TCM Classic Shorts Awards 2003
London International Film Festival

Michael Caines

At first sight, it seemed that the judges had short-listed films with only brevity in common, and declared the shortest film the winner. At six minutes, The Most Beautiful Man in the World, directed by Alicia Duffy, is nothing if not short and sweet, evocatively and delicately disquieting. It comes from the school of filmmaking that favours ambiguous implications over overt statements of fact, an influence less obviously at work in its competitors.

The Most Beautiful Man in the World begins with a bored little girl lying on a living-room floor, a dog lounging with her, noises emanating from the TV and the next room. The day drowses on; there then follows an odd outdoor encounter with a strange man. The scene is potentially melodramatic or menacing, partly because of the man’s opaque character. What is he thinking when he softly plucks an insect from her bare shoulder? The moment in the summer sun, although it offers an alternative to a luridly humdrum limbo, the not-so-great indoors, is potentially chilling. Jude Law, one of the judges, said that The Most Beautiful Man in the World 'left [him] with questions and emotions'.

'Ambiguous things can seem very threatening', says Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, whereas 'Taboo confronts the ambiguous and shunts it into the category of the sacred' (xi). In art, as in ritual, ambiguous symbols' can serve 'to enrich meaning or to call attention to other levels of existence' (49). Short films may be short on what is conventionally recognised as intimations of the sacred, but some of them do bear out Douglas’s point about ambiguity, taboo and alternative levels of existence. While mainstream features reliably conceal these levels behind the ethical and generic industrial bog standards, short films remain attractive to filmmakers after apprentice days are done, in spite of scarce financial backing or reward; taboos are boundaries that exist to be tested and disturbed, if not broken.

This applies to form as well as content. The short film is a chimeric entity that could be said to include, at its broadest, everything from pop videos and TV ads to Bill Viola and the 'Beat flicks' of William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin. It would have been a bad sign if the judging panel – which included, beside Law, luminaries like Ralph Fiennes, Bernardo Bertolucci and Stephen Frears – had shown no sign of eclecticism. While Duffy’s film uses ambiguity to deliberate and compelling effect, her competitors’ entries tended to fall into two camps. Some told complete and clear-cut stories. Others, like Duffy’s, were more about mood than forward motion.

Take the two comic films on the bill, Lost and Found and Claverdeek, for instances of the former style. In Dominic Santana’s Claverdeek, Tim Vine determines to wipe the irritating smile off the face of his neighbour and arch-nemesis, John Claverdeek. Lost and Found stars Phil Daniels as the maestro of lost property in a railway station, able to guess at first glance what anybody who walks into his office is missing. (Some are obvious: Alastair McGowan turns up as an undertaker, and Daniels reaches for 'NAH', a floral wreath.) Claverdeek is more or less an illustrated monologue, speeding down Hammer-Horror Lane past Steven Coogan and Doctor Terrible’s House of Horrible, while Lost and Found, directed by Toby Haynes, puts an affectionate spin on Ealing comedy. Both are handsomely acted, directed and produced, but neither could break the old law of dramatic competition, that comedy never wins anything. They are skits writ large rather than feature films writ small.

Second prize went to The Bypass, directed by Amit Kumar, a film about small-time banditry in a scavenged desert. It is more ambivalent than ambiguous in its division of the audience’s sympathies between the victims of a violent robbery – newly-weds who take a wrong turn down the bypass of the title – and the robbers. After this, one unscrupulous predator does for another. Like The Most Beautiful Man in the World, the film eschews dialogue in favour of close-ups, and opts for isolated monosyllables over sentences in a discussion. It achieves a dream-like, silent-film mood, enhancing the impression of a black comedy as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes might have made it. In the end, though, it simply says that dogs eat dogs, and that’s the way of the world (or at least a rotten part of it). Again, the scenario’s transparency is essential.

The Bypass offers more obviously photogenic landscapes, costumes and incidents than The Most Beautiful Man in the World, but the latter, shot by Nanu Segal, has the inkier saturation of colours and richer contrasts. Both benefited greatly from the big screen of NFT1, especially The Bypass, with its opening shots of the desert and scavenging birds hollowing out a carcass, and aftermath images of violence, albeit framed in fairly conventional ways – panoramas, mid-range shots and close-ups. The directors of the other films took distinctive, even showy, approaches to their subjects. (Lost and Found, with its fish-eyed verticals, and the grainy, hand-held Job Street were the work of the same cinematographer, Annemarie Lean-Vercoe.) Perhaps it is not coincidence, then, that The Most Beautiful Man in the World is an altogether calmer act of camera work, resting not rushing.

Unambiguously, it is a small miracle that such films as these get made at all. They derive from the chronic passion of apprentice mages and the good will of their peers. Matthew Santiago’s eerily fervid Job Street, following three illegal immigrants through one bleak day, was apparently the cheapest film to make it to the last six, and was shot over the course of three weekends. The BBC helped with the making of Brown Paper Bag, described by the company who made it, Dreamfinder Productions, as 'A credit, certainly, but that can’t be worth a second glance for the Beeb. . . . Perhaps it’s simply an idealistic corner of the empire that Birt’s corporate storm-troopers didn’t manage to conquer. There are actually people there who believe it is important to nurture local talent and give budding programme and film makers a chance'. Brown Paper Bag also boasts the star of Dreamfinder’s Bouncer, Ray Winstone, as an executive producer.

It is unlikely to be widely available, of course. The shortlist was screened on November 5 as part of the 47th Times bfi London Film Festival, and again on TCM over the following weekend – good exposure but fleeting. Richard Jobson, TCM presenter and the prize ceremony’s compere, stressed that a short film should not be regarded merely as the director’s calling card, a pitch for the feature-length presentation he or she really wants to make. Nonetheless, building up to the presentation of first prize, last year’s winner told the audience how he made the deal for his script currently in development at the after-show party for the 3rd TCM Classic Shorts Award. And plans are afoot to produce a new, improved Brown Paper Bag, funded partly by the (third-prize) winnings of this thirteen-minute version. It would be hard to improve Michael Baig Clifford’s diatribe against an insidious combination of poisons, alcohol and self-doubt, by extending it, but he’s going to try. Short films, after all, occupy an uncertain place in the market. It would be wonderful indeed if some of the unconventional talent on display here could survive the transition to a bigger screen.