Critiques of the Short Film Festival of Drama 2009

Critiques of the Short Film Festival of Drama 2009

At the request of the film-makers themselves, I will be posting my personal reviews, critique, polemics, etc. etc. of short movies shown at the 2009 edition of the Short Film Festival of Drama (SFFD).

First, a little background information on myself and my interactions with short films. Other than the experimental films shown on the Amsterdam local TV station Kunst Kanaal, the majority of which were by pampered middle-class Gerrit Rietfeld Art Academy students and thus self-indulgent and unwatchable, I first attended a short film festival back in 2004 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The theme of that year was double (or even triple) simultaneous projections, some with the breaking-point right in the middle of the screen. It was so intriguing that I hung around until closing-time. My first edition of the Amsterdam Short Film Festival was unfortunately also my last, for the Christian Conservative government decided to discontinue funding the festival arguing that it was superfluous in the context of all the other Dutch film festivals. The larger, established and better-funded International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) stepped in to fill the void created by the disappearance of the short film festival by offering to screen artistic or experimental documentaries as part of the IDFA's "Paradox" program, still the most interesting program on the whole festival. I volunteered at the IDFA for over half a decade, so my experience with viewing short films was mostly short documentaries, conventional or artistic.

My texts on culture (which I have been writing since the age of 12, when I first published my first ever fanzine) are a labour of love and hate. I have no official affiliations, no government subsidies, no commercial sponsors, and no institutional associations. Everything and anything you read from my hand is illegitimate, DIY, no-profit, no-bullshit hardcore criticism. Therefore, everything I write, unlike everything written by official legitimate for-profit critics, is honest and true. I am not promoting anyone just for the sake of receiving favours from them. I am certainly no sycophant of any artist, festival, institution. I am against free tickets for critics, VIP lists, special insider-only screenings, registration-only events, invitation-only events, anything that separates critics from the general audience and puts them on an undeserved pedestal. I have witnessed time and again the sheer inability and unwillingness of official artists and legitimate institutions to deal with an free independent citizen reporting on the internet. As bloggers, as online authors, we are considered to be the untouchables of the caste system of writers and authors. Last year I attended an event where a theatre director literally demanded that online critics be censored; this man believed that a single negative blog review had the power to destroy the buzz around a performance. He never once considered holding artists themselves responsible for producing something worthwhile. He never once considered the right of audience members, as consumers of a product they paid for out of their own pockets, to warn other consumers against wasting their time and money. Since there is so little respect of blog criticism amongst legitimate institutions and artists, why should blog critics respect those who don't respect us? And let's not forget all the bloggers and online authors who had their work stolen, plagiarized. There seems to be an army of wannabe academics, PhD candidates with no ideas or mental life of their own, who do nothing but search the web for blogs they can plagiarize. As much as I worry that once again plagiarism will be the fate my critiques on this blog - as has been the fate with everything I have written anywhere else on the internet - being plagiarized and having to suffer to humiliation and disrespect of watching someone use your ideas and thoughts without crediting you, well, this will certainly not silence me. If anything, it will make my texts more hardcore, uncompromising and honest. Being responable and fair to artists has certainly never earned me respect or recognition. All it earned me was the humiliation of plagiarism. So I quit trying to write serious reviews, and set myself free. As paradoxical as this may sound, telling the truth opened my eyes (even more than before).

As you can tell from reading a random text by my hand, I do not particularly care for artists or art. I have very little respect for conventional or official criticism, which generally does not involve much critique. I am too old to glorify artists the way I did as a teenager (some critics never grow out of that state, in fact, critics become critics as an excuse not to), and I am too intelligent to dumb it down just because an artist showing me his art expects to be catering to an audience dumber than himself. I might praise and condemn an artist all in the same breath - I have never come across a film I liked entirely, a record I could listen to from beginning to end, a book that did not bore at one point or another. It is thanks to my total independence as an author that I can do this, write honest and true reviews. I do not suffer fools gladly, especially if they are professional fools, aka artists. This is what you can expect to read on this blog as I discuss the 2009 edition of the Short Film Festival of Drama. Got a problem with something I say? Want to correct something? Use the reply-function.

Maria Technosux
anti-fascist blogger
http://maria_technosux.livejournal.com