For the
Visions Film Festival, I attended the viewing of the 1 hour 1 take competition.
I was curious in participating in the event because it sounded like a lot of
fun, but I was intimidated. I’m still just a beginner when it comes to
filmmaking and I was concerned that I might hold a group back because of my
inexperience, so I didn’t sign up to participate. If I had realized it was just
a simple thing for fun, shot with an iPhone camera, I would have felt a little
more confident. After watching the brief films other festival attendants made
in their 1 hour, I wished I had signed up. It really did look like fun.
Hopefully I’ll have the option to try it out next year. Voting for your
favorite group, was hard though, because there were no credits and all of the
group names were colors, so they ran together in the end, making it hard for me
to know which one I really did like best over which group name I could actually
remember.
I went
to the first film block, as well. There were some really wonderful short films
submitted to the festival. I wish I could have seen the second block as well,
but unfortunately there were conflicts for me attending at that time. There
films I saw were Reel Farewell
(documentary), Exposed
(experimental), Advice from a Caterpillar
(animation), Scoundrel (narrative), Win or Lose (documentary), Boy (narrative/period piece), Peck Pocket (animation), and Caught (narrative). I thought both of
the documentaries were done really well. I was really interested in Win or Lose because it was focused on an
issue that I really care a lot about, marriage equality. It was heart-warming
and sad at the same time. I was also interested in Reel Farewell’s subject about the rapid decline in films made on
actual film stock and thus the decline of film projectors and projectionists. This
reminds me of a documentary I watched about a similar issue in literature with
e-books and the struggles many printing companies have competing with Amazon
e-books. While many people will probably still want to read actual paper books,
film is something that isn’t thought about as much. There is a similar feeling
of nostalgia to film stock as there is when flipping the page of a book, but I
don’t think the average movie viewer is going to notice the difference between
a film projection and digital projection. It seems to be a much more rapid
decline. The film really sparked my interest in wanted to know more about
working with film. I thought the choreography in Exposed was beautiful and that the dialogue was very poetic. The
filmmaker explained that the dancer in the film had written the monologue which
was about the inner turmoil of the dancer’s current relationship. I thought it
was interesting to hear about complications with some of the shots, like how
the filmmaker was so close to the dancer during filming that at one point the
dancer accidently punched the camera breaking the lens! The movement was really
amplified by the camera work in this piece. I haven’t seen a lot of
experimental films, but I‘d like to learn more about them. I thought Caught was hilarious. I do think that
the story might be lost on other generations, but for anyone who was around the
age of the characters at the time Pokémon cards were popular, the film was
great. In the comments from the filmmakers, someone asked the makers of Boy
about complications making a period piece. I can think of so many things that
would be difficult about a period piece from set design, to costumes and
written dialogue, but what I wouldn’t have thought about was the issue the
filmmakers discussed with using the N word. It makes perfect sense that most
people would be uncomfortable using that word, creating a challenge for the
actors. The filmmaker explained how it took some time for the actors to
understand that they are speaking as their character in a certain time period
and situation when it makes sense for the characters to use that word.
I also
attended the second conference block at Visions. Students Conor Boyle, Tyler
Davis, Brandon Konecny, and Amanda Sonebarger all presented during this block.
Conor Boyle talked about the desensitizing and de-eroticizing sex scenes in the
film Irreversible. An interesting
point he made was about the way the film is told in reverse, and how that
creates an unbiased sympathy for the female rape victim of the film. Although I
haven’t seen this film, the idea makes a lot of sense to me. To tell the story in
reverse, you get to the tragic assault quickly, before you have a chance to
know the characters. If you tell it at the end, viewers will develop feelings
for all of the characters which could change their opinion of the event, where
showing it before these feelings develop would allow the viewer to only see the
scene as a violent crime. I haven’t seen this film, but kind of want to now. I’m
a bit intimidated by the graphic content of the film, but the plot structure
seems very unique to me, kind of in the way that Memento is told. Tyler Davis talked about Avant Guard cinema and as
a student, I was interested to learn more about what Avant Guard cinema
actually is, for example that it doesn’t follow a linear story or mainstream
narrative structure and that it attempts to draw attention to the media. He
talked about surrealism in the film In My
Skin, Sombre and Irreversible and how certain sex scenes
in the films only show certain body parts in an abstract way. Brandon Konecny
walked about the existentialist them in the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Again, another film I haven’t
seen based on a book I haven’t read. It was still interesting. As a writer, I
was particularly interested in what he had to say about the adaption of the
screenplay. The film was criticized for lacking the essayistic asides of the
narrator in the book. Someone asked him about the possibility the filmmaker
could have had to insert the narrator somehow, but Konecny wasn’t sure how it would
have affected the film. Amanda Stonebarger talked about two films, one of
which, Pan’s Labyrinth, I had
actually seen. Stonebarger made comparisons of the two films (also The Sweet Hereafter) and the use of
fairy tales and storybooks in the response to trauma. I like to write, and
because of this, I found her lecture of the narrative similarities between the
two stories interesting. She noted how in both films, the heroine switches
rolls between the story teller and the story subject. To me it seems that framing
certain fantasies in a story told by the character can help retain reliability
for the filmmaker and believability in the story. Because I have seen Pan’s
Labyrinth a few times, I could really take in a lot more of Stonebarger’s lecture
than I had with the other speakers. She discussed the conflict between the
female character and opposing male dominating figures. I also never noticed the
little details in the film linking the main character, Ofelia, to certain
fictional characters like Alice, Snow White and Dorothy through her clothing.
I truly enjoyed going to the film festival, particularly the opportunity to see some outstanding student films from UNCW and other universities. I really
wished I could have gone to more events, and next year intend to participate
even more in the Visions Film Festival. I thought it was a lot of fun. (Though
I did hear a rumor that it didn’t used to cost any money to attend, which as a
broke college student I need every dollar I can save. I just wanted to mention
this because last semester for my Creative Writing major I was required to
attend UNCW’s Writer’s Week, which had even more speakers and events taking
place throughout the entire week, also open to the public, but it was all free.
I just didn’t understand why this event had to cost money to attend.)
.jpg)
