As part of the ScreenLit Festival, Broadway was keen to thank their followers on social networking sites of various flavours by inviting them to a screening of two award winning shorts. In lieu of a compere, we were treated to a Twitter-based introduction, as missives of 140 characters or fewer welcomed us to the event. How modern.
First up was Dog Altogether, a gritty tale of a deeply violent, deeply antisocial man coming to terms with his aggressive tendencies. A perfectly poignant image is created of Joseph, played by Peter Mullan, and his self-imposed ostracisation from society, with the subsequent realisation that this position is untenable as he breaks down in among the racks of clothes in a charity shop. Mullan successfully conveys the character’s oscillation between rage and misery, as he performs various actions – racially abusing a shopkeeper, starting fights in a pub, kicking his dog – without thought of the wider implications. Considine, in Dog Altogether, has made a bleak, beautiful and deeply unsettling vision of a man’s struggle to deconstruct his own identity.
From the distressing to the faintly bewildering, Dog Altogether was followed by Peter Capaldi’s debut as a director with Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life. This delightfully absurdist short sees Kafka labour over the opening sentence of his work, The Metamorphosis, as distractions from around the sinister house prevent him from working. Richard E. Grant plays a fabulous Kafka, exuding all the frustration of the writer, as he is interrupted by an eerie knife collector, a girls’ party and a delightfully amusing lady trying to deliver an insect costume. The absurd nature of the film is largely in keeping with Kafka’s works, with the film offering a parodic, gently amusing, but ultimately fictitious account of how Kafka came to decide Gregor Samsa’s fate.
Alexander Britton
Tags: broadway, screening, screenlit, social networking, twitter
