The Beauty of Brevity

Good things, when short, are twice as good. ~ Gracian


That philosophy was no doubt the genesis of the 2011 James River Shorts Festival. That or an acknowledgment that attention spans have become length-challenged.

It was the first year for the festival, which attracted 78 short film submissions, the top fourteen of which were shown tonight at the VMFA.

And the shorts varied widely in subject matter. Some were animated or stop motion and some were live action.

My favorite, "Solo Piano," was actually still photographs with a piano piece for background music.

A piano on a NYC sidewalk was photographed as people walked by it and stopped to play its keys.

Thinking it was a lighthearted piece about the randomly placed instrument pulling in people, I was saddened to eventually see men come along and destroy it, chopping up the wood and carting it away.

It ended with two young people showing up with dollies,apparently hoping to move the piano to their home.

It was a mini-tragedy in five minutes.

But there was humor, too. "The Pervert" used old '60s film footage to construct a tale of a nice boy gone astray after finding a pornographic magazine on the siddewalk.

"Another Dress, Another Button" was a stop-motion piece about the extra buttons that come with clothes.

Put in a bowl still in their tiny Ziplock bags, the buttons escaped and played games, only to hurry back into their baggies when the girl got home.

An artsy 16 mm film was "Watercolors," a silent movie with an impressionistic feel. The images of nature reflected in moving water truly looked like paintings.

Extremely touching was "My Son" about a choreographer dealing with cancer while raising a young son and continuing to dance and teach.

She saw her son as standing between her and death, while the little boy just saw her as Mom.

Especially beautiful was "The Leaf Woman and the Centaur," a combination of black and white drawings with vividly colored animation telling the story.

My friend and I had visited Amuse before the screening, enjoying a new-to-Amuse wine, Felino Malbec, which turned out to be wonderful blood-thickener on this unexpectedly cold evening.

With a local cheese plate and 40 minutes, we enjoyed a short repast to prepare us for the short films we were about to see.

Not aware of Amuse's limited hours, my friend was surprised to learn that they wouldn't be open for us to return to once the screening was over.

In fact, you could say that some good things, when short, are not twice as good.

A couple of things, Amuse's hours not being one of them, immediately come to mind to substantiate that.

But not tonight's films. Like well-written short stories, they delivered and were over.

Call it bite-sized films at their best.