Brevity was not just the soul of wit but also its blood and sinew at the Opening Night program Thursday at MICA's Brown Center. A brisk, well-balanced slate of films (four under 10 minutes, none longer than 15) swept the audience from Howard County to Nigeria, Japan and the Twilight Zone. In "Bikini Lighters," by Maryland filmmakers Andrew Blackwell and Andrew Goldman, three young lads shoplift the title cigarette lighters near the start of a seriocomic display of antisocial mischief, sexual curiosity, and resilience; the mini-epiphanies go off pop, pop, pop, like the bag-bomb they create with those lighters. Patrick Bergeron turns "LoopLoop," his deconstruction of images caught on a train to Hanoi, into a visual roller-coaster that, improbably, moves on stacked horizontal lines. It's both a sleek, surprisingly visceral art piece and a spot-the-details-in-a-photo game. Kenneth Price's "The Late Mr. Mokun Williams" offers a perfect counterpoint of one-joke farce and one-note tragedy, pivoting on the unexpected communication between an African schoolgirl and an American farmer. Durier Ryan's "Monroe St.," about a Bed-Stuy teen opening up to life as well as art via a video camera, overflows with sensitive observations. Mark Cummins' "Slow Pitch in Relief," a domestic romance featuring a single mom and her son, and a salesman and his tall tales about baseball, displays remarkable craft in its evocation of 1957 Los Angeles and 1950s soap opera.
But to me there were two standouts. In "Junko's Shamisen," Sol Friedman conjures a medieval Japanese revenge tale with a slashing combination of stage performance, cartooning, and several types of animation. He brews an atmosphere more cutting and ironic than any one melodramatic act.
Best of all, Kelly Sears' sly, sexy "Voice on the Line" is a burst of inspiration. Sears' collage animation draws on 1950s archival footage celebrating technology in general and phone companies in particular. She uses these images to toy with the feelings of hope they once aroused -- the audience experiences "the shock of the new" via "the shock of the old." She also creates a coiling tale of a government conspiracy to exploit communications between exchange operators and their customers. T.S. Eliot promised to show us "fear in a handful of dust"; Sears shows us fear, and a lot of entertaining kinkiness, too, in a tangle of telephone connections.
Sun photo by Chris Kaltenbach: Left to right: Andrew Blackwell ("Bikini Lighters"), Mark Cummins ("Slow Pitch in Relief"), Durier Ryan ("Monroe St."), Kenneth Price ("The Late Mr. Mokun Williams"), Festival director Jed Dietz, Patrick Bergeron ("Loop Loop)", Sol Friedman ("Junko's Shamisen"), Kelly Sears ("Voice On the Line")