ResFest is a mobile temple to the personal computer: This is the commodity it celebrates. At the heart of all these dazzling illusions and special effects is this thing in front of me. Its luminous screen, its erect tower, its sensitive keyboard, its soothing hum. Now 20 years old, the PC has been the wellspring for a whole new (and possibly the last) branch of humanism, inspiring in articles and ads noble words like liberation, self-expression, accessibility, the democratization of knowledge, globalization, interlinked communities. Like the telephone for another age, it bears the mark of utopia or--more theoretically--dialectics at a standstill. Indeed, a home without a PC is nothing more than a barn. It is a dumb abode, with windows as vacant as the eyes of a peasant.

Of course, the PC is not what it used to be--with the technology stock crash and all--but its temple, ResFest, is still alive and well. In fact, at the very end of the reign of the PC, and the deep, dreamy sleep its rhetoric induced on the '90s, we suddenly awake to find that ResFest has arrived. Digital films are better than they were two years ago. And the filmmakers are becoming true artists, rather than mere Thomas Edisons with new inventions. True, most of digital film's success is occurring in the music-video industry (particularly for electronica acts like Björk, Gorillaz, and Daft Punk), but this should not arouse scorn, as it has with so many grumpy film critics. Any form of filmmaking is valid so long as it offers gifted artists an access to the public, and this is what music videos have provided: large audiences for important artists like Chris Cunningham, Hype Williams, and Spike Jonze.

This year, ResFest--which is based in San Francisco and tours major tech cities around the world--received 1,500 submissions from which it selected nine digital films. Of these nine digital films, I will mention four, beginning with Manga Entertainment's Blood: The Last Vampire.

Though I'm not an anime fan, the beauty of this film, which is directed by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and stands as "Japan's first fully-digital-animated-feature," exists beyond the border of ordinary language. The words I need are not here yet; they are still in the future. At present, all I can say is, if traditional cinema is "the orchid in the land of [mechanical] technology," as Walter Benjamin put it in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," then Blood: The Last Vampire is a pure mirage reproduced (or replicated) in the depths of a powerful PC.

More impressive yet, Blood: The Last Vampire offers a compelling story. Set on the brink of the Vietnam War on an American military base in Japan, the movie is about a girl vampire killer, who is hired by American secret agents to kill vampires who have infiltrated the American base. The girl, who is Japanese and descends from some ancient, royal, original family, is cold and doesn't really like Americans. She is just doing her job, and even feels pity for the evil vampires she slays. The whole anti-American-militarism thing is so apparent it needs no elaboration. However, the paradox that's presented by the setting (early '60s) and the technology needed to realize this distant setting so perfectly (futuristic PCs) deserves a book-length explanation.

The best music video in this year's lineup is undoubtedly Fatboy Slim's "Ya Mama." It's directed by a Swedish collective called Traktor, and is set in a chaotic Caribbean market. Like the music video for Roni Size's song "Brown Paper Bag," "Ya Mama" severely fucks with human movement or human motion, and the outcome is a work of comical genius. Once upon a time, Aphex Twin's "Window Licker" was the funniest video on Earth. Now that honor falls to "Ya Mama."

The best (and only) documentary in the festival is Doug Pray's documentary Scratch, which looks at the last real b-boys in the corrupted world of hiphop: the DJs. After such hysterical rap documentaries as Backstage (2000), it's a relief to watch a sober examination of the art itself--the mechanics of the music, theories on turntablism, and so on. Finally, there is a narrative short film called Helicopter, which possesses only one flaw: It's a little too long. The film is about a group of teens bemoaning the death of their mother in a bizarre helicopter accident, and had it been just five minutes shorter it would have achieved masterpiece status.

The films in ResFest 2001 range from great to interesting. Nothing in the lineup is a waste of time. Such a success can only mean one thing: The art of digital filmmaking has finally arrived, and the PC has fulfilled part of its promise.