama, Documentary, Experimental, Film School, Animation, and International.

Overall, the selection provides a fractured front on the future of cinema; the greatest difference among the entries seems to be the goals of the directors. A third seem entrenched within the tradition of purely commercially cinema, a third with a more oppositional cinema, and the final third somewhere in between. It is unfortunate that the most expensive and best produced (read: 35mm, semiprofessional actors and film school resources and education) fall in the first category. Their appearance hints at the festival's focus on commercial film and the business of cinema, as reflected by its previous guests and judges: Vice Presidents, Executive Producers, and Agents; it even has an official hotel, The Marriott.

This focus is further instantiated by the low visibility of the student films, the presumed premise for the festival's existence, during the weekend. However, it would be a shame to believe that the festival offers only poor imitations of Providence Place's latest outcasts. With one gem, several intruiging re-readings of current cinematic trends (the comedic musical, mockumentary), and a few simple pleasures, the Ivy Film Festival may yet give Godard hope.

Shooting Digital Insurgents

By far the best entry I saw was a documentary by Michael Highland (University of Pennsylvania) entitled As Real as Your Life. The video, tagged: "I am a videogame addict. Here is my story," follows a pseudo-first person narrative about how the director's love of video games compensates for his otherwise lacking "real" life. In 10 short minutes, Highland traces a personal history of video games, offering up plenty of screen shots juxtaposed with Waking Life-esque "meaningful" questions.

The project, one of the few truly multimedia-based entries takes other technologies (video game progress) not only as its content, but also as its form. The film combines a hodge-podge of scraggly hand-drawn PS2 controllers, split-screen digital video and computer graphics (with the protagonist mirroring the actions of the hero from GTA3), perfect soft laptop pop from Four Tet, and ambiguous night vision shots of "actual" combat. Such extension and integration of subject and object gives the multimedia project a credibility and complexity absent in many of the other films.

At the same time, this complexity leads to many questions and problems unanswered in the text itself: does Highland endorse continued progress in gaming? Does he believe games actually cause "real life" violence? Has the ambiguous didactic nature of his rhetorical questions already defeated any intended effect? Has he ever beaten Final Fantasy X with no cheats on Wizard level?

These problems arise mostly from the director taking upon a complex project, both technically and conceptually, and never reaching a final conclusion about the relation between video games and real life. Yet this failure is the mark of a film that is entirely devoted to and caught up in itself, a perfect drive towards aesthetic complexity and thematic relevance. Leaving any final solution to the video game quandary is both a consequence of time restrictions and insight into the intricacy of the issues surrounding the proliferation of hyper-real video games and digital images, as well their ubiquitous place in today's childhoods.

A Dead Trekkie Sings To Some Really, Really White English Dudes

Recently, in both television and movies, pop culture has relegated the once-noble musical to snarky comedy: Daria, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut all reduced the once respected Hollywood blockbuster genre of the musical to off-key gags on Canada and the suburbs. Planted firmly in this recent trend is Penny: A Musical Comedy, made by Brad Wilson (Cornell), a film dedicated to absurdity and underwater love duets (yes, they sing underwater). With an elliptical narrative, Penny's comedy succeeds in its abrupt conclusion; stuffed animals, an electrocuted Trekkie, and one character's near nudity, all presented in the first shot, are explained only in the herky-jerky and absurd final minute of an otherwise slow narrative.

As one of the only entries shot on 16mm, the softer color and rougher quality of Penny helped it stand out from its better financed 35mm competitors. The slowed moments of song (a cafeteria lament, a courtship reduced to a fencing match, and the underwater sequence), offer the filmmakers the chance to give some of the more beautiful, if understated, shots of the festival. The underwater scene especially creates gorgeous dark shadows around its stars, the bubbles and molecular movements softly present in the imperfect quality of 16mm.

Another video notable for its sly irony is Andrew Oxley's (International Film School, Wales) White English Men, a mockumentary of pock-marked, sallow, tea-loving Britons. Without any of the tricks or high style, the video exhibits extremely subtle mockery. Only the project moves beyond its comic object with a perfect placement of contemporary England.

While the English men in the video were pure caricature, including a stuffy cricket club member and a full regalia town crier (though assumedly actual people), available to the filmmaker in some sort of timeless capsule of pure "Englishness," the surroundings and stills point to a different England. This England has a contemporary existence, full of sunbathers in American trunks at the beach, particularly non-English looking plastic chairs, store bought muffins, and awfully chintzy plastic tea cups. Absurd images of stereotypical England play off ordinary markers of today's homogenized Western world, both authenticating the project and increasing the humor. Oxley mocks well, but places England better, offering a short glimpse into an actually existing country in 2005.

The success of Penny and White English Men lies in their ability to show new aesthetic and conceptual possibilities for the cinema in simple manners. While Penny turns to 16mm for color, White English Men mocks with material beyond stereotypes; each is a glimpse into how the cinema can evolve, expand its object and apply new concepts or aesthetics in order to revive an old genre or gird an already budding one.

Heavy Hands And Simple Pleasures

Unfortunately, the majority of films at the festival do not offer such pleasure or complexity; the worst of the rest are poorly stylized takes on vacant concepts. Many of these films, such as Crossing (Oliver Horovitz, Harvard) and Tahara (Sara Rashad, USC), are burdened with heavy-handed, overly weighty classical music, staining any possibly profound or emotional moment with undue intensity. Even worse is a recurring problem of hackneyed or missing stories in the narrative based entries, like Chelsea-Prentis (Guillaume de Roquemaurel, Columbia) and Fragrance of the Night (Jon Aaron, Occidental). Perfect continuity editing and crisp 35mm color cannot save these farces.

These problems do not completely ruin the specific films or the program as a whole, but rather force the viewer to take pleasure in smaller, less enticing doses, such as the stylistic and narrative simplicity of Broken Retail (Sam Fleischner, Wesleyan) and Red Sky Morning (Sterling Sheehy, USC), the bird chirping man in The Bird in the Head (JB Herndon and Celina Paiz, Brown), and the crumbling bones

contrasted with a slaughterhouse in stark eight millimeter film of Epsidios Sinfonicos (Victor Mares, Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television, Cuba). Overall, the program is relatively mixed, but with enough small victories to make a trip to the movies this weekend worthwhile. Though the Ivy Film Festival as a whole may never lose its corporate edge, the student films it selects in the future will hopefully continue the trend set by this year's successes: small glimpses into different possibilities for an aging art form.

For more information and a schedule of this year's events, see www.IvyFilmFestival.com.

JOSH BAUCHNER B'07 thinks Godard is a trick-ass bitch

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