When I watch a movie or play that is somehow less than I expected, it always takes me a while to sort out my reactions from my insecurities. Oh, man, this is kind of weird and lousy, I think, or is it just me? I’m always afraid of being that one person who couldn’t appreciate the piece, couldn’t get into it at all, couldn’t see the deeper underlying meaning and beauty of what only appears to be confused jumble. In my head I imagine walking out of the cinema, totally bemused, while everyone else around me is sobbing silently in wonder and ecstasy. “How incredible and visionary was that?” they’d whisper, as we ride down the escalator. “What genius. What a poet. So poignant. You know?” “Uh... no, I don’t know,” I’d admit quietly, and a hush would fall on the group. Everyone would eye me with surprise and pity at my intellectual limitations. They’d never see me in quite the same light.
I pondered all this during the short film screening we attended last night. Called ‘Experimental Shorts’, it was an hour-long collection of 5 films from Singapore, Thailand and Japan. None of us really had any idea what we were going to see, but I figured that short films were always a pretty safe option – if it sucks, you only have to endure it for ten minutes, fifteen tops. Plus I felt slightly encouraged by the title. Experimental. It suggested something exciting, something thought-provoking – perhaps a new take on the conventional narrative, a la Memento, or a creatively edited musical montage. Something we could discuss over drinks afterwards. “Did you feel that the choice to shoot John’s emotional climax from that angle, with such harsh lighting, was meant to grab the audience’s sympathies or play up the inherent grotesqueness of the subject matter?” Etc.
So there I was, eyes fixed intently on the screen, asking myself over and over: Is this as shit as it seems, or am I just a moron? I asked it through the first film, a chaotic mess of yellow and pink from Japan interposed with random English phrases that might or might not have been relevant (“Honeydew Melon?"). I asked it through the second film, which seemed like it had been shot with a handphone, over which a long and circular telephone conversation was played containing some friends’ opinions on love. By the middle of the third film, which consisted of clips of a swimming pool and a monotonous voice-over intoning a bizarre story in Thai, I had a pretty good idea of my answer, but it wasn’t until the fourth film that I really knew for sure, 100%, full marks, distinction.
This film depicted a boy and a girl, Asian, wandering around an unnamed European city. The boy held a video camera in his hand, and occasionally got on his knees to film his surroundings. We saw him do this over and over and over again. Sometimes they spoke, but I couldn’t make out anything they were saying, because the whole film appeared to be shot on a cheap digital camera by a person walking backwards with a mic attached to his shoes. Every so often, words would appear onscreen, and an emotionless voice read these out, in Singaporean. “He was blinded by the darkness like a plague, and got up to walk around what was once civilisation.” “He looked around at the city, which was now just ashes and ashes.” Real intense stuff, this was. At the end there was this still of a window, barely open, revealing a little sliver of horizon as the sun rose out of the night. Silence. And this shot remained on screen for about the amount of time it takes for a tree to grow. No shit.
I was so bored during this monumental, epic, never-ending monolith of a scene that I gave up trying to focus and just let my mind run riot. The director of this short was somewhere in the audience, apparently, and I derived a lot of joy thinking about how I’d march up to him afterwards, as suggested by the screening host, and deliver some passionate feedback. “Excuse me, sir? What the hell was that? Did you go to film school? Do you know what film is? Experimental Shorts, my ass – what was the experiment, how many people would pay 5 bucks to stare at a window for an hour? How much torture one man and a camera could inflict on a roomful of viewers? Why didn’t you just call it Pretentious Shorts and avoid misleading audiences? Or Shit. Shit Shorts. Nice ring to it.” None of the films were good, sure, but for some reason this particular guy was really making me mad. The others, at least, gave the impression of attempting to achieve some vision, tell some story. Their incompetence prevented this from being actualised, by at least they were trying. But this guy! He obviously didn’t care. He felt no obligation to the kind souls who had paid to see his work. You almost had to give it to him.
It drove me nuts thinking about this. As the sky on screen turned infinitesimally lighter, my palms turned redder and redder from the clenching of my fist. I finished my mental rant and, distressed and crazed by the deafening silence, was reduced to visualising big, flaming vulgarities raining in through the window into the hut, burning everyone inside into ashes and ashes. The ashes of civilisation.
4 years later, the scene ended. Shaken by the experience, I didn’t even really watch the last short, and was overjoyed when the lights finally came on. “Quick, I want to get out,” I said as soon as the host told us we were free to go. We dashed out of the building like rats off a sinking ship. I couldn’t wait to get out of the room, out of the filmmakers’ earshot, into the street where we could badmouth them without guilt, which we proceeded to do for the next twenty minutes. Des, Shiang Nee and I were scarred, but the effect of the ordeal was most pronounced on Rachel, who was quite delirious. Her voice had gone up a few octaves, and she giggled hysterically every few derisive words, eyes glittering strangely.
It’s always the worst shows that provide the most fun, right? There's only so many ways of saying something was good, but a person could talk forever about something that was bad. Saying mean things about people I know makes me feel awful, but saying mean things about strangers is one of the real joys in life, no matter if they’re ten metres away, or sat behind you in a dark room for an hour.
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