A Potpourri of Student Film

A panel of student filmmakers in a Q&A session during the Salmagundi Film Festival.
Photo by Chris Sabbatini

Andy Warhol would’ve loved it. But so, too, would George Lucas.

The 10 short films debuting at the 12th annual Salmagundi U.Va. Film Festival sponsored by the U.Va. FilmMakers Society, range remarkably in tone and texture—from edgy, surreal, do-it-yourself experiments echoing the ethos of Pop Art’s godfather of underground cinema to nearly ready-for-prime time storytelling fare that might rank alongside the apprentice work of hot-marquee mainstreamers like Lucas, Steven Spielberg or Rob Reiner.

In Newcomb Hall on April 11 and 12, die-hard cinéastes and the more casually curious gathered for competitive screenings of undergrad film work by novice filmmakers from the University of Virginia and colleges in Maryland and the District of Columbia.

The intention, says festival chairperson Ayesha Ninan (Media Studies, Sociology ’08), was to offer an eye-opening experience fueled by an Everyperson aesthetic. “We wanted to be as inclusive as possible,” says the future film editor, “to reflect real variety in technique and genre, and to appeal to every kind of taste.” Certainly the free candy doled out to patrons helped keep the proceedings fun and funky, a stated aim of the presenters. Ninan and Laura Scott (English ’08), vice president of the FilmMakers Society, hoped to showcase the burgeoning expertise and enthusiasm of artists whose inspiration and industry are largely self-determined.

“We’ve been planning this festival since January, while taking on a full load of courses, managing part-time jobs, roommate issues and all of the other assorted chaos associated with college life,” says Scott. “We’ve all grown very close over the year and work extremely well together. As a result, the festival ran very smoothly. Personally, this group has changed my entire life and has made my college experience!”

With the University lacking an actual film department, the festival was adamantly a grassroots affair—backed neither by school money nor constrained by official oversight. And the open-door policy was successful, welcoming not only very fresh work but a real diversity of judges to assess it—Richard Herskowitz, artistic director of the Virginia Film Festival; Academy Award-winning independent filmmaker Paul Wagner; producer Mark Johnson (College ’71) (Rain Man; The Chronicles of Narnia films); Barry Sisson of Cavalier Films, a corporation funding independent films in the Commonwealth; and Media Studies and Germanic Languages and Literatures Assistant Professor Laura Heins.
 
A black-and-white dazzler that fused the gypsy brio of Federico Fellini and the anti-automaton anarchy of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Mondo Musical took Best in Show, its pell-mell energy and collective genesis nicely capturing the Salmagundi spirit. Indeed a mini-musical, of a decidedly offbeat sort, it featured outsized, mustachioed comic leads, carnival zest and a strange, hurdy-gurdy lyricism, all products of the group effort of the cinematography class taught by Art professor Kevin Everson, eminence grise of U.Va.’s movie-making scene. Class member Jonathan Taee (Anthropology, Philosophy ’08) ably designed and edited the piece, which also garnered the Audience Award and the Ken Jacobs Experimental Film Award.

If Mondo rocked on an operatic scale, the three-minute, Photoshop-generated The Life and Times of a Dust Bunny was twisted, Zen-like minimalism from Tim Burton/Walt Disney fanatic Emily Hamel (Studio Art, Psychology ’08). Dust Bunny adheres to ceiling fan. Fan spins. Bunny dies. Ah, the horror!

Rubber Ducky, color-splashed and weirdly wonderful, owed much to David Lynch. And director Konstantin Brazhnik (Studio Art, Physics ’07) zealously admits the influence of the mind behind Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man in this dark fantasy he terms “a schizophrenic mixture of narratives edited together to elicit emotional response from the settings, the character, the costumes and the sound design.”

Taee’s Edie, grainy, poetic, and suggestive, Lauren O’Connor’s (Media Studies ’09) Gemini, a Degasesque reverie of dreams and dancers, and Ashley Chipman’s (Interdisciplinary-Computer Science, Studio Art ’08) Never Again, a Bergmanesque love-story vignette, all added to avant-garde ambience.

But realism, too, had its turn. Tonight, by Steven Quinn (Neuroscience ’08) and Jedidiah Crews (Foreign Affairs, Religious Studies ’08), won the Cavalier Films Narrative Film Award with its naturalistic lighting and Sartrean relationship-as-powder keg dynamic. Quinn calls it “a short drama dealing with happiness and remorse and the situations that inextricably bind them,” and he and his partner proved themselves just as concerned with style as story, favoring, for example, long, single tracking shots that, Quinn says, “trap the characters in an inescapably bleak situation, continually building tension until the release at the finale.”

Also capturing the power and pathos of real life was College second-year Min Hee Park’s The Girl on Wheels. Believing that “movies should bring hope to the people who watch them,” Park sketched a poignant portrait of her disabled friend Erin, a U.Va. student whom Park celebrates for “creating an atmosphere for people so that they never have to feel sorry or even uncomfortable around her.”

Christina Tkacik (History ’08) won the Runner-Up to the top award with Gerry Mitchell: 3,164 Miles, a documentary toasting a Charlottesville artist recently hit by a police cruiser while crossing a downtown street. (Mitchell was later issued a ticket, which was still later rescinded.) Living with HIV-AIDS for 27 years, the wheelchair-bound painter radiates triumph-in-adversity, his apartment walls crammed with canvases recalling Philip Guston and his character indefatigable.

Two special showings bookended the festival. Paul Wagner, veteran Charlottesville indie stalwart, reprised and discussed The Stone Carvers, his 1984 slice-of-life study of the Italian-American masons and sculptors who embellished the Washington Cathedral with gargoyles and figures of saints. And Gretel Truong (Interdisciplinary ’08) premiered her thesis film, The Write Note. Assured in its camera work and pacing, the short movie told the tale of an unusual—and unusually moving—alliance: an Asian-American high-school pianist and his African-American counterpart, a girl with a voice as earth-shaking as the gospel music she sings. “I really wanted to do something uplifting, something inspiring,” says Truong, a fourth-year student who aims at a career in the media industry and whose tenure at U.Va. has included work on several movie sets.

Yet another Salmagundi highlight was a panel discussion hosted by film professionals. Casting director Erica Arvold (Charlotte’s Web, Runaway Bride), director/screenwriter Jeff Lowell (John Tucker Must Die), producer Temple Fennell (Joshua) and art director Leslie McDonald (Architecture ’11; Minority Report, Field of Dreams) discussed showbiz ins and outs in a forum examining the distinctions between Hollywood and independent filmmaking.

With Tinseltown’s handful of major studios now turning out a mere 20 films a year and regularly employing a stable of only around 140 directors, paths must be blazed elsewhere, panelists said. And yet, they claimed, investors are still always on the lookout for the next Juno or Little Miss Sunshine, small movies that broke big at the box office. The secret to future success? “Writing good scripts, and developing a unique voice,” said Lowell.

The Salmagundi filmmakers, then, just might be on their way.