Destination: L. City

You could say short films get short shrift.

Actually, James Parrish of the James River Film Society said just that tonight at VMFA during the opening of the two-night James River Shorts screenings.

The event came about after the JRFS acknowledged that the shorts weren't getting their due as part of the larger James River Film festival.

I'd thoroughly enjoyed last year's event, so here I was back again for this year's.

First, there was a late lunch at Best Cafe, which was populated somewhere between almost empty (my last few lunches) and completely mobbed (my last few Thursday Jazz cafes), meaning practically perfect.

We scored the wine of the evening, Primal Roots, a red blend of syrah, zinfandel and Merlot, along with ham and bean soup and a salad with chicken, but notable for its other ingredients: grapes, strawberries, candied walnuts, goat cheese and red onions.

We finished our Primal with a triple chocolate ganache before heading down to the Cheek theater for the shorts.

A jury of five local cinephiles and a visiting guest, filmmaker Lyn Elliot, had decided what we were to view tonight out of the many entries received.

After having seen the twelve finalists, I have two conclusions.

There's a lot of interesting short-form films being made in 2012 and there are several recurring themes.

See: falling rain, nudity and the appearance of scratched film.

"Lot 22 (Concession 5)" had a vintage feel, with occasionally flickering images of farms, fields and animals.

It was followed by technical difficulties (the filmmaker having insisted on a high-res showing), causing one of the JFFS guys to announce in the dark, "This is part of the transition to the digital age."

Eventually after some storytelling in the dark, we saw "Simple Machines," a black and white film that told essentially the same story as Koyonasqatsi but in a fraction of the time.

A seed sprouts and grows in time lapse photography before imagery of machines and large metal things take over.

Nature lost, technology inevitable.

"L. City" was exquisite, beginning with a jittery black and white shot of a man on a train and moving onto animation to describe the heartbreak of a woman gone and a man for whom time stops in her absence.

I was smitten with the beauty of the black and white pictures that made up this film.

"Alphabet" was a stop-motion film with a white Gumby-like figure trying to scrawl a message on a cave wall for mankind (Gumby-kind?).

"THEM" he wrote as bad things happened all around him.

Like a light show at a music performance, "Nothing to Undo" was a series of changing images.

Our first silent short of the night was "Footprints in the Snow," which caused the guy sitting behind me to start drumming his fingers in lieu of a soundtrack.

Not everyone is comfortable with silence.

The imagery of scenes of a snow-covered landscape were so vivid I could almost feel the cold of the snow-laden branches just outside the windows.

One good thing about a silent film though, is no one talks or chatters.

I heard a few coughs, but otherwise silence as people took in the white landscapes.

"Eye Pieces, Number 1" was not novel, but the footage of an eye blinking continued to multiply, first into two eyes, then four, sixteen and eventually 64.

By then, the eyes shown were responding to each other, looking sideways and askance.

It was well executed and I laughed out loud several times at the eyes' antics.

A brief intermission allowed for some mingling and then we were back at the shorts.

"Evolution" was adorable, full of animated  crayon drawings of monsters.

Sometimes they were eating each other and another time, two met, followed by a plethora of hearts coming up from them (successful first date, I suppose) and then a pile of babies appeared as a result.

What have we learned from this, kids?

Turns out the filmmaker used students from Fox Elementary to hep him with this one.

"That gets the sentimental vote," my companion said to me.

"Parva Sed Apta Mihi" was the longest short at seventeen minutes and it showed California streetscapes, vendors and religious iconography as words floated across the screen to Latin and accordion beats.

By the end of the film, I knew that the title meant, "Small, but enough for me."

I don't even have time to go into the wisdom of that philosophy, but feel free to stop by my tiny Jackson Ward apartment to discuss it at any time.

We returned to animation with "You, Everyone and Everything," a story of a young boy, the bugs in his life and his bad dream.

Luckily, all's well that ends well when he awakes and Mom and Dad are waiting at the dinner table for him.

If only life was always that easy.

A bit heavy-handed but still clever was "Changed Landscape," where for each day of the week shown (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday), we heard random headlines, weather reports and horoscopes over shots of the same pattern of scenes: animals grazing, a beach, a herd on a hillside.

Life.

By the end, there were no days of the week and the landscape had, well, changed.

"Movements" was another experimental film, this time of shifting patterns.

Once we'd seen all the films, we had to vote for the People's Choice award while guest juror Lyn Elliott decided the real winners.

Like me, she picked "L. City" as the best short, probably for the same reasons it had struck me: outstanding camerawork, breathtaking cinematography and a heartbreaking story of lost love.

That same film had lost by one vote the honor of people's choice award, which went to "Evolution,' no doubt for the students' charming contributions.

Wasn't it W.C. Fields who refused to work with kids because they stole all the attention?

Some things never change.

After hearing the winners announced, my companion and I went our separate ways and I went out to meet my friend Holmes for a drink.

We convened at Amour wine bistro where Holmes had dinner and I enjoyed a cup of tonight's soup, lamb and lentil while sipping bubbly (sparkling Vouvray, if you must know).

Holmes was flying solo tonight because his beloved was all stopped up, but we made the most of each other's company even without our favorite Richmonder.

With no dates to keep us on track, the conversation ranged all over creation, but one anecdote stands out.

I'll tell you that the punch line was, "At least she had a heater in her bedroom," and leave it at that.

Only Holmes.

But he was just as funny when I expressed surprise that he'd guessed that I'd been at the James River Shorts screening.

"As if you'd have been anywhere else?" he said mockingly.

Well, of course not. They say that brevity is the soul of wit.

I'll go as short as I need to as long as I get the wit.