Film Fantasia

By Nora Rockwell, AlterNet. Posted September 16, 2004.

While everyone is accustomed to watching music videos and commercials, only the cinematic cognoscenti is accustomed to considering them first and foremost to be works of art. RESFEST – which kicked off a 33-city international tour September 9-12 in New York – expands the definition of film beyond that to which a traditional film festival ascribes.

At this festival, advertisements, experiments and music videos hold as much weight as filmic shorts or feature films – and each command the same $12 admission fee. The result is a festival that is simultaneously esoteric and accessible: Many viewers will find themselves lavishing an unfamiliar type of attention onto Nike commercials, movie trailers, and Radiohead videos. Similarly, corporate sponsors have taken on a central role in this seemingly counterculture festival. Corporate sponsorship – albeit "cool" corporate sponsorship – is integral to and warmly invited into RESFEST. Advertisements are screened as artistic works during the festival and Canon has scored a spot on the RESFEST schedule with a presentation of its XL2 digital video recorder. The program entitled Handheld Cinema, available only to select guests, showcases cell phones, PDAs and other teensy-screened personal technology items that are equipped to play digital videos. RESFEST fuses film festival and high-tech trade show.

But the festival is also home to short films that prize narrative above pure aesthetics. RESFEST saved the political program "Bushwacked!" for 8pm on September 11th, thus exploiting the Tribeca Performing Arts Center's location just north of Ground Zero, from where the two towers of light ceremoniously projected that night.

The festival, now in its eighth year, shows off the digital medium's commitment to slickness not only in its individual films, but in its presentation, parties, and displays. The waiting area under the festival tents just outside the theater, called the RES lounges, played a part akin to that of a rave's chillout room, complete with easy chairs, graphic displays on flatscreen monitors, and lounging late-twenties film enthusiasts. The festival's packed opening night party at Tribeca's Dekk featured a back room in which works of digital art and clips from the night's series of shorts were shown, well out of the way of the crowds hassling the bartenders for the event's free drinks.

"Bushwacked!" brought together shorts critical of the current administration. United by a common anti-Bush theme, the shorts in this series ranged from the serious to the satiric. Michael Moore contributed a documentary music video covering the world-wide protest on February 15, 2003, and director Saam Farahmand positioned George Bush and Tony Blair in sexually suggestive, homoerotic stances in his video for the Electric Six song, "Gay Bar."

RESFEST also includes a three-part selection of film shorts by emerging digital directors that stretches over the course of the festival's tenure. As true of the shorts in many film festivals, the quality and level of ambition of the different entries vary significantly. One notable entry is the vividly colored short "Oedipus," by Jason Wishnow, in which a chorus of vegetables enact Sophocles' trilogy.

The short begins with Oedipus, a potato shepherd, leading his cauliflower sheep down a country road. En route, the group runs into a broccoli King of Thebes, who ironically remarks, "I had a son Oedipus... but he's dead," before taking his meat cleaver and embarking on a brutal battle to the death with Oedipus, who is armed with a vegetable peeler. Oedipus then finds his plump tomato Jocasta singing in a tavern dressed in a black taffeta strapless. He follows her back to her poster bed, and then their round, orifice-free bodies somehow, somewhere connect in the dark, and the legacy is complete. During the Q & A session, Wichnow, who could get into film school on the merit of his black clothes, slight build, and thick-framed glasses alone, assured the audience that "ninety percent of the vegetables used were real," and that none of them were hurt.

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Nora Rockwell is an arts writer living in New York.