A striking feature of this year’s Singapore International Film Festival was the variety of ways of thinking about and presenting short films demonstrated in the programme. Given that a lack of effective screening circuits – and a general lack of respect for the form – limits the audience for and influence of short films, filmmakers are having to devise other strategies to get their work seen. At one end of the scale, a filmmaker can string a series of shorts together to form a kind of pseudo-feature, as attempted by Azharr Rudin with his Amber Sexalogy (discussed elsewhere in this issue). At the other, it is often tempting for a director to try to adapt a successful short film into a feature. This throws up various questions about the nature and purpose of short films and features. The tensions are nicely demonstrated by the examples of two Singaporean filmmakers who have both undertaken the process: Royston Tan, whose feature film 15 (pictured twice below), which brought him international acclaim in 2003, was based on a short film he had made a year earlier; and Kan Lume, whose debut feature The Art of Flirting premiered at SIFF last month.
The key factor which conditions all filmmakers eventually to focus on features is of course screening viability. Despite the fact that a great number of prominent filmmakers have made short films at some point in their career, somehow nobody has ever successfully conceived of a system of screening short films that can pay its own way. Consequently theatres are reluctant to show them and it remains more or less impossible to either gain attention or make a living as a short film maker. As Royston succinctly puts it: “There are very few short film venues, so you cannot achieve as much as you can with a feature. A feature gives a lot more exposure to the topic. That helps.”
Royston is well known as an ardent proponent of the short film as an art form in its own right, so it might seem inappropriate that he chose to rework a film he had initially conceived as a self-contained short. 15, a story about the kind of foul-mouthed, nihilistic teenagers that Singaporean culture likes to pretend don’t exist, was critically admired and received positive audience response at festivals around the world: in short, it was a great advert for the short film medium. Ultimately his decision to expand it comes down to the afore-mentioned dilemma: the film’s form restricted its exposure. Having made a film he felt was important and valuable, he wanted as many people as possible to see it. Few would begrudge him that, though he still comes across as somewhat apologetic about it: “Every time I do a short film, there’s always a story behind it fully maximising the medium, because a short and a feature are totally different,” he explains. “A short should never ever be expanded into a feature. That’s what I honestly feel: if it’s meant to be a short you should just stop there. The medium of the short is important, it’s beautiful; unlike other filmmakers who say that a short is a rehearsal for a feature, I’ve never thought so. But I did an expansion of 15 for a different reason, because there was a need to expand the story for a wider audience. Ideally I would just stop with the short, but I had filmmakers from all over the world telling me that the film ended with a comma, and it would be good if I could expand the subject matter and complete the story. It took me a long time to decide what to do but when the money came along … [I figured] that should be the way to do it.”
Accepting that the short version of 15 could be extended to follow the story to a later stage, Royston decided to use the short as the opening third of the feature film without making any changes to it. He had extra footage left over from the short film shoot, but proceeded to develop the narrative with new footage, on the principle that if the cut footage didn’t belong in the short version, it wouldn’t be right to try to force it back into the new version of the film: “In order to extend [the story], I introduced two new characters, to add a part two and a part three to the existing part one,” he recalls. “It follows them through two years, what happened after [the short film ended]. I shot all brand new footage as I didn’t want to cram [existing surplus footage] into the film. I gave it a new dimension by adding new characters, in some cases interacting with old characters coming out of the short. I didn’t want to re-edit because I feel I’m recycling, just trying to force a feature out.”
By contrast, Kan Lume freely admits that ‘forcing a feature out’ was exactly what he wanted to do with The Art of Flirting. This micro-budget DV film crosses the improvisational script development technique of a Mike Leigh film with the provocation and loose handheld camerawork of Lars von Trier to create a story of an intense relationship which is snuffed out as quickly as it is ignited. Originally screened as a twenty-minute short in late 2005, this early version appears to have been conceived not only as a self-contained piece but also as an eye-catching preview of a longer work. Kan’s approach to the film was deep-rooted, though he maintained an ability to react to the film’s circumstances. “[Expanding the film] was not really about palatability,” he admits. “I was just thinking about how desperate I was to reach the 80 min mark – it’s like a marathon I needed to complete. When I started making short films, my sole intention was to work towards making a feature film. So I always saw short films as a stepping stone. Royston doesn’t see it that way because he sees it as an art form in itself. But I see short films as a stepping stone for myself to make a feature.
“But I had been making short films for two-and-a-half years and I did not see myself as ready to make a feature – at least not in the sense of engaging a scriptwriter and going through the whole [industry] process. I didn’t think I was ready. So The Art of Flirting was something I stumbled upon; it wasn’t something I planned. I feel that for most people their first film is accidental, and that’s how it was for The Art of Flirting. I was actually thinking of another film with three stories, because that’s how short filmmakers often progress – they have three short stories that become a feature. So that was the plan. But plans never work out … But one of the stories was about a break-up and when I met Marilyn [Lee, who plays the film’s female protagonist, Lynn] she was talking about a break up.”
Thus a scenario began to take shape in which a female journalist, Lynn, and a male sports star, Leonard, meet for an interview which develops into a flirting session and then an intimate relationship. However, the form of the film remained indeterminate. The film was developed from a skeletal script during rehearsals in which the two actors were encouraged to add details and feelings from their own lives in order to flesh out the characters and their predicaments. The film then evolved further during four days of shooting, during which Kan frequently threw extra complications into the mix in order to test his cast’s reactions. When the shoot was over, Kan found himself with four hours of footage and the freedom to cut it in any way he wanted. It may seem strange, then, that the film he ended up premiering in Singapore last year was a mere twenty minutes long. Looking at the reaction to the film helps explain why he might have done so.
Maybe it’s something about Singaporean audiences, but the screening of I Promise, as the short was titled, provoked one of the most confused – hostile, even – responses to any film I’ve seen. The film turns on the moment when, after a few days of romantic and intellectual bliss, Lynn is awakened one morning by a text message from Leonard telling her, with no explanation at all, that he ‘needs some space’. Her subsequent anguish is the counterpoint to the tender, intimate scenes of the first half of the film. It is fairly obvious that the point of the film is to show the frustrating and painful way in which we often treat people who have let us into their confidence and into their hearts – and how difficult it is to ever really know someone – but the audience at this screening seemed unable to accept that Kan would neglect to explain Leonard’s motivation. They also had a hard time coming to terms with the film’s greatest asset: it’s singularly intimate hand-held camerawork which manages instinctively to find the facets of a scene which usually remain unseen.
Though a calm and soft-spoken personality, Kan is clearly someone who delights in provoking extreme reactions in people, and in this particular reaction he found a reason to go back to his film and think again about the different ways in which film can make viewers respond. So how did the form of the new eighty-minute version alter the perception of the film? Restoring certain cut footage to the film inevitably alters the context and meaning of a film, and Kan exploited this cleverly. By restoring a lengthy scene in which Leonard opens up to Lynn about a past relationship which ended badly, and which he has never really gotten over, Kan effectively challenges the audience: ‘OK, now I’ve told you why he did it. How do you feel now?’ But revealing Leonard’s motivation only muddies the waters further and, unsurprisingly, the audience response to the feature version has been just as uneasy as it was to I Promise last year.
“The spirit of the short version is different from the feel of the long version,” Kan explains. “The short version contains very strong provocation, it’s very angst, it’s almost angry because you don’t get to hear Leonard’s side of the story, you just see him in black & white – a bad guy – so it’s a very angry conclusion. The longer version is more an observation piece, it’s calmer and we take more time. When we cut the short version, we made sure we were in an angry state, we worked ourselves up. We’d make sure that if we’d had a bad day we’d go and cut it. If we were happy, we’d leave it alone. Film is an interesting form in that sense: it captures an emotion [in more than one way]. The Art of Flirting, on the other hand, had a kind of lulling, calming effect, more irony, we allowed more grey areas. People may react that Leonard is someone to be sympathised with because he’s been hurt before. This is exactly what we were going for. Conflicting points of view based on each viewer’s experience of life.”
It seems reasonable to assume that form follows tone in this sense as an eighty-minute film has greater scope to provoke a wider range of perspectives, while a more straightforwardly angsty film might be liable to alienate its audience if strung out to feature length. A short film, by contrast, can benefit from a punchy, one-note approach, and as Kan points out, “People who love short films may detest the 80 minute version because it’s meandering, it doesn’t give easy answers. Often as audiences we are lazy we want the filmmaker to tell us something, but I just don’t want that for a feature film. If you want that from a feature film, there are always Hollywood films and nobody does those better.”
Royston agrees that it is both unrealistic and undesirable to try to replicate the feel of a short film in a feature version. As such, he perceives very different responses to the two versions of 15. “I think it’s really subjective for the audience,” he muses. “In the UK people like the long version; in Singapore people like the short version. In Singapore people seem to like that the feature has no story at all in the first half-hour because it’s so fast-paced. That was actually the short version. But in Europe it was the opposite case – they like the later part of the film because it’s the deliberate slow pace which brings out the story. The first part is just fluff! I think it’s a different perspective as to how you choose to see this film.”
This also raises the question of what the life of a short film becomes once it has been, for want of a better word, ‘superceded’ by a feature version. Again it depends on a filmmaker’s overall philosophy. As a committed advocate of shorts, Royston is optimistic about continued interest in his short: “I think different crowds will love the short version and the feature version. They cater for different markets, and it depends on how festivals want to handle the film. Both versions of 15 have run in many festivals and the short version has actually won more awards.”
Kan, on the other hand, is more philosophical about the life of I Promise. I suggest to him that screening both versions together might be an interesting idea, though of course the opportunities for doing so will always be very limited. And, as he points out, there remains limited enthusiasm among viewers for viewing short films in theatres. The outcome suggested by all this is a little underwhelming, though perhaps necessarily realistic: “Perhaps [the best venue for the films is] on DVD. If I get a chance to choose, I would probably just want [the short version] to be an extra feature on the DVD. I mean no disrespect to short films, and [I realise that] you don’t get so much discussion because people watch DVDs at home alone. But I don’t know many places that put a high value on short films and it would definitely change my perspective if I did.”
It’s a fair point: if making a short film a DVD extra might seem to devalue it as a piece of cinema, at least it can serve to get the film out their and available for people to see, if only as an afterthought. In the meantime new ideas are needed on how to raise the screening profile of short films. Due to its proliferation of young filmmakers, and because a lack of effective established cultural authorities encourages the creation of interested schemes and organisations, I feel any useful strategies are as likely to come from Southeast Asia as anywhere else. But until then short film makers will continue to look for opportunities to develop shorts into features, no doubt providing further opportunities for the processes outlined here to be examined further.
Robert Williamson
