The Three Obstructions
Restrictive rules of the 48 Hour Film Project challenge local filmmakers to rely on their ingenuity
by Jim Ridley
For the people who participated in last week's 48 Hour Film Project, I have nothing but sympathy. Two years ago, as a birthday present, my brother dragooned me into joining one of 24 teams competing to write, shoot, cut and deliver a finished short film—and tougher still, a watchable short film—in exactly 48 hours. It was the contest's first year in Nashville: that's all I'll say in my defense. It was fun as long as I stood back and watched people who knew what they were doing (which I did for roughly 47 hours and 57 minutes). But helping to write a movie, faced with an unforgiving blank page and all the choices in the world, is living hell.
And yet 30 teams of local filmmakers submitted shorts for this year's 48 Hour project, which will screen for a week at the Belcourt in three hour-long blocks starting Friday. The stakes aren't high. The overall winner gets a meeting with Curb Entertainment, a screening at the Frist Center and...er, a refund of the submission fee, before going on to compete against entries from 31 other cities (including Paris and New York). The hours are grueling. Dangers are plentiful, from wasp-infested locations to the inevitable 11th-hour dash to delivery. And as one team learned last year, camera crew or no camera crew, don't let the cops see you running down a city street waving a gun.
So why does anyone do it? For one thing, it's a challenge—a homegrown bite-size variation on Dogme 95. Every team draws a different genre: horror, film noir, musical, mockumentary. Then they're given common elements that have to be incorporated—a character, a prop and a line of dialogue—and a deadline of 48 hours. For another thing, it has become a friendly rivalry among Nashville's many independent filmmakers, as well as a place for everyone to see each other's work. This year's event corralled more than 300 participants, some professional filmmakers, some novices with a spirit of adventure.
Fine—but why should anybody see it? Admittedly, the 48 Hour films are a mixed bag. While this year's are slicker and more technically proficient than before, they also suffer as a whole from a blandness that creeps into local filmmaking. It's a bad sign when group after group resorts to a "How I Made My 48 Hour Film" premise—the equivalent of a kid starting an essay with, "Webster's defines (blank) as...." (Although it's a hoot when a guy in a fright wig and goatee turns up playing event coordinator Andy van Roon in Pajama Pictures' "Wild Card.") Plus the filmmaking conditions are more of an obstacle course than creative inducement. Reviewing these is a tad unfair, like judging a gallery show of Pictionary sketches.
It's fun, though, to watch the filmmakers struggle with the contest's rules and genre conventions, and to see how they affect the work. How do you create a superhero movie (Demetria Kalodimos' "Van Gone"), a gangster thriller (Hal Sandifer's "The Disciple"), a samurai Western (Moosepack's "Fraus Fraudis Cerebrum") and a musical (Brent Walters' "Games People Play") featuring the same bunch of bananas and "B. Spicer, addiction counselor"? The bananas become almost surreal as they reappear in the backdrop of every plot; the Spicer character turns addiction into the subtext (or the subject) of every film, whether it's comedy or drama.
The result is like a film festival organized around the most tangential of unifying elements, such as smoking or guys named Pete: watching the shorts together reminds you of all the hidden threads that connect and recombine seemingly unrelatable movies. My favorites tended to be the ones with the most exteriors and location shooting—such as Michael Carter's hilarious "Balls Deep," an action-adventure that chases courier Chris Crofton and, yes, his 48 Hour tape through downtown streetscapes that'll be an archivist's treasure 20 years from now.
Formal repetition worked well too: in Extreme Measures' sci-fi yarn "Unfortunate Me," which relies on black-and-white freeze frames that literally stop time; in the coming-of-age whatsit "Andy," where the one joke of a skinny girl repeatedly ass-whupping huge Napoleon Bissaillon somehow never gets old; and in Cat Fight's lunatic "The Country Fog," which gets a belly laugh every time its mush-mouthed Boomhauer-like superhero arrives in a whoosh of smoke. But if there's any consistent improvement this year, it's the acting. I'd seen Kai Porter in some short films at a Watkins student show and made note of her name: she's a real find as a hell-bent addict in Trey Mitchell and Greg Hallmark's "Pieces." Though not entirely successful, it's one of the few films in competition with the guts to play it straight. She's got an instant portfolio piece.
The films are being shown in three groups; if you can see only one, I'd pick Group C. It has the two slickest shorts in competition, both by previous winners: Lil Dragon's witty infomercial romance "Integral" and People's Power's flashback-driven hit man comedy "The Way It Happened" (the latter sharply edited by John Eikamp). Better still, it has what may be the single most striking film in competition, Geoffrey Sexton's "9-18-98." A throbbing black-and-white industrial mood piece with a great setting (a pizza-box storage room) and a Lynch-like soundtrack of buzzing ambient noise, it's the one that seems most independent of its origins as a 48 Hour Film—and most guaranteed a life on the festival circuit. I'd like to see more from Sexton, and I'd love for other Nashville filmmakers to take note.
The lesson of the 48 Hour Film Project is that choice can be a filmmaker's crippling enemy, while restrictions are often a shot of creative adrenaline. It's a bit like the old studio system. Conventional wisdom always says that studio interference and penny-pinching ruin movies, and plenty of examples bear it out. But constraints of time, content and money also tested filmmakers' ingenuity and focused their energies. I kept thinking of the recent documentary The Five Obstructions, where Lars von Trier challenged filmmaker Jorgen Leth to remake the same short five times using a different set of arbitrary restrictions. (Only one flubbed up the unflappable Leth: absolute freedom.) For the brave souls who enter the 48 Hour Film Project, three obstructions are plenty.
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