Art, if it's doing its job, is supposed to evoke an emotional response. But rarely is that idea applied so directly as it is with this year's Fear No Film festival, the movie component of the Utah Arts Festival starting Thursday. Topher Horman, the new coordinator of Fear No Film, has arranged the 63 short films into programs not by subject matter or genre, but by the emotion each film is likely to elicit in the viewer: "Divided," "Empty," "Happy," "Reoriented," "Spectated," "Subcultured" and "Unsettled.
" (Sounds like the existentialist's seven dwarves.) "There's an art to programming, just like a movie itself - the flow is so important," Horman said. "I just tried to hit one emotion, and group according to one emotion, as opposed to having the audience experience spread out over a range of emotions in each screening.
I guess I just wanted to see if it would work, and if the audience would be able to experience one community emotion." For example, he said, "the 'Unsettled' movies are extremely unsettling, emotionally. The visuals, they're not too extreme or abstract.
I think the vision of each of those filmmakers is portraying a world or an experience that will be unsettling to many members of the audience." And while most film festivals gear short-film compilations to hardcore movie buffs, Horman has to take into account the flowing nature of the Utah Arts Festival crowds - keeping programs down to around an hour each. "I want this to fold nicely into the larger arts-festival experience," he said.
The Fear No Film Festival is screened in the City Library Auditorium and is free - even without a ticket to the Utah Arts Festival. Horman, who took over the Fear No Film programming duties from artist Amy Caron, took an equally unconventional route to soliciting entries to the fourth annual event. "I worked the Internet very, very hard," he said.
He posted applications on a MySpace page and on the filmmakers' clearinghouse Web site Withoutabox.com, in such adjective-filled categories as "clever narrative short," "inspiring documentary short" and "mind-blowing animated short." The explanatory text for the documentary category consisted solely of a quote by Alfred Hitchcock: "In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.
" "There are so many small festivals out there that I tried to set ourselves apart a bit," Horman said. Working the Internet, he received nearly 200 submissions from all over the nation, plus a dozen foreign countries. Films from Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Korea made the cut.
Eighteen shorts are by Utah filmmakers, and Horman said one of the perks of this job has been meeting them. "Our arts scene in Utah and Salt Lake City is so wonderful, yet people don't know each other," Horman said. "The filmmakers in Utah County don't know the filmmakers in Salt Lake, or the filmmakers in Ogden or in St.
Nine Utah-made films will compete in the Utah Short Film of the Year competition - the first such contest since the Utah Short Film Video Festival ended in 2004. Among the competitors are two shorts that played at this year's Sundance Film Festival (the Spy Hop-produced documentary "Mother Superior," and Kohl Glass' World War I drama "Der Ostwind," made at Brigham Young University), and one, Jimmy Martin's "Klaus," that won the 48 Hour Film Project in April. The entries in the Fear No Film program show that, in this day and age, filmmaking is within anyone's reach.
"Now, we're entering a golden era for people who want to put their ideas and their heart and soul up onto a screen. That era, of everybody having an inexpensive computer and a quality inexpensive camera, is allowing people to really run with some guts and desire." Art, if it's doing its job, is supposed to evoke an emotional response.
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