[rate 3]
“And what do you do?”
I rarely do shorts. I prefer feature length films which allow narratives to gestate without the pressures of time weighing heavily upon them. Thus it is with a certain reservation that I watch shorts, and in particular, collections of shorts around a common theme. Last year at the festival it was ‘Paris je t’aime’, which for the most part only reaffirmed my convictions on the matter. So why did I attend ‘Chacun son cinema’, a collection of shorts commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Cannes film festival? Um, good question. I suppose I was drawn in by the breadth of talent involved, and the central conceit that each short should attempt to depict the film-going experience from the perspective of each director’s country of origin.
With the exception of Jane Campion’s entry (?!?) the shorts were solidly entertaining, some playing off of the nostalgia component of the history of cinema, some intimately personal evocations, and some playing with the three minute format to unfurl high-concept punchlines. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s short felt the most earnest of the entries and perhaps the best executed, a quiet love letter to cinema. In the same vein, Zhang Yimou’s short adeptly captured the spirit of the project, depicting the magic of cinema through the wide-eyed perspective of an expectant child. Strangely enough it was the Canadian directors that were the most innovative with their concepts, Atom Egoyan exploring the effects of the latest technology and David Cronenberg exploring the anxieties of the art form. More often than not, the shorts were devised for laughs, some too high-concept and obvious for my taste (Roman Polanski), some throwaway but hilarious (the Coen Brothers, Lars Von Trier, Ken Loach), and some funny AND poignant (David Cronenberg, Nanni Moretti). Elia Suleiman’s parody of a director at his own premiere was priceless, and has inspired me to seek out some of his work, the same goes for the work of Ken Loach and Takeshi Kitano which I have shamefully neglected to see.
Here are some of the best of the crop: