Day in the Life of an Idiot

 
Image: Scream it Off Screen mascot, Screamy.

In October, I happened to be listening to MNPR in the morning and heard their arts correspondent talking about an absurdist short film festival called Scream it Off Screen. I've actually always been a short film aficionado, ever since my college days. Maybe it doesn't seem like me, but I've gone, often alone, to animated short film festivals, international short film festivals... the point is, they had me at "short films" and then the MNPR correspondent cinched it for me by adding this little descriptor: "It's part performance art, part competitive film festival."

I immediately asked my friend naomikritzer if she'd be willing to try this out with me and bought tickets. I picked Naomi over my wife, because Naomi regularly attends the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and Shawn's tolerance for the absurd is much, much, MUCH lower. I bought tickets for the November 3 showing. 

In the meantime, I did a bit more research into this thing. From what I could tell, the competitive part of the film festival operates a bit like the old Gong Show. I suspect that most of the people reading this have no idea what I'm referring to, so I will give a quick explanation (or you can read about it on the Wikipedia article I linked to.) Basically, The Gong Show was a 1970s variety show where performers would come onto the stage and a panel of judges would decide whether or not they could complete their act (not, actually, unlike a lot of the musical competition shows popular now, like American Idol.) If the judges didn't like an act, the would get up out of their seat and bang an actual, physical gong. The Scream it Off Screen people also have an actual, physical gong, but they let the audience decide if we finish watching the film.

The films are given a decent amount of time to establish themselves, however. They are allowed to roll for several minutes (none of them are longer than 15 minutes in total) and then, when a red light on the side of the stage turns on, the audience can either shout "Gong!" or "Let it Play!," or, if the decision is contentious both at once. If the emcees can't decide which team is loudest, they turn on the houselights and aske the "Let it Play" people stand up and they do a quick guestimation as to whether this constitutes a majority.

The films that are allowed to compete in Scream it Off Screen have to fit certain criteria, they have to be less than 15 minutes in total, they have to be original, and they have to have subtitles. Otherwise, it's nice if the film is on theme (the November theme was "harvest.") Like the MN Fringe, the films are not juried, and in this case, also not pre-screened. 

Okay, sounds kind of fun, right?

What is less clear until you get there is how the performance art figures in. 

What you may notice lacking on the list of requirements for the films is format. So, the projectionist has their work cut out for them. As reels are being shifted, digital content being loaded, etc., there are... skits, if you could call them that. There are amateur musicians, also? (This month they asked people to submit an audition tape to sing songs by Neil Young.) 

And here's where shit gets weird.

Naomi and I had a long talk about this experience afterwards. Both of us generally enjoyed the short films and the experience around shouting them off, etc.  There were some real stinkers that got immediately gonged, a few that caused the house lights to have to come up, etc., and others that, in comparison, were quite good--even laugh out loud funny or heartwarming. But, that was, as they say, as advertised. Naomi noticed that all the film makers (who were invited up to the stage to introduce their work) were white men, and that nearly all the actors in the films were also white men. I will admit that it never occurred to me, in part, because as soon as Shawn heard a description of this event she gave me the side eye and said, "You realize this will be entirely populated by the worst kind of hipsters, right?"

But, I would say, despite that, generally, this part was what I expected and about as fun as I hoped it would be.

The part that didn't really work was the stuff in-between. For reasons known only to the organizers, after they explained the rules to us, they opened the show with an "expert" on harvest. This was a guy who maybe actually did own a maple syrup farm, maybe didn't? Who then spoke AT LENGTH, very seriously about how maple syrup was made. What was off-putting about this was that it was really, really unclear whether or not this was meant to be taken seriously. At one point during this extremely long, deadpan presentation (with slides!) someone yelled out "Gong!" from the audience and the emcee got legitimately hostile with that person, demanding that if they were experts in harvest, then they should come up to the stage and explain maple syrup making!!  And, then, with the audience feeling very "??" they then let this maple syrup guy go on and on... and ON. If it was funny in a kind of absurdist way, it stopped being so after 15 full minutes of this. It felt, instead, Stockholm Syndrome-y, or like we'd come to the wrong thing, you know? Like, it was clear that the full house was made up of a lot of people who had never attended this event before and we were all being asked to sit through something we did NOT sign up for and which was in no way funny or fun. 

That put a pall over everything.

So, when, later they had someone up from a fake organization called the Minnesota Farm Preservation Society, I also didn't feel like laughing at any of her obvious jokes because I didn't want the emcee to grab the mike and yell, "This is serious!" because I had no real idea how to take what came next, you know?

Afterward, when Naomi brought up the lack of women and people of color (both participating in the event, in the films as actors, and in the audience) we were like, "Yeah, WHY WOULD PEOPLE FEEL UNWELCOME, I SURE DON'T KNOW." /Sarcasm. 

That being said, I enjoyed 65-70% of the experience. I am willing to, at some point, give this event another try. (It happens the first Friday of EVERY month.) However, it's not immediately going into rotation for me, despite my life-long love of short film festivals. In many ways, this should be entirely up my alley, even with the weird performance art, but there was such an "insider" vibe and this weird controlling-ness of the opening that I'm quite put off for the moment. I expected weird? But, this weird felt... unfun.

Which is a shame. Having a venue like this for amateur film makers is kind of cool. There is a small cash prize for the winner ($100), and zero experience in film-making is required to enter a piece. I could enter something for next month, for instance (immediately boosting the number of women and queer submissions.) There was at least one science fiction themed short, which I rather enjoyed, which made it to the final round. Someone even submitted an animated film.

Like, I said, I really quite liked the parts that involved the actual films.

Maybe it was an off performance? This is why I'd be willing to give them another go at some point, but... yeah. Bummer. I would recommend it to people who might be interested, but with the caveat that you just need to be aware of how white, het, cis male the whole thing is. (Also, Naomi and I were two of maybe six people masking in the entire packed theater.) On the flip side, if this all sounds fun, but not if you're sober, you can buy alcohol and snacks at the theater. The Parkway is very much set up for these kinds of events. The lady sitting next to me had several fancy cocktails during the show (very wisely opting out of a lot of the performance art.)