Oxford Playhouse, Fri May 21st 2010

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Nina Brown June 2, 2010

It comes but once a year and ought to be a highlight in any film enthusiast’s diary: the Ruskin Shorts film night at the Oxford Playhouse. It is a cinematic feast of emerging artistic talent that ruthlessly stretches the parameters of film to house the inspiration of Ruskin students, teachers and alumni.

This year was no exception. Presented by screenwriter and director Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), the evening showcased films that ranged from the truly bizarre and comic, with Jim Allchin and Rob Brough’s Smokey Lady featuring human birds pecking in rhythm at what looked like a hanging hunk of meat, to the shockingly realistic Retraining from Saatchi award winner Oliver Beer, that deals with the harrowing job of a telephone counselor.

Certain films were hard to get into, having no obvious plot line, a common characteristic of art-house shorts. Karolina Raczynska’s Anatomies tried the endurance of the audience, using close-ups on a male body in an attempt to force the viewer to focus on his own physicality. This only succeeded in making me concentrate on desperately trying to suppress a yawn.

What was so awesome about the film shorts however, whether or not the substance of the films themselves captivated you, was that every short offered an original and interesting take on filming technique, something that can be exploited in the intense, abstract context of film shorts. Plot lines were laid aside to make way for artistic repetition in the cycling phenomenon Bicycle by Erin Hughes, for the eerie music score of Hannah Meszaros-Martin’s Untitled, and for the interesting triptych screen layout of Istvan Prem’s Ladder from the Skies.

All these techniques served to provoke the contemplation and abstract thought usually experienced when gazing on a painting or on the groundbreaking products of off-the-wall film directors such as Fritz Lang, who let his films be a facet of the German expressionist artistic movement. The artistic techniques provoked a sensation that is all but lost when one views the action-packed, special effect-laden thrillers that enjoy a monopoly over our cinema screens today.

Friday the 18th June promises an evening of similar exciting artistic enterprise with the Ruskin degree show being held in East Oxford.

It’s easy to make a short film, it really is, and it isn’t actually too tricky to make a fairly good one. What’s difficult is making a great short film, but with a little guidance and nurturing, even a first time filmmaker can put together something honest and clear and which will speak to an audience. The craft – because there is craft, and it goes far beyond understanding the technology and tools involved – can be learned.

I’m not sure such guidance was readily at hand to the students displaying work in the Ruskin Shorts program, fifteen short films selected from thirty-five submissions by students of the college and presented to an audience of peers and strangers at the Oxford Playhouse. The filmmakers’ output was wildly varied – stylistically, generically but also qualitatively. I’d guess that instead of guidance in the craft, they were instead offered encouragement: encouragement to experiment, encouragement to feel free and to ignore convention, and sometimes sense, and encouragement to make films that were wholly and entirely indulgent. The distinctions between the films are illuminated by a question of who was indulging a passion or a burning desire to tell a story or communicate an idea or emotion, and who was indulging… well, themselves and their more selfish instincts.

Before the films, screenwriter Tony Grisoni took to the stage to greet us, read the rather amusing lyrics to They Might Be Giants’ My Experimental Film and offer even more encouragement. He proposed that exciting future filmmakers were going to come from art schools – something rather more traditional than he was letting on, but this omission was likely deliberate in the service of inspiration. Grisoni is an uncommonly skilled writer – see Tideland or Red Riding – and perhaps takes for granted how easily it comes to him, and how demanding some of his subjects will find the hard craft of making art for an audience.

I spoke to a couple of the artists after the show and was impressed by how humble they were, yet how sincere and serious. I was, however, left wondering what kind of guidance they’d been afforded or if they’d ever before been asked to explain themselves, or to make a case for their work. I’d have been keen to speak with Michelle Deignan, who had made the best, most cogent film of the selection, Red Cheeks, though if she was there, I wasn’t able to find her. Red Cheeks, by the way, can be viewed online: http://www.variablemedia.org/info/mdeignan/recentwork/redcheeks.html

There was certainly some raw talent in the group, and some sensitivity to certain video aesthetics; elsewhere there was some ambition with complex conceptual construction, as with Red Cheeks. The most polished film, Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon, showed dancers and pentathletes enact a fictional sporting performance; the most off-handedly comic, Smokey Lady, evoked Gilbert and George dancing to Bend It; another was a monologue to a webcam, and yet another comprised 3 separate images, almost like Quicktime VR videos panning and zooming and spiraling. The breadth of films on offer followed a predictable undpredictability. For the most part, however, these artists weren’t yet sufficiently in command. This was early days, sheer-potential stuff, freshly mined and still waiting for the discipline of the forge, more exciting than satisfying and more deserving of hope than trust.

Brendon Connelly 23 May 2010

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