Resfest 2004, a visual and aural field day, shakes you like a Six Flags roller coaster for the eyes and ears. The traveling digital film festival packs the color, sound and ideas of a rock concert, philosophy class and art gallery combined into tasty 10-minute bite-size morsels. Just watch out for a few stale ones.
Resfest, a San Francisco-based organization, has been bringing together some of the best international independent cinematography in the world for the past eight years.
“Some dudes in San Francisco got together,” Sandy Hunter, Senior Programmer and contribution editor, said. “Digital film was emerging, so they put together something amazing with these new tools.”
This past weekend, Resfest came to the Grosevenor Auditorium of the National Geographic Museum to give viewers a welcome relief from the belabored plots and themes of Hollywood blockbusters. The majority of the films were shorts, ranging in length from 35 seconds to 10 minutes, with a final showing on Saturday night dedicated to feature films one to two hours in length.
The “Shorts” section of the festival featured 25 films with themes ranging from mockumentaries on the secret underworld of the so-called bicycle gangs of New York to the life of a professional music video actor. Though the subjects varied, all were made with the delectable tongue in cheek flavor of a Christopher Guest movie, such as Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman. Interspersed rather randomly among these were more “serious” pieces were some abstract films that included faceless women and interviews with New York City park bench gurus. Pretentious titles, like the aptly-dubbed “Nothing,” were too common, not to mention long, thought-provoking silences and references to transcendental meditation.
“We base our program around themes that emerge from our submissions,” Hunter said to explain the ever-changing nature of Resfest. “We saw that we were getting these themes and built a program around that.”
Hunter is responsible for selecting the featured films from an applicant pool of about 1,500 submissions every year.
“I didn’t have glasses before I started this job,” she said.
The juxtaposition of familiar images and frequently disgusting mutations of them in the films makes for innovative, but occasionally disturbing effects. In one film, pumping human hearts sit on a white table in a white room. Blood flows everywhere and tubes rush back and forth channeling the coursing blood between the exposed and bleeding organs. Thanks to gory movies and high-school biology classes, the images are familiar, but what’s new is the message of unification introduced with the electrical wires running between the hearts. (http://rxreviewz.com/) Independent film doesn’t dole out its messages like Hollywood Halloween candy to complacent trick-or-treaters; it gives us a box of mysterious chocolates where we really never know what we’re going to get.
But inevitably, we all bite into the occasional coconut or fruit-jam-gunk-filled variety. The shortest of the short films were featured in the “By Design” section of the Festival, which showcases an array of films running three minutes or less. The majority resembled a combination of the inside of your childhood kaleidoscope and a trip on the magic school bus. For the most part meaningless orgies of sound and audio, the films belligerently exploit the aesthetic notion of “art for art’s sake.” Films such as “Daydream” drag viewers through fragmented images and hazy out-of-focus cinematography into a very realistic simulation of a daydream. The viewer is left at the end of its somnolent two minutes with a similar sensation to that experienced upon re-awakening mid-sentence to the drone of a boring lecturer.
The beauty of being bombarded continuously with short spurts of artistic inspiration is being able to pick and choose the films that get under the skin. For those films that resemble bad drug trips accompanied by bad techno music, there is always the security of the knowledge that they will probably only last another 45 seconds.
Resfest fulfills its purpose: to open the eyes of observers and creators alike to images and themes they won’t otherwise see. Militantly indie, the festival exposes independent cinema’s inspired highs and grating lows for everyone’s viewing pleasure.
