Unlike some film festivals that have limited their audiences to the region (MIFF being one), Slamdance 2021 was available for anyone who wanted to subscribe. My wife did so for her work, and I reaped the benefits.
The reaping was fairly limited, though. I only watched two proper feature length films, Darragh Carey and Bertrand Desrochers' A Brixton Tale, which had some promise but ultimately did not fully come together, and Agnieszka Polska's Hurrah, We Are Still Alive!, in which I never really got my bearings. I don't have anything further to say about either at the moment.
I do have thoughts on something I watched that was not proper feature length, but is making me reconsider how exactly I define that.
Background: I am a strict adherer to perceived rules -- when it comes to how I define and classify cinema, anyway. I've written about it before and I suspect you are at least somewhat familiar with my stance on the subject.
My most recent writings about it related to Steve McQueen's Small Axe film series last year, which won huge amounts of critical praise, but bent a lot of us out of shape in determining how to categorize to it. For one, it was made for television, which typically disqualifies a series of "movies" from discussions about the year's best "films." The more salient trait for today's post, though, is that most of those "films" are barely over 60 minutes, making them dubious candidates as feature films on length alone. I ultimately didn't watch them in time for last year's rankings, and am sorry to say I still have not.
But the issue has come up for me more recently than that. A few weeks ago I got contacted to review a documentary called The Astrology of Pandemics, whose title really piqued my interests. I was all set to request a screener link when I saw the movie is only 42 minutes long. Recoiling at this oddball length, I had to tell the publicist, "I'm not sure how to say this without sounding snooty or arbitrary, but we usually stick to feature length films for reviews."
So that brings us to Slamdance. A couple nights ago my wife told me about a film called Taipei Suicide Story, directed by someone with the single moniker KEFF, that she'd watched and loved while out of town. She texted me "You probably have a million things to watch right now [for once that's not true] but I just watched Taipei Suicide Story and it's great -- only 46 minutes."
Only?
That's not a selling point actually. It's a point of great consternation for a slave to categorization like me.
A point of consternation that wouldn't have mattered to me if I hadn't actually watched it.
I hadn't been planning to. But when the kids and I joined my wife out of town on Wednesday night, I needed something shortish to watch after feeling exhausted from a long and busy day of packing, working, and driving 90 minutes to meet her down in a coastal area on the Mornington Peninsula.
My first choice would have been just an episode of TV, something like Snowpiercer, the first season of which I am still slogging my way through, and the only show I'm watching that she isn't. But she reminded me of Taipei Suicide Story and its 46-minute run time, and I decided "Fuck it. Categorization be damned."
Now, this was not a snap reconsideration of my ideas of what qualifies a movie for inclusion on my lists. Rather, it was a snap decision not to worry about if I watched something without being able to add it to those lists.
This is a surprisingly strong motivator for me. I have enough of a collector mentality that I shy away from things that I can't "collect" via inclusion on my lists. This doesn't apply to TV, obviously -- I don't have a list of the TV shows I've watched (yet, though I am thinking about starting one). But with movies, it does, and it's been a big factor in why I have not watched many short films over the years. The lack of access to them combined with their incompatibility with my lists has made it easy for me just to give them a miss, to use the Australian lingo.
Taipei Suicide Story is not a short film. I think we would agree that 46 minutes is too long for a short -- though I note that IMDB lists The Astrology of Pandemics as a short at 42 minutes. IMDB does not give TSS that same designation, but that could just be inconsistency in their approach.
However, there could be something to that 45-minute line of demarcation. When once struggling with the length of the Buster Keaton classic Sherlock Jr., I decided that as long as a silent film was at least 45 minutes it could earn inclusion on my lists. Length standards were different back then, and I didn't want to categorically dismiss films made before 1930. The new freedom enabled me to add Sherlock Jr. to my lists and to give it the full five stars it so richly deserves.
There is a similar potential motivating factor behind Taipei Suicide Story. See, it is by far the best thing I've seen so far in 2021.
Just to give you a little plot, it has to do with a clerk who works at a Taipei suicide hotel, where guests check in and they never check out. Or sometimes they do check out, if staring into the void causes them to reconsider their course of action. But each morning cleaning teams move from room to room, hauling out bodies and wiping down blood spatters, wearing full PPE. Except in one room where a woman has been in a state of uncertainty all week, having hung a maintenance sign on her door to dry to draw out her limbo until she can make a decision either way.
As my wife pointed out, upon my grumbling about the category confusion, it doesn't need to be any longer than it is, for what it is. And she's absolutely right. It tells the story it needs to tell in the exact amount of time it needs to tell it, which allows it to invest us in the characters, and all other things a good feature film does well. If it had stayed another 25 minutes to push it into clear feature length territory, maybe it wouldn't seem like such a tight little bit of melancholy loveliness.
So if I were ranking Taipei Suicide Story, it would go straight to the top of the list of 12 titles I've seen so far this year. It would be an easy call.
Now, to decide whether I should actually do that.
Having so recently argued against Small Axe -- more passionately on the grounds of it being TV than it being too short -- I find myself flirting with hypocrisy by talking about Taipei Suicide Story (which is shorter than all the Small Axe movies by 15 minutes) as a movie I want to rank for 2021. The difference, of course, is that I was making that Small Axe argument in the abstract, not having seen those movies, while the more tangible nature of my current situation allows me to make the opposite argument. The same thing probably would have happened with Small Axe. No one who watched them decided not to make them eligible for ten best lists, and fearing I would do the same, I just decided not to watch them in time.
But with my wife's urgings and my own need for something short on Wednesday night, not to mention a closing window of opportunity to watch it before the Slamdance movies went offline, I have indeed seen this movie, and now I've got a Big Question on my hands.
I can tell you that in the short run, I have not added it to any lists. Then again, I have not updated my lists since about Tuesday, meaning they do not yet show my earlier viewing of The Lady from Shanghai (speaking of things with references to China in the title) either. Until I have actually omitted TSS from a running list that includes movies I saw after it, I haven't really made up my mind, I guess.
Not to say that doing that will make up my mind either. I can go back and add it later. But will I?
If I'm trying to rationalize in favor of adding the movie to my lists, including my 2021 running rankings, I could say the following: "A film has to be one of two things: a short or a feature film. If it's not one, it has to be the other." And there's a certain logic to that. We don't have a third way of categorizing films, and I think we've agreed that a 46-minute film ceases to be a short. So in this scenario it would have to be a feature.
But maybe Taipei Suicide Story just breaks the mold, and forces us to consider whether a third category is necessary -- and whether these categories will even mean anything ten years from now when fewer and fewer films appear in the theater. That's the big argument in the other direction, which is that this movie has no good venue for playing to the public. Forty-six-minute films just don't play in cinemas, at least not unless they are packaged with another 46-minute film, though the odds that two such odd ducks would be thematically compatible with one another are pretty slim. Simply put, people don't make 46-minute films because they want to have some prospect for recouping their investment. When a theatrical screening is not an option for that, it means you may have a highly unprofitable film.
But as all movies go increasingly to streaming venues, it may start to matter less how long they are, just how good they are. How many features have you seen, even shorter features, that had 20 minutes more content than they needed to reach their maximum potential impact? Instead of padding itself out with B plots or drawing out interactions to a point where they become banal rather than poignant, Taipei Suicide Story just embraces the shorter running time. Should we punish it for that?
Maybe KEFF, whoever he or she is, just has a more enlightened view on all of this than the rest of us do. And as I was looking at KEFF's credits on IMDB, I noticed one other directing credit: 2019's Secret Lives of Asians at Night. Which is listed as a short, whereas TSS is not.
If it's good enough for IMDB, maybe it's good enough for me? Maybe?
I suspect I will continue thinking about this for a while.
Hey, at least it's not TV. *shudder*
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