Rising stars

Student filmmakers strike back at RISD's fest

by Peter Keough

THE RISD 1999 SENIOR FILM, ANIMATION, AND VIDEO FESTIVAL. At the RISD Auditorium through May 22.

The empire of George Lucas looks many galaxies away from the student shorts showcased at this year's Rhode Island School of Design Senior Film, Animation, and Video Festival, but the force of filmmaking is with them, maybe more so than with the creator of the critically beleaguered new Phantom Menacde. With modest means and no hype, they draw on the exuberance, ambition and magic that are the true origins of the movie experience, and so continue the struggle of individual vision versus mass conformity.

That takes a certain amount of ego, of course, and without big budgets, fancy sets and movie stars, the self is an obvious resource for the neophyte auteur. So it is in Cadence Thomases's "My Movie," which opens with a succession of photo ID cards of the filmmaker, followed by the emphatic statement that this is her movie. The seeming self-confident conceit, however, gives way soon to a vulnerable bravura, insight and irony. Thomases discloses through direct address to the camera and the occasional macabre artifact her turmoil at her father's death, a subject fraught with the dangers of sentimentality and self-indulgence. Thomases avoids these through a sometimes excruciating honesty and a wry reflexivity. "Where do I end and art begins?" she asks, answering her own question by dismissing the take and repeating it.

Equally personal but exquisitely detached is Adam Gault's "Restless," a formally austere black and white meditation on parenthood evocative of Maya Deren. A young mother and her son grapple with estrangement through a fluid montage of images of everyday terror. Addled by background sounds of storm and stress and subtle use of slow motion and stroboscopic lighting, such scenes as the setting of a table, a spilled glass of milk, the bare limbs of trees caught by headlights, and tire tracks in the snow unfold a fable of distance and possible reconciliation.

More whimsical is "Living by Numbers" by Nari Eunice Kim, a series of disparate numbered episodes involving a young woman troubled by a prophetic dream and the nature of true love, a Korean-American family discussing food preferences and standards of beauty at the dinner table, and videotaped memories, presumably the filmmaker's, of growing up in Korea. Unifying these fragments of desire, memory and social conformity, besides Kim's quirky tone, is the device of numerology, the desperate ploy of an individual seeking meaning and order in the chaos of experience.

Few people are more orderly than Martha Stewart, and few people make an easier target for the satirist. But Fedde shows a deft and subtle touch in her "The Icing On the Cake." The cake in this case is marriage, and the icing true love, and the film makes a tart, multilayered confection out of Stewart's advice on this institution with sly frosting by the filmmaker.

Such indirect assaults against the many forms of social oppression and tyranny recur throughout many of the films in this festival. Ann LaVigne's simple line-drawing animation "Where Monsters Lie" features a proper, Martha Stewartish heroine complaining about the saw-toothed furball "monsters" who are her neighbors; by the end it's clear who the real monster is. More subtle is Laura Nespola's "breathe," a black and white tour of derelict machinery in a limestone mine; backed by the sound of pounding engines, it humanizes its subject with grace notes of color tinting and an anthropomorphic pathos.

More to the point is Royce Wesley's "Untitled No. 16," a brief animation about a lone rebel against a monolithic, technological empire. The quiet lives are more desperate in two other animated shorts. In Jason Patterson's puppet animation "Linwood," a loner in a stifling apartment acts out tales of good and evil with a homemade knight, maiden and a Darth Vaderish bad guy. The struggle ends up on the floor. Not so with Eric Aguiar's "Upon a Crumble Throne," a Jan Svankmajer-like construction in which the smug, all-consuming despot ends up the one consumed.

The evil empire these days, though, controls the means -- films, television, the Internet -- through which any rebellion can be expressed. That seems part of the message in Jesse Wiens's digital video collage "Channel 2000 A/D," a wry reflection on the absurd superficiality of the media, the upcoming Y2K apocalypse and the merging of anno domini into "analog/digital." Maybe our best hope is with the anarchist hackers profiled in Josh Backer's puckish documentary "Disinformation," who have succeeded, among other things, in replacing a front page of the New York Times Website with pornography. "The reasonable man," says one, paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, "expects to conform to society. The unreasonable man expects society to conform to him. Therefore, the progress of society depends on unreasonable men." Here's to the unreasonable men and women of the class of '99.