sundance '08

Sundance turned out to be a bit like Los Angeles itself for me. When I moved there when I was 24, I decided that I would go and find the beauty, and the tender heart of L.A. This was an antidote to my impression that the people there were superficial, catty, and impatient, and the city itself was smoggy and ugly. This approach ended up being key to my living there. I found amazing museums there, the Norton Simon was my favorite, there is a movie house where they show only silent movies, there is a man who walks around Silverlake reading, the downtown library is magical, there is also a building downtown that was originally built in the 1920s to be a communist artist studio space/apartment building with a grand deco gallery space downstairs. I explored it one day while I was on lunchbreak from my temp job. There is bizarre and daring architecture in L.A, there are gardens tucked into odd places-- there are such incredible tamales. And at the end of my year of living there, I found myself saying, "I love L.A! L.A is a place of infinite possibility."

So this was my approach to Sundance: find the beauty. Because after my last two years of working during Sundance, I was pretty sick of it. Just the word made me cringe a little. As Ang puts it, it's like everyone's auditioning. And they are so often superficial, catty, and impatient. On about the third day of Sundance, I overheard this guy say, "Dude, Paris Hilton was up on stage at Harry-o's last night and people were throwing meat at her. It was awesome." The town kind of turns into a big party with strata of VIP's--with waitress to the stars not being at the top. I didn't have much fun the first few days of it; I mostly hid from it as much as I could.

I started having fun as soon as I went to a film. It's a whole different world at the films. The atmosphere is serious and professional, the audiences are made up mostly of people who make films or are connoisseurs of film. It's more like being at a gallery or a play than going to the movies-- there's much more of a dialog between the audience and the film than you usually see. People in the audience respond to the nuances, they laugh at little gestures by the actors, they even sometimes applaud mid-movie.

I went to a series of short films first. Shorts! Like short stories, you get a concentrated punch of concept or emotion, really fast. I think Francis Ford Coppola said in one of the mission statements I read of his for Zoetrope that he started the magazine to explore the relationship between short stories and films-- which makes sense. To me a short story and a feature-length film correlate-- they are both a single-sitting event. To adapt a novel for the screen, so much is going to be lost, but you can really get in there with a fifteen to twenty page story. Film is much more efficient, though, emotionally. For example, writing about setting takes time-- in film setting happens in quick flashes. You lose exposition almost entirely, actually-- which I guess becomes its own challenge. But the medium, I think, is faster than literature. Some of the shorts felt more like short-shorts, almost, though some felt very similar to short stories, including the amazing short "Dugong" by Erin White, which felt incredibly literary. Also check out "Pariah" by Dee Rees, which was a 27-minute short, kind of the Alice Munroe version of a short film. The directors promise their films will be available on iTunes soon.

Once I went to the shorts, I couldn't get enough. I went back for the Grand Jury selection for drama, Frozen River, and then the Grand Jury selection for documentary, Trouble the Water. Both excellent.

Once I started having discussions about story and craft, it was like all the stuff happening to Paris up on Main Street, and who was where and who partied with whom and all that stuff that had been bugging me in the beginning of the week, all that faded. I felt like an animal, a giant dumb animal grabbing films with its fat paws and stuffing them into its mouth while its eyes search for the next one to get in there.