Review of the Resfest Short Film Festival, Nov 17-22 2005, ACMI Melbourne.( Printed in Real-Time magazine ).
( Update: added some pix and links to watch movies mentioned. )
For better or worse, Resfest comes through town like the dinosaur chase scene in King Kong, and we stumble out at the end of it – exhilarated, overwhelmed by the feast of technical delight, and yet somehow wondering why we are covered in cheese. That said, the Resfest condensed program of ‘short films, music videos, features, motion design, live music and speakers’ inevitably contains breathtaking moments – where the obsessive pursuit of novelty actually leads somewhere, where the technical wizardry transcends the sum of it’s intricate parts, where bedroom creatives kept chipping away on a piece that no-one could ever elevator pitch, where brats with a handicam nailed the perfect moment, or simply while holding your hand, where the film-maker-animator-designer gradually takes you outside of yourself, and what you thought possible.
‘Tis a given that Resfest’ll unearth a few sparklers, and definitely true again in 2005. Resfest’s reputation however, in an increasingly crowded market of international media festivals, also rides on the quality and style of it’s overall curation and ability to deliver material that actually lives up to it’s new mantra of ‘innovative’, ‘out of the ordinary’ and ‘inventive’ (replacing their ‘digital film festival’ tagline), without ending up some sort of Resfest Kong in a gelled faux-hawk, walking around in the world’s largest sneaker advertisements.
Australiana
Travelling to over 30 cities worldwide, the sheer reach and global flavour of Resfest provides an illuminating context for the compilation screening of Australian short films, ‘Digital Projections’. Shove the spotlight on our own backyard ( thanks to ACMI curators Clare Stewart & Kristy Matheson ), and it mostly serves to show how soaked in global pop culture we are. Epitome of that’d be the excellent pixel art animation by Paul Robertson, ‘The Magic Touch‘, which splices retro game aesthetics, rollerskating turntablists, manga scientists, oversized ghetto blasters and hip hop sea monsters into a short but satisfying whole. Also managing cute pop-cultural points is Nicholas Randall’s ‘All He Needs’, a gay rollerblader love story set to the title track by French synth popsters Air, whilst parodying the work of Mike Mills. Music video ‘Heaps Good’ finds Aussie hip hop in fine form (Muph & Platonic), and well represented by Anto Skeene’s stylishly effective post-it note flip-book animations ( a technique mirrored in another session by Michel Gondry’s brother, Olivier). A few too many saccharine coated technically clever clips cluttered the rest of the line-up, but Vincent Taylor’s ‘The Cypriot’ & Van Sowerine‘s eerily enchanting ‘Clara‘ transcended those, offering layered, compelling viewing with the respective help of radically transformational make-up & exceptional stop-motion animation in a doll-house.
Surface Layers
Resfest at best pioneers thrilling new aesthetics, at worst propositions clever gimmickry looking for it’s own tail as ‘innovative’. Case in point – Francis Vogel – where was your editor or art director to restrain your considerable technical achievements from becoming so torturously, mind-numbingly self-defeating? True, some amazing visual manipulation on exhibit, but what is innovative about implying narrative and not knowing what to do with it, then repeating your already revealed visual punchlines ad nauseam? Nowadays, there are shopping malls of available techniques unfolding in all directions, aisles filled with artists drifting by with trolleys. But what to do with them? Edouard Salier was a stand-out of the many visually gifted directors at least trying to harness visual ideas for the service of greater provocation. With ‘Flesh’ Salier gave us a breathtaking NY skyline rendered in 3D, each and every building ( including the two towers ) textured using animated and vectorised porn models. The inevitable was rendered as giant blood red shards spiking out of the two towers, and followed by more planes crashing into the seductively coated buildings all over the city. Salier’s ‘Empire’ clip resonated deeper though, subtly morphing American Dream scenarios by allowing 3D military shapes to shift the contours of the screen from behind, haunting the on-screen pleasantries with the lurking machines underneath.
Juke Boxing
Despite all the best music videos of Resfest having already been seen long before, and a growing army of music video blogs making genuine ‘premieres’ harder each year, audiences still seem to lap them up on the big screen – which in part reminds that there’s an opportunity for Resfest to extend and explore beyond their choice of films, to represent changing audiovisual forms in ways artists are reshaping – with DVD mixers, with laptops, with installations, computer games, live video and theatre. There’s a growing list of media festivals worldwide who not only screen short films, but seek to exhibit and provoke with new forms. And there’s an even longer list of online ‘curators’ who already provide a much wider range of music video clips, every day. At Resfest, my favourite music video was a repeat – by Johnnie Ross, for his ‘Blood of Abraham – dangerous diseases’ – a fantastic video, humourously urbanizing and updating Zbig Rybczynski’s famous “Fourth Dimension” people-twisting clip.
Pixel Juicy
Imagination, narration and black and white photographs ( ala Chris Marker’s La Jetee ) were all that was needed to kept a theatre a cackle during Le Grand Sommeil ( The Big Sleep )by John Harden, the story of a scientist who formulates a serum that transforms him into a dog. Also more than a bit funny – Nagi Noda‘s Poodle fitness video. Miranda July won affection with her unlikely survey offered to passersby : ‘Are You The Favourite Person of Anybody?’. The Southern Ladies Animation Group‘s animated documentary ‘It’s Like That’, beautifully utilised animation techniques that accentuated rather than dominated the story of asylum seeking children detained in an Australia detention centre. 
And favourite techniques employed to achieve artfulness beyond efficiency? Software, hardware and imagination danced nowhere better at Resfest 2005, than with ‘City Paradise’ by Gaelle Denis, an utterly enchanting exploration of a secret underground city, filled with the lateral nimbleness animated compositing can bring, a luscious tale of pixels offset with Joanna Newsom soundtrack.
Jean Poole, Jan 2006.
See Also:
http://www.resfest.com
Online ‘Video Curators’:
https://www.skynoise.net/2006/01/11/viral-video-blogs/
A big list of other ‘innovative’ video festivals:
https://www.skynoise.net/2006/01/17/video-media-festivals/
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