Concessions

I turned 27 this year (which is weird, because I’m pretty
sure I’m still 25), and my parents presented me with a
terrifying DVD entitled “Home Movies.” My first reaction,
“Geeuuuuaaaahhhhhhhhhhh,” had to do with my first instinct, which was
that they had transferred to DVD the hours and hours of old VHS tapes
on which my elementary-school stretch pants and I recorded
“hilarious” talk-show parodies, “hilarious” cooking-show parodies, and
“hilarious” reenactments of Muppet Show sketches. Hours. And
hours.

But in reality, my parents had found, somewhere among boxes of
forgotten things, about 30 minutes of old Super 8 movies they shot when
I was age 1. AGE 1! There’s no sound—just sunny, pleasantly
grainy, contextless moments: a drunken croquet party; my mom,
with a perm, pointing out her armpit hair; me learning to walk (walking
is hard!); people who are now dead; people who are older now, but still
strikingly the same. They’re not full stories, just glimpses, and their
incompleteness is somehow comforting—the gaps filled with
potential, not frustration.

Watching a few short films for Northwest Film Forum’s Short
Exposure program—they’re screening one locally produced short
before each feature, introducing audiences to local
up-and-comers—put me in mind of those old West Family Babytime
Movies. Most shorts have a built-in incompleteness: questions left
unanswered, characters thin, stories simplified. But sometimes it’s a
strength.

Craig Downing’s This True Story of Dad Club (which is no
longer playing, but is available online at www.vimeo.com/962026) is a
terrifically effective little documentary narrative. In the plainest
language, a woman describes the last few bleak years with her alcoholic
father. On the screen, an unidentifiable white substance (smoke?
Pigmented water? Both? Underwater smoke? Is that a thing?) swirls and
undulates in shades to gray and black and back—an amazingly
restrained visual for an emotional gut punch.

Manquér, by Matt Daniels (also finished screening at
NWFF, but online at www.vimeo.com/1237934), is an
Amélie-lite story (precious and French) about a little
boy who is best friends with his bicycle. The bicycle is named
Suzette. But then the bicycle is stolen! Then the bicycle falls in
love. Good luck not liking this one. It’s fucking adorable.

Katherine Leggett’s Gray Days (screening before
Hunger) is the most ambitious of the three, and also falls the
shortest. It’s a miniscule documentary about elderly prison inmates
that barely introduces its protagonists before it’s over. Lonnie, 82,
in and out of prison since 1941, smacks his gums and says, “I’m not
wild anymore. Do pretty much what I should do.” This is the best
moment in the small movie. Gray Days has so much left
unchewed-on: It should be a full-length or not exist at all.

Short Exposure continues into May.