[The Integrity Cell] on the Decadence of the Short Film

by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]

The short film has long been the most transparent form of film in America; neither major production nor aphorism, it projects the most potent apex that is diluted over a longer time extent than the major motion picture. Lost in its own resplendence, reduced by its own significance, fed only by a metaphysical hunger, it is a body that must empty itself of the most mainstream cliches and rediscover the origins the moment the reel begin to turn. Man has long dwelled in its own reduction, in its own illusion of grandeur; it is in film, namely the short, that imperfection isn't hidden in a slow anticipation to something predicted, but a truth willing to come out of thin air to risk everything.

The film can bring the sun into a focal and reduce it in the same manner, create a deep chasm of deceit, cleverly hoist darkness from its association and disassociate it. More often than not, the footage will fail, and if it does not, it will do no more than to create the shell of its own disquiet. Because the mainstream film is littered with brand and popular names, it prevents the perspective of one seeing it as the dismemberment, as unoriginal, a stolen thing from the past which Artaud believe masterpieces must remain. To resurrect these masterpieces are not a stroke of genius, but a retreat of the auteurs into the darker corners of themselves. Truffaut believed that the filmmaker is the author of the film and thus exposes their own perceptions. The perception is major motion picture has been compromised, an impossible compromise tainted with incapability, borrowed visions from bygone greats, brought into modern, is inane when it has not become from a dream in utero.

If there is no risk, no outrage, no shock or awh, then there is no need to compose. Silence will claim us as a vast mist descending from the nothingness that has become. In the short film, there is an opportunity to reclaim the light we've lost in film today, reconcile with what was, bury it, say our peace and never again feel the need to exhume it. Exhumation means that art as we know it has not evolve but devolved. Embarking on a journey means to decimate even the ideal of the loiter, not to declare who we are because we do not know until the reel stops once and for all. In our mind is the draft, the unseen, to create, the instrument of the seen is then projected, and not only on us to meet the dream we once dream, but onto the whole of the audience, who is the dreaming world awaiting movement, awaiting the initial reason to be moved.

Perhaps Chapman knew this dream, perhaps Bunuel, perhaps Truffaut in bed with all whom he fancied and fetished; it is impossible to doubt the world that has plunged into mimicry and mockery, into the pseudo-placental depth that all artist must plummet into if their art is to ever become. The events of a film must speak for themselves, as Samuel Beckett's art, introducing nothing, giving nothing; and from that nothingness, everything is translated, transferable, transmuted and transmutated. These events must not be manipulated but nurtured, as a child who first begins to walk, and from this walk, this child must fall, as man must first fall, to know that he is able to stay upright. The human perspective, the human walk, has thus nowadays been narrowed, its path narrowed, rudimentary thought suspended by capital and advertisement to cajole artist and hypnotize a somnambulate public.

Think of the scientific method in which scientist use to test disease. First, they begin with a lesser life form, rodents, then an advancement to larger mammals and then, the human cell is brought into a petri-dish. With film, the disease is taken directly into the human cell via histrionics, in a myopic manner where the moral and the box office is the true means to an end. Though man makes films, it cannot be in the image of him, for man is awaiting death and the film is made to be immortal.

The desperate straights taken in a flawed thesis is now showing its arrogance, its fits of sequels, borrowings from the posthumous. There then is a scorn in the discourse for all interest other than self-interest, a waltz around the subcultural and subterranean, self-reassurance via acknowledgement and annual award validation. Film has found itself in a perilous, revolving vanity, a mirror of said and stymied petulance, the lack of a visceral and cerebral capability, adrenal possibility. If it continues on its present course, it will again be a twofold image of man, headed for an inevitable doomsday plague.

A short film is a pretext to evolution from revolution, filmmakers unknown to the mainstream, ignored, blacklisted and ousted motion artists. As a cell splits and reproduces, the body, which is it represented shell, too reproduces, its function a reproduction of that splice, its genetics nonethesame. What can be altered must be manipulated, what can be changed only can undergo a gradual shape-shift, though it too, as the human personality, remains constant. The body as we know it is intricate and diverse but the cell always is true, functions to its own truth, cadence and tandem flow. In this, its integrity maintains. If film is to ever rediscover its integrity, it will be through the short film, the first cell before its split, that growth must begin, be nurtured with a mirrored truth, until such time it divides and meets its double.