This week, I was fortunate enough to be treated to a screening of a selection of AFTRS film school graduates' short films. The AFTRS is regarded as Australia's premiere film school. It was established as a government initiative during the Australian cinematic renaissance of the late 1970s, and since then has grown to become a major force in the short film festival circuit. Past graduates of the school include Jane Campion and Rolf de Heer.
This year's films reflected a sense of maturity and artistic vision comparable to some of the school's most successful shorts. Especially worthy of note are the computer-generated short Serving Suggestion and the masterful homage to pop-art, The Zipper, as well as the moving drama The WHite Tree, which I have reviewed below.
Written and directed by AFTRS student Paolo Bassi, The White Tree, like Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry, traces the tragic life of a man who has become so disjointed from life that he can't function properly in the Real World. His frivolous attempts to relate to people can only, at first, be replicated through art.
The lead character is a morbid mortician who labours monotonously in a claustrophobic funeral parlour. His loneliness is unexplained - perhaps the result of the death of a loved one, as indicated by the character's attitudes towards treating the deceased with respect. The character's angst-ridden relationship with his adolescent apprentice is indicative of his inability to relate interpersonally.
Upon encountering a young man in a freak collision, however, the lead character is slowly brought out of his shell. Bassi's assured direction and the sensitive, rhythmic cutting delivered by Maria Rita Barbasallo creates a familial tension between the main character and his teenaged companion in a matter of minutes - an emotional bond that is positively palpable. It is to be but a brief encounter, though one that changes the main character's worldview significantly.
Prior to his chance encounter, the main character's only companion was an incomplete sculpture - a headless Frankenstein-esque being that recalls the outcast's morbid creation in the short film Bowl of Oatmeal. This half-baked creation is a metaphorical representation of the main character's claustrophobic state-of-mind. Having shut himself off from the world at large, his mind has been lulled into a state of mechanisation, his only creative impulses being directed at a failed attempt to create life from a series of disparate, inanimate objects. The sculpture is directly linked to the film's major visual motif, which is used to represent the main character's unconscious emotional transition.
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