I recently directed a short for the 48 Hour Film Project. This is my second time doing a festival like this. I'm not sure where this fits into my artistic sensibilities. It is certainly more about the incredible process of getting a group of people together, some of whom don't know each other, and producing something in such a compressed amount of time. It's also a way for me to get my hands on some fun equipment and some footage for editing. I enjoy the process of film-making, and in this case, almost more than the product.
It certainly makes me think about experimental films like those of Stan Brakhage, who glued moth wings to the celluloid and then projected it. Such a notion seems to be way more about how it's put together than how it actually looks on screen.
While I'll admit I enjoy the films we made, they hardly challenge or bring anything interesting into the film community in my opinion. They're fun stories, and the rules of the festival follow Hollywood formulas of genres and characters, which we attempt to subvert but still make narrative.
Last night the project I did last year for the 24-Hour Film Extravaganza and the project I did this year for the 48-Hour Film Project screened at North Country Co-op's 35th Anniversary Film Night. This was a curated film showing that had our films tacked on at the end. The night, I must say, was pretty dry. Aside from the documentary about the Minneapolis Beer Revolution called Brewing Democracy which was fun because I knew so many people in it and it was well made, and Daniel Palahniuk's Nosefight, which was beautiful, the rest of the evening was very heavy-handed, and I felt like the films I had worked on were out of placed and probably received as a bunch of college students goofing around amongst a bunch of serious (but not so great) documentaries. It made me wonder about where in any artistic medium is the line between entertainment value and purpose? Can you have both? Does a serious subject always need to have a serious, melodramatic execution? I certainly don't think so, but the audience at the film showing suggested otherwise.
I would like to bring up a specific project from Learning to Love You More where the participants were asked to draw and document a scene from a film that made them cry. This is interesting, because it all at once asks questions about emotion in art, its impact, entertainment value, and whether something comical can be taken seriously. This project has a very serious set of questions it is asking within a comical and entertaining framework.
So where does the 48 Hour Film Project, or something similar, fit in to a more purposeful idea of art? Is it a Harrell Fletcher style project about working with others, or is there potential for the films that come out of it be considered something a little beyond that?
