The Aesthetica Short Film Festival: Inside Out, Outside in

This past weekend, a buzz of film fans in yellow badges dashed from place to place around York for the Aesthica Short Film Festival. As a nineteenth century art historian, I have only really examined film and its art in a brief undergraduate course, but as simply a lover of art, I was eager to be visually stimulated and challenged with the some of the 400 short films over the course of four days.  From 'experimental' to 'drama' to 'documentary' and 'family friendly,' there was literally a category for anyone of any age and any interest.  I was not to be disappointed.

Screening at the National Centre for Early Music - right around the corner from me! Never would have known...

In a range of beautiful venues across York - many of which I had yet even to know existed! - back-to-back sessions were screened from morn onto late into the night.  In the flurry of options, I chose sessions largely entitled 'Experimental' and 'Artist's film' or 'Dance,' 'Music,' and 'Fashion.'  These categorisations seemed by no means ultra-restrictive, as I myself questioned what explicitly determined 'Experimental' from 'Artist's film' and saw the heavy reliance of dance upon music and fashion and vice versa.  Their interrelationships, especially in a direct comparison between sessions like this, usefully illuminated for me one of the wonders of films: its extraordinary flexibility that, at times, challenges, subverts and therefore underlines our habitual attempts to structure, organise and (oftentimes) fully understand art itself.

It was this understanding of 'understanding' itself that was repeatedly impressed upon me as viewer. These issues converged in a variety of ways in an amazing set of Artists's Films, that as a collective, stand out in my memory.  On the one hand, many of the videos could prompt the viewer to think about our existence within a multitude, presenting us with the temporality and smallness of our existence within the collective architectures of our society.  In films like Theo Tagholm's Simulacra, the buildings and structures of our very lives were blown-up, fragmented, and examined, picked through what, in some cases, ended up looking like the great rubbish heap of humanity. This feeling was explored in a different was by other films, which explored our subjective interior loneliness, digging sometimes quite literally beneath our relationships, our clothes and skin.  Notions of beauty, gender, and reality itself were slowly, and many times, uncomfortably stripped away to lay bare deep emotional and physical fears.  Text on the screen, the spoken word, and music often underlined visuals that equated eerily open landscapes or unidentified fleshy surfaces with our bodies.  The Toby Tatum Guide to Grottoes and Groves was no traditional 'guide' in the sense of documentation or education; rather, I felt myself asking, what are we learning about ourselves? The music, the angles, the lighting, could all make nature feel both more and less alien to us.  The strings, playing against the gurgling murmur of the waterbed, sometimes gave me a sense of peace, but at other times made me incredibly uneasy.  Do we therefore become anxious outsiders, glimpsing and probing into secret grottoes' shadows, and aware of own 'looking' as potentially sinister and forbidden?  In Aya Ben Ron's short entitled No Body, a deep resonant voice made the viewer feel the fear of loss of your own body -  words like 'itch,' repeated and associated with the 'ants' that were crawling on and inside your skin, your 'stomach', made me squirm in my chair.  Furthermore, by converging reality and fantasy with the opening lines 'based on a true story and a fairy tale,' I altogether began to wonder, are we on the inside or on the outside of the story, the characters, the film, and our very selves?  In these and other instances, I felt that the insides were pushed out, and outsides were pulled in, fluidly breaking boundaries in beautiful and ugly, serene and uncomfortable ways.

My favourite film, if I were to select one, was Maryam Tagakory's Poem and Stone, where 'residual soil and stains aren't mere reconstructions of the past, but an attempt to ritualise the fragments of the absent' (ASFF Official Programme, 87).  Iranian street scenes were played against the bare feet, the bare fingers, that formed a lump of fallen soil into a beautiful circular arrangement of words - poetry, textually and visually.  Colours, music, words were all coordinated into a sublimely sombre aesthetic experience that played shadows of past memory against collages of the present. Even days later, shadows of this film play in my own memory, reenacting and yet inevitably separating me from those ritualised fragmentations of pasts, presents, and absences in Iran.  Thus, even here, I am aware of my bodily distance from and emotional connection to that which was presented on the screen - a paradox that a film like this can make so profoundly apparent to its public.  


In the end, I was taken not only to new places in York (who knew the National Centre for Early Music was less than a minute's walk from my accommodation?!), but new places geographically, ideologically and artistically.  I am already excited for next year's addition, and I highly recommend it to anyone, especially my fellow departmental students here at York.  It is an amazing opportunity to see and think about the ever-present issues, wonders and mysteries in art that is not to be passed up next year!