I saw the opening screening of the Ann Arbor Film Festival this Tuesday. Ranging from 1-27 minutes in length, every single film presented was a unique experience unlike anything the standard moviegoing experience offers. I highly encourage my fellow student body and Ann Arbor residents to participate in this film festival in future years. Ranging from narrative to experimental, the opening screening was an excellent primer on the unique film culture the festival offers.
One of the most visceral and difficult pieces presented was Cut, a 13-minute collaboration between two German filmmakers. Cut is an experimental narrative which contains frequent visual motifs of red and white across a disparate group of images–some traditionally beautiful, such as a woman adorning herself with lipstick, while other shots were disturbing–shots of people recovering from surgery, bug bites, and other graphic imagery. Cut made me cringe from start to finish, even for shots that I would normally consider aesthetically pleasing. This is not a filmic experience I would voluntarily engage with in my leisure time. Cut was thrust upon me by the festival amongst a bundle of other films. Nevertheless, the harrowing experience was highly rewarding, forcing me to reconsider not only the mechanics of visual storytelling, but also to question what I consider to be beautiful. The juxtaposition of graphic, disturbing imagery sharing similar color tones to traditionally beautiful photography demonstrated how arbitrary and contrived cultural beauty imperatives are.
Another picture which caught my attention was the Division, barely a minute long and the shortest piece amongst the anthology. This stop-motion piece shows the filmmaker tearing a single piece of paper into increasingly smaller divisions. What begins as a mundane action turns into a compelling thought experiment: how small must a physical object become before it loses its “thingness”? Division is both visually stimulating and intellectually provocative, engaging the audience with intriguing visuals, bombarding them with a sequence of complicated imagery.
Based on audience reaction, the most popular piece in the opening screening may have been A Million Miles Away, an experimental take on a traditional story. A Million Miles Away is a journey into the emotional minefield that is the high school experience. Told through the perspectives of high school students of disparate social standing and a strange substitute teacher, this entirely female ensemble performance renders the psychological territory of the high school world in a way that I have not seen any mainstream high school movie do. A Million Miles Away publishes several characters’ text messages on-screen, simultaneously satirizing the low-attention-span nature of communication and glorifying the unifying capabilities of mnemonic communication shorthand. The emotional resonance of the film lies in its fearless intent to capture a more personal inquiry into the psychological reality of the high school experience, not only from the perspective of various students, but also from the perspective of the substitute teacher–the furthest outside the high school.
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is a highly non-traditional film-going experience. I would be the first person to admit this isn’t the place I’d go to for decompression, designate as a hangout for my friends after a day of work, or bring a first date to. This is an experience which challenges what the traditional moviegoing experience should be.
