The
term ‘short film’ was coined in North
America in the 1910s when most feature films had
a long running time. Proponents of short films
offering brief stories centred on live action,
in the form of animated cartoons such as Walt
Disney shorts made for children, and comic episodes
popularized by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton
and Laurel and Hardy. The regular feature film
continues to unspool its story over a running
time of one to three or four hours. But the definition
of the short film has evolved dynamically over
time. The Capalbio Film Festival in Italy is known
for having given a celebratory platform to short
films that run anywhere between one and twenty
minutes. Filmmaker Goutam Ghose, jury member at
Capalbio some years ago, came back to plant the
seed for the Kalpanirjar International Short Film
Festival five years ago. Organized jointly by
the Kalpanirjhar Foundation and the Goethe-Institute,
Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata in association with
Alliance Francaise du Bengale, the festival is
sponsored by Patton. This year, the Foundation
introduced its first ever prize, sponsored by
Patton, for the best entry in the India Selections.
The festival that runs for five days at a stretch,
draws a packed audience in the rather small but
well-equipped theatre of the Max Mueller Bhavan.
Like other years, this year too, the festival
held from December 7 to 11, 2007, offered an interesting
mix of films from across the world. The International
Selection, curated exclusively for this festival
by Robin Mallick, Director, Dresden Film Festival
was screened in four parts with films ranging
between two minutes to 26 minutes drawn from Germany,
UK, Spain, Canada, The Netherlands, Czech Republic,
Italy, China, Poland, Belgium, Norway, Austria
and France. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic
of France, brought together a package of 10 short
films from different countries. 14 films in animation
and real mode came from Capalbio, Italy. Two films
schools in Germany also found representation at
this festival. One of them is the School of Higher
Education Specialized in Computer Graphics at
Arles and Valenciennes (SuperInfoCom Selection)
and the other is was the Hamburg Media School.
This year, one could get to watch six short films
from the Ministry of Culture of the Basque Government
and one of the most brilliant representation in
short fiction ever through a retrospective of
films made by Veit Helmer under the title Surprise!
drawn from one of the films in the package. The
39-year-old Veit Helmer has been making short
films since 1989, employing the gestures, dramatic
storylines and comic exaggeration typical of silent
cinema, constantly playing around with surprise
and chance.
 Lukar
Mico’s The Frozen Sea, a Germany-Austria
co-production was the inaugural film. Narrated
from the point of view of eight-year-old Marco,
the film examines how the absence of a father
the child ascribes to the constant squabbles between
his parents, can force him to seek an escape route.
In the international selection, one of the best
films was an animation version of Conan Doyle’s
The Tell-Tale Heart narrated in eight
minutes flat, departing in its narration from
the original horror genre to punch it with a light
touch. Love Thunderbolt from France
weaves magic in a happy tale of two friends and
a young girl in five short minutes. Diary
of a Perfect Love, combined the genres of
science fiction and romance through paper cut-out
animation, not seen in this country before, to
make a subtle but strong statement on choices
a man must make when he falls in love. Ray of
Hope is an eight-minute film of heightened, nail-biting
suspense with an open end. Maquina from
Spain, journeying with a young girl through her
continued angst made little sense. Fair Trade
used Black-and-White and colour to explore
the dangerous area of trading in babies along
the straits of Gibraltar ending in a strikingly
unusual climax that reveals the extreme polarities
of good and bad human beings are capable of.
The French Republic’s contribution ‘A
Journey into Short Films’ offered a mixed
fare of which, Penspusher from France
and Pillow Talk from Thailand were the
highlights. The former is a brief encounter between
a young man and a young girl inside a Parisian
metro which leads to a moving relationship only
till the journey ends. Pillow Talk deals
with the theme of adultery and sexual incompatibility
within marriage in a hilarious way. Films from
the two film schools could offer a model lesson
on what film-making, short or long, is all about
to the students and fresh graduates from film
schools in our own country. The SuperInfoCom selection
showcased animation films with wonderful subjects
such as Fast Cars where two rest-home
lodgers challenge each other in a wheel-chair
race, or, Camera Obscura, where the director
chooses to enter the head of a blind man to find
out what he can see within his world of darkness.
In the Basque Focus, one must mention the five-minute
film Taxi, shot in Black-and-White where it is
the cabbie and not his customer who calls the
shots and if the customer is not listening, he
is dropped anywhere.
The batch of films from the Hamburg Media School
was beautiful to say the least. Farewell Song,
a Black-and-White film without dialogue, gets
into the mind of a comatose mother whose grown
daughter sits beside her, waiting to release her
from this death-like life. Memory Effect uses
anti-narrative structure to relate a narrative
tale that deals with the confusions of a woman
who has undergone a heart transplant, her feeling
of being pulled to the husband and son of the
dead woman whose heart she now has. Childhood
Scars is the journey of a young girl in search
of her mother to ask her just one question –
why did you leave me in an institution? Invitation
is another Black-and-White film about a lonely
old man who finds happiness when his home is suddenly
filled with guests who come to party. Have they
really come in to party? Or is his world now filled
with people who have gone yonder and he is now
one of them? The incessant ringing of the doorbell
is a brilliant metaphor on life and death.
Veit Helmer’s films are unforgettable and
timeless as they cross all barriers of history,
geography, language, genre, style and culture.
Dog’s Life is about a little boy
who designs a candlelight dinner for himself and
his dog on the streets after he cleverly purloins
two plates, a candle and a few sausages from the
local market. As they two dine on the wayside,
the boy laughs away watching a programme on television
through an open window. He hardly uses dialogue
in his films and makes ample use of Black-and-White.
Within Grasp is another silent story
of a window-cleaner who falls in love with a pretty
lady he sees from his scaffolding and expresses
his love in the only way he can. A building filled
with single old women suddenly turns alive when
a young man comes to deliver food to the inmates
in House of Joy. They ogle at him frankly
and bid him goodbye when he leaves.
 The
biggest and most pleasant surprise of the festival
was the only film playwright Samuel Becket
ever wrote and scripted which took him on his
only trip to the USA. The film, simply called
Film, was restored in the mid-1960s and one got
to see this restored piece. Directed by Alan Schneider
and produced by Bani Rossett, it stars Buster
Keaton in the main role. Shot in granular Black-and-White
against a completely silent soundtrack, Film explores,
through a single character, the insecurities,
the sense of alienation and isolation that plague
the psyche of a criminal.
The dark spot of the entire festival, sadly,
was the India Selection. From 33 entries, the
selectors short-listed only six of which just
one could pass muster and won the Best Film Award.
Biswas Nao Korte Paren (You may not believe…)
directed by Pradipta Bhattacharya touches issues
of identity in a society that has become extremely
sensitive to a person’s communal identity.
One fine morning, a young man called Shyamal suddenly
finds a new name thrust on him – Salim.
His small world collapses around him. He is about
to lose his job, his fiancée calls the
marriage off and his landlord asks him to vacate
the room he rents. Bhattacharya uses feather-light
touches of humour to enliven and otherwise serious
subject aided by the excellent acting of Ritwik
Chakraborty.
With the entry of digital technology combined
with the astronomical logistics and money involved
in making a full-length feature film, the short
film can be a boon for talented young filmmakers
in the country who keep running from pillar to
post in search of funds to make a film, an exhibitor
to screen it and a distributor to market it widely.
Perhaps this festival marks a beginning towards
popularizing the short fiction film in India.
Shoma A Chatterji is a freelance journalist
who specialises in cinema and gender. She has
won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema
twice.
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