One of the nice things about the collection of short films in the Convergence 2002 Film-Video-Animation Festival beginning tomorrow night at the Cable Car Cinema is that if something leaves you scratching your head, it won't be for long.
All films in the program run no longer than 20 minutes, with some as short as 7, 6 and even 3 minutes. Lynne McCormack, associate director of Convergence, has run the film festival three of its six years. She says the purpose of the festival, which awards $500 prizes each to the top animated, narrative and documentary short films, "is to try to encourage the independent filmmakers, a lot of whom are making films by themselves without much of a crew.
"It ain't Sundance," she said of the festival and its prizes, "but it's something."
One of her favorites in the program is Totaled, about the aftermath of a real car wreck. Filmmaker Ben Coccio had the presence of mind after his car flipped over at the side of the road and was destroyed to rescue his camera from inside the vehicle and then place it atop a pay phone while he called various friends to tell them what had happened. "It's really honest and it's short and sweet and it's done in a way that really pulls you in and for a long time you're not sure whether it's real or not."
Totaled turns out to be cinema veritae at its best. Coccio is at first nearly delirious with panic about what has happened. But the longer he talks and the more phone calls he makes, reality sets in and he breaks down in tears. All this is intercut with shots of his car being righted and then towed away.
McCormack says she received about 50 entries to the festival "and rejected more than half of them." Those were winnowed down to the approximately 15 that are in the program, which will run 110 minutes each night tomorrow through Sunday. McCormack, who was a film department assistant at the Rhode Island School of Design and has sat through hundreds of entries in the three years she has curated the Convergence Film Festival, says, "I feel fortunate that I've watched so many short films at RISD. It takes a keen sense of talent to be able to tell a story in 10 minutes and to have a nice punchline."
After McCormack made the first cut, she turned her selections over to judges Bonnie MacDonald, head of the communications department at Rhode Island College, and John Terry, dean of fine arts at the RISD, both of whom are filmmakers themselves. They awarded the prize for best animation to Kathy Smith's Indefinable Moods, a gorgeously rendered, if wildly experimental, series of 3-D computer collages that, as is often the case with such films, encompasses the birth of a baby in its images.
The best narrative prize was won by Todd Korgan's bizarre black-and-white The Man With the Empty Room, a clever film about desperation and loneliness that's set in a 1984-ish kind of place. A man rents out his spare room, as much in hopes of finding companionship for his dull existence as for the money, to a strange woman with slicked-down hair who dresses in severe white-shirt-and-business-suit attire. Their budding relationship seems destined for something magical when, unfortunately, it hits a roadblock when he takes a terrible misstep.
Matt McCormick's the subconscious art of graffiti removal, won the best documentary prize and it's one of McCormack's favorites, too. The Portland, Ore., filmmaker sets out, very tongue-in-cheek, to underline his point that "painting over graffiti inadvertently creates its own art" and that people who slather paint over graffiti scrawls are creating "one of the more intriguing and important art movements of the early 21st century." The filmmaker makes his point when he puts works by the acknowledged leaders of the modern art movement alongside some of the rectangles and squares painted on the sides of buildings. The end results are disarmingly similar.
McCormick sees this as "the subconscious release of artistic desires." McCormack sees the film as "very beautifully done."
While these top selections, as well as the other films mentioned below, will be screened every night beginning at 7 p.m. at the Cable Car (admission $7.50), some of the other films will change nightly.
But be sure to be on the lookout for:
Crank Calls, Terry Rietta's very funny film about a bum-luck guy who discovers an ingenious way of taking revenge on a man who insulted him on the phone, a man who cheated him out of a parking space and his screamingly demanding boss.
Birdbeat (fugue), Providence filmmaker Geoff Adams's wonderfully amusing use of animation and real shots of our feathered friends as they fly to a bird feeder, turning their visits into a dance-filled symphony.
Passage, Chel White's experimental film that explores the duality of human beings, contrasting gentle images of people of all ages serenely floating underwater with shots of men marching to war, bombed-out cityscapes, nuclear blasts, soldiers murdering civilians and robed Klan members. It's man's inhumanity to man, contrasted with the peace and serenity man is also capable of. It's all rather heavyhanded, yet it has some startling and provocative imagery.
