E-Mail This Article to a Friend Brief encounters The Manhattan Short Film Festival BY GERALD PEARY
	Related Links The Manhattan Short Film Festival's official Web site

Here’s the e-mail sentence that freezes my marrow: "Dear critic: I just completed a short film, which I think you will enjoy." No, I probably won’t! Don’t send it to me! Ninety percent of short films are mishaps, sit-com-derived farces awash in frosh-dorm jokes or elephantine melodramas drowning in sophomoric Meaning. Too meager, or too much. I realize novice filmmakers have to learn somewhere. Still, do the wrong people make short movies, just like the wrong people go into politics?

For every hundred decent short stories published, there might be one fairly okay short film. I can count on my hands the short narrative films that really mean something to me.

Here’s my 10-finger list, the Ten Great Live-Action Short Films since the coming of sound.

"The Dentist" (1932), W.C. Fields plugging cavities.

"The Music Box" (1932), Laurel and Hardy delivering pianos.

"Une partie de campagne|A Day in the Country" (1936), Jean Renoir’s tragicomic picnic.

"L’Amore|The Human Voice" (1948), Roberto Rossellini orchestrating an Anna Magnani telephone monologue

"Two Men and a Wardrobe" (1958), Roman Polanski’s Polish film-school absurdist comedy.

"Antoine et Colette" (1962), François Truffaut’s treatise on unrequited love in the anthology L’amour à vingt ans|Love at Twenty.

"A Girl’s Own Story" (1984), Jane Campion’s semi-experimental take on female sexual awakening.

"Life Lessons" (1989), Martin Scorsese on love affairs and high art in the anthology New York Stories.

The New York City episode from Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), in which a taxi-driving ex-clown finds the heart of darkness.

"The Heart of the World" (2000), Guy Maddin’s dizzying retooling of Russian montage as Canadian high comedy.

The above are outstanding. But I had that glum feeling of shorts-as-so-what? as I made my way through this year’s Manhattan Short Film Festival, which screens at the Coolidge Corner September 16-22. Taking place in 53 venues in 30 states, the fest has an interactive gimmick: attendees vote for Best Short and the filmmaker of the national winner gets help in launching a feature. For the 2005 program, 12 shorts were plucked from 504 entries from 30 countries.

The first nine shorts in order had a few pleasing moments and many derivative ones; there was certainly no deserving candidate for a Best of Show. Colin Hutton’s "Gravity," kids with guns in Great Britain, is interestingly shot and appealingly told at only six minutes. Matan Guggenheim’s "Crickets" (Israel) stretches credibility but is courageous in positing an underworld of Jewish youth who gamble money on where the next suicide bomber will strike. There was only one American film and it’s a dud, Francisco Lurite’s "Cuco Gomez-Gomez is Dead!", an LA-set goof with imagery stolen from Eraserhead.

Then, surprise! The last three shorts were genuinely accomplished. Alex Pastor’s "La ruta natural" (Spain) tells a man’s life backwards, as he slides from parenthood to having no children to having no wife, and so on into a second babyhood. John Williams’s "Hibernation" (England) is The Night of the Hunter meets Winnie-the-Pooh, a troubling fantasy about three boys dressed as bears in a tree house. And Andrew Kotatko’s "Everything Goes" (Australia) retells Raymond Carver’s "Why Don’t You Dance?" Eros at a yard sale, and lovely Abbie Cornish, who shines amid the tarnished goods, could be the next Nicole Kidman.