Glasgow Short Film Festival: Time to get Transgressive

“All boring films never be made again.” That’s the gambit adorning the brochure of this year’s Glasgow Short Film Festival (16-20 Mar). As a call to arms, it’s hard to argue with. The slogan’s origin is Nick Zedd’s manifesto for the Cinema of Transgression, a mid-80s film scene that grew out of No Wave cinema and music. As a movement, it was less about boundary pushing, more boundary smashing.

When we catch up with GSFF director Matt Lloyd, he’s in similarly pugnacious form. “I seem to be permanently angry about something or other these days,” he says when we ask about GSFF’s combative brochure cover. “Maybe that’s just the onset of early middle-age, but since the high of the incredible summer of 2014, we appear to be undergoing a period of increasing entrenchment and antagonism at home and abroad.”

The ethos behind the Cinema of Transgression appealed to Lloyd in this context. “They were a loose collection of angry filmmakers arising from a not entirely dissimilar political situation, setting out to shock their audiences out of complacency or apathy, but crucially not taking themselves too seriously either," he says. "We need our preconceptions challenged, but we need a laugh as well.”

“Heroic failures are what I look out for” – Matt Lloyd

Short film seems uniquely suited to this provocative yet playful war cry. Bryan M Ferguson is a filmmaker whose cinema perfectly fits these demands. Caustic Gulp, a brutal and hilarious story of cultdom in Florida, won this year’s Skinny Short Film Competition, and his equally inventive Flamingo, a Ballardian tale of alienation and self-mutilation has its world premiere at GSFF. Ferguson suggests the short form is intrinsically rebellious and anarchic. “I suppose it harkens back to when Jean-Luc Godard theorised that short form is ‘anti-cinema’. What could be more fun than rebelling to prove Godard, a pioneer of experimental cinema with an appetite for mischief himself, wrong?”

Ferguson also notes that shorts, by their very nature, allow their makers to be creative without trying their audience's patience. “You can experiment with storytelling and imagery in a way that I feel could grow tiresome or tedious for an audience if utilised in a longer piece of work,” he suggests.

While short films aren’t under the same narrative constraints of feature length cinema, there's still the problem – albeit to a lesser extent – of financing them, but Lloyd reckons this might even be a virtue. “Budget is the only real limitation I can think of, and in some respects a large budget can be a crippling limitation, as it brings funders breathing down your neck. Freedom from commercial considerations is freedom to innovate. Obviously you can’t do justice to a complex narrative in a short time span, but I’d argue there are short films more profound and complex than 99% of new features.”

When thinking about the films to programme in GSFF, Lloyd doesn’t necessarily look for slickness. “Technique fascinates me, what I value less is technical proficiency.” In other words, Lloyd is more interested in what filmmakers do and how they do it, than how well they do it. “Heroic failures are what I look out for: filmmakers who push themselves to do something different. This term 'short film' is so meaningless really. I’m just looking for moving image works under 50 minutes which explore the potential of the medium, whether through sound, visuals, spatially or temporally.”

One event in the festival specifically dedicated to this type of low budget, creative filmmaking is the showcase of Scottish indie shorts curated by Blueprint, a group who provide, in collaboration with Glasgow Film, a platform for the “truly independent weekend warriors of cinema”. Blueprint’s curator, Hans Lucas, lays out the challenges for such filmmakers: “Access to the film-making apparatus has never been more available. But recognition of and access to the 'industry' remains as guarded as ever.” This doesn’t stop tenacious filmmakers making worthwhile films, however. “There are some remarkable productions below the radar, which rely on people's volition and camaraderie to get made.”

Blueprint’s aim, says Lucas, is to shine a light on such humble products. “It is time DIY, non-institutional film, was recognised as a legitimate part of film culture. We can't all afford expensive educations in film school or have the right cultural capital to access prestigious seats of learning. But Blueprint can exist and demand, at the very least, films made without industry support have access to first class cinemas – which is where those films belong. The films Blueprint programmes are not the afterbirth of cinema. They are the nucleus of an industry.”

Another great asset of short films is the relative speed at which they can be made. “Short film can respond to reality with far greater immediacy and directness than a feature,” notes Lloyd. This is evident in GSFF’s Focus on Syria, which presents work produced within Syria and by Syrian exiles, not in the last few years, but in the last few months! Lloyd points out there is a flipside to this: short film can be more disposable in the long term. But he isn’t sweating this either. “Longevity isn't all it’s cracked up to be,” he says. “Oh dear, I’m back onto my middle-age crisis again, aren’t I?”

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Glasgow Short Film Festival runs 16-20 Mar

The Skinny Short Film Awards, 17 Mar, CCA

Blueprint: Scottish Independent Shorts, 18 Mar, CCA

Brutal Measure: Lydia Lunch and the Cinema of Transgression, 19 Mar, The Glue Factory

Focus on Syria, 20 Mar, CCA