It's What They Wear Underneath

With the James River Filmmakers Forum, you are guaranteed variety.

That means 16 mm and video. It means comic fables and music documentaries. It means shorts and clips from longer works. It means stories about dating and self-mutilation (not related, by the way).

At tonight's screening at the Visual Arts Center, it meant five films (or parts of films) and a good-sized crowd to take them in.

The first two shorts by Robert Massa,"Margaret" and "Cora," were from a series about women and their neuroses.

Because they were done on film, the images were just beautiful. Interestingly, some of the film had been developed in the filmmaker's bathroom.

The main character in "Cora" was a cutter and, in a truly odd twist, so was the actress who played her. It was an unsettling thing to learn after the fact.

"Treezilla" by Joey Tran and Shawn Hambright used paper cutouts and a pipe cleaner tree monster to tell a cautionary tale about over-sized trees gone bad.

A lot of the dialog had a dry wit to it, surpassed only by the sound the raging tree made, which we learned was a combination of screaming and burping.

Some things they can't teach you in film school.

We only saw fifteen minutes of Les Owens' "The Silo Effect: The Treehouse Sessions" because it was a 47-minute film.

It documented local band The Silo Effect's three day recording session at Sound of Music Studios.

Made by the father of one of the band members who was a professional musician for over thirty years before taking up filmmaking, the documentary served as a tease to a bigger story than we got to see.

The youngest of the filmmakers was Thomas Bell, a senior filmmaking student at VCU.

"The Gauntlet" was a humorous take on speed dating (shot at the Empress, of all places) and the issues inherent in any kind of first date when so much can be read into what people say.

And don't say.

From the overly agreeable yes man to the over-confident studly type, the film exposed a variety of male stereotypes and what their behavior means.

There were also a few female cliches like the girl obsessed with her ex and the bitch who wouldn't cut any guys any slack.

Even the credits were funny, with one that said, "Thanks to all the extras who forgot to give us their names."

It was quite a leap from there to Tamara Eastman's historical documentary, "Birthing a Colony," a film about how different the experiences of women giving birth in the Virginia colony were depending on their social class.

Indentured servants and slaves had it worst, not surprisingly, often having their babies taken from them before being thrown in jail or sold.

But as the film showed, any woman was at risk giving birth in a time where childbirth frequently killed mother or infant or both.

I always stick around for the filmmakers' panel after the screenings, because, cutting and burping aside, you never know what fascinating tidbits you'll hear from the filmmakers.

For example, when some women are talking about an attractive guy one of them saw, the first question they ask is, "Is he in a kilt?"

When women like that start a production company, they name it Is He in a Kilt? Productions.

Fact.

So I guess if I ever start a production company, it'll be called Is He a Good Talker and Kisser? Productions.

Prediction.