The first public screening of VCUarts cinema student films premiered to a full house last Tuesday and I have only one criticism:
The problem is that the films were, collectively, really too artsy. And this is coming from a kid who worships Luis Buñuel. I consider myself pretty good at analyzing films and for most of Tuesday night I was baffled. The films were interesting (“Steam Heat”), pretty and poetic (“Jackson and Joseph”), and well made (“The Persistence of Everything”) but if you put a gun to my head and told me, “Decipher the meaning of this or I’ll kill you,” I’d be a dead man.
That being said, I was also impressed. I’ve sat through some horrendous student-made short films, but none of them were shown on Tuesday. The screening opened with “The Persistence of Everything,” set during the Bosnian conflict followed by “Molly,” described as an “attempt to create a visceral reaction in the audience by director Steven Vagias.” The film succeeds in the task, with help from rapid cuts to a bloody crucified Jesus and the performance of Mark Joy, who plays moral conflict very well.
“Flicker” was a film that depicted two profoundly lonely people, one a caregiver and the other an elderly man rapidly approaching senility. At this point I had to leave because I creeped out the girl in front of me by writing a limerick about her back and giving it to her, so I missed the freshman-made short, which is in fact part of a feature film. I did make it back (to a new seat) for “Jackson and Jacob.” Easily the most artsy of the films shown, “Jackson and Jacob” was also one of the most engaging. It followed Jackson as he traveled between centuries, taking pictures and delivering cool poems over montages of black and white photos.
The last three films were my favorite. The first was “Hair Grows in Funny Places,” a love story about two maladjusted people, one a dominatrix and the other a werewolf. If you can get past the bloody kid in the wheat field at the beginning, “Hair Grows” is actually really funny and endearing.
Next was “Steam Heat,” which focused on a dystopian future where all the mail has anthrax in it. The conflict in the film came from the family dynamic of the man who is charged with removing the anthrax. It was a pretty interesting subject.
The final film of the night was “Laboring Lament,” which dealt with a subject I am intimately acquainted with: crappy jobs. “Laboring Lament” was the only straight comedy and thus, appropriately, was the funniest of the films.
In the Sept. 10 edition of The Commonwealth Times, Rob Tregenza, head of the cinema department said this was the birth of one of the best film schools on the East Coast. If the films I saw on Tuesday are any indication of what’s to come, Tregenza’s prediction might actually come true.