Ashort film festival brings to mind a joke by the late conceptual comedian Mitch Hepburg: "If you're not too hungry but want to eat 2,000 of something, try rice." Similarly, if you want to see a lot of movies but don't want to invest a lot of time, try the Canadian Film Centre's Worldwide Short Film Festival (June 13 to 18) where there are 250 offerings from around the world in one quick five-day hit.
Thanks to the digital camera, the Internet, the cellphone and the iPod, the short film has reached a new critical mass right now. There are thousands of them available, for free, and in avid competition for attention. In the time-squeezed world of the digital hook, the joke, the novelty, the parody and the instant shock rule, while emotional engagement and visual elegance have receded. Even in a curated selection of films such as these at the Toronto festival, many seem as glib or sentimental as television commercials.
For those looking for something more canonical, the best choice is the NFB mini-retrospective 65 Years of NFB Animation. No, this isn't just all those squiggly animated films you were ordered to watch in high school, though it does start with Norman McLaren's Le Merle, using white cutouts on a black background to illustrate a nonsensical French-Canadian folk song. McLaren set the NFB's worldwide standard for animated shorts, using a musical model to spin out a theme and variations with sophisticated whimsy.
The rest of the NFB selections are in the same tradition, but from the 1970s on. These include Caroline Leaf's The Owl Who Married a Goose: An Eskimo Legend; Jacques Droin's 1974 film, Le Paysagiste ( Mindscape); John Weldon and Eunice Macaulay's comic, dead mailman joke, Special Delivery; Richard Condie's The Big Snit (1985); Cordell Barker's The Cat Came Back (1988); Martin Barry's The Juke Bar (1989); Christopher Hinton's Blackfly (1991); Tali's A l'Ombre ( Under the Weather); Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis's When the Day Breaks (1999); and Torrill Kove's My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts (1999).
In contrast to the classic NFB short, about a small event that grows into something larger, some short films are too ambitious from the start. They're compressed television dramas or feature films, hitting the usual emotional buttons -- dead children, murder and incest -- but leaving too much unexplored. At the opposite extreme are the many single-idea comedy sketches: Hoosiers II: Senior Year -- the aged 1952 team gets together for one last try under coach Matthew Perry; a lip balm addict recalls his ordeals in Valley of the Chapstick; an adult baby refuses to be born in Heavy Pregnant.
One happy middle-ground is found in the vitality of some of the emotionally raw slice-of-life dramas. Two Canadian short films, both about unemployed men and their bonds with their mothers, are fine examples. Maxime Giroux's Le Rouge au Sol ( Red) is a vignette about an alcoholic man taking a trip with his mother to Ikea. Elliptical, but clear, it's a shining example of the kind of concision the short film format can exploit. Similarly, Zoe Leigh Hopkins' One-Eyed Dogs Are Free, about a young man living with his mother in the native fishing community in Bela Bela on the British Columbia coast, is an emotional snapshot of his life, a father who is lost at sea and a job rounding up stray dogs.
Another example of the rough and real mini-drama is American director Jeffrey Hevert's student film, Look Through My Eyes, which shows two brief scenes of a family driven to the edge by their emotionally disturbed son. Films like this one hit home because they have the nerve to test the audience's patience and empathy, a daring idea in a world packed with instant digital diversions.
The Canadian Film Centre's Worldwide Short Film Festival
runs from June 13 to 18 with the opening gala at Bloor Cinema
(506 Bloor St. W.) and screenings
at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Ave.) and Isabel Bader Theatre
(93 Charles St. W.). For further information contact the festival box office at 416-967-1528 or visit http://www.worldwideshortfilmfest.com.