UPix makes a mini-Cannes in SSS 114

By Georgina Cullman

"Yale is an Ivy League school that wants to be an art school," Ross Wachsman ES '02, co-president of UPix, explained. "And because we're so liberal arts, there's a huge demand to actually make things." And UPix offers Yalies just that—access to the training and resources to make original films as they would at an art school. Accordingly, their membership has ballooned to more than 50 students, with an e-mail list of 300.

Membership in the association costs $10 a year and grants you free admission to screenings. UPix has also begun to offer its members workshops on how to shoot a 16mm film. "It's an extraordinary opportunity," Elizabeth Newman, TD '02, co-president of UPix, boasted. "Freshmen and other new UPix members with absolutely no film experience can learn how to create a short, and, in just three months, have their finished product screened."

The product of these UPix workshops is three "short shorts," one-and-a-half-minute sequences made by neophytes. They will be shown, along with nine other short films (varying in length from a couple minutes to almost 20) at the Fall Film Festival this weekend on Fri., Dec. 1 and Sat., Dec. 2.

UPix is also laying the groundwork for the Editing Club. "I loved editing. Editing was the most exciting part!" exclaimed Gabe Green-berg, MC '04, a new member. Thanks to the efforts of Caitlin Taylor, PC '03, and Laura Horak, CC '03, Calhoun College will be the home to a complete digital video-editing studio with Final Cut Pro. Right now, only senior film studies majors have access to Yale's editing room. The new Calhoun facility will be open to any Yale student. UPix films will no longer have to be edited on students' personal computers, which frequently crash due to the huge amount of memory that visual media requires.

Move over, Sundance

Newman explained, "In these past two years UPix has been experiencing something of a renaissance, holding film festivals at the end of each semester to showcase the work that we have done in the preceding months as well as the work of other student filmmakers." This fall's festival is a testament to that renaissance. It has unprecedented stylistic variety—including color, animation, and the first synch-sound endeavor for UPix in the last 10 years, Wachsman's own Emotional Vacation.

Wachsman and Newman underscore the dual nature of UPix; they hope the group will act both as a catalyst for the creation of film at Yale and also as a resource and builder for the University's filmmaking community. To achieve the former, UPix brings members of the film industry to Yale for Masters' Teas. Most recently they brought Frances MacDormand to campus. "Film is a collaborative art form," Wachsman said. "We're hoping to get together a community of filmmakers at Yale, people we can depend on while we're here and also when we get out in the real world."

This weekend's festival will run approximately one hour. Both UPix members' works and others are included. The only color live action film in the festival, Two Degrees, is a clever and whimsical little film. Sarah Burns, PC '04, the creator, keeps it simple—the subject matter is just a couple of friends having tea on a very cold day—while doing a great job of using color to make every frame a piece of eye candy. She gracefully limits her scope, which permits great clarity but very little action. There is a nice twist at the end, which ties into the original jazz score that serves as the film's soundtrack.

Newman will screen two of the shorts she made this summer at the New York Film Academy. The Family Room, she said, shows "the necessary reversal of roles between child and parent when a family breaks apart." While shot well and intelligently realized, the short feels like a montage of stills rather than that of a moving picture. More successful is Seed, a surreal allegory for "the guilt that one feels and the inability to let go after the death of a loved one." Seed is beautifully rendered, reaching the full potential of the medium. Newman manipulates the camera to reveal much about her characters with an economy of shots.

Caitlin Taylor's, PC '03, Postcard was also shot in a class at the New York Film Academy. She traces the range of emotional possibilities contained in one woman's morning. The short is lighthearted and funny, and Taylor does a good job of making the audience identify with Postcard's heroine by revealing both her insecurities and her ability for showing delight.

Magnum Opus?

Emotional Vacation is the product of two years' labor by Wachsman. In his first attempt at synch-sound, Wachsman not only directed and wrote the film, but also designed the sound, wrote the soundtrack, and composed the score. He explained, "I wanted [Emotional Vacation] to have the same depth as that encryption-type puzzle poetry of the Middle Ages, but at the same time I wanted it to have a visceral effect, which is why the cohesiveness of the sound was so important to me."

The film follows Bern Russell, "a regular Joe anti-hero," during the days following his mother's death in a car accident that also put his sister in a coma. Momentarily numbed by the shock of the tragedy, Bern tries to escape his horror through constant external stimuli. He chews piece after piece of gum and cannot be without books or TV for too long. The majority of the film focuses on Bern's visit to his sister in the hospital and what happens when there are no more pieces of gum in his Extra Plen-T-Pak and he can't turn on the TV.

Wachsman gives this "long short" an impressive feel. He sets up Bern's surreal plane of existence and invites the audience in. The lines between fantasy and reality are blurred as Bern drifts away from quotidian life because of the trauma of the situation. All the people that Bern encounters are grotesque. The hospital receptionist blinks her doll-like false eyelashes and informs him in a sing-song voice that he cannot go in to see his sister now because she is getting sponged. Wachsman clearly intends for the audience to be as unsettled as Bern is while visiting his sister in the hospital. Wachsman mostly succeeds in producing the uneasy laughter that he courts, but unfortunately he sometimes lapses into pretentious posturing that undermines the rest of Emotional Vacation. His ambition is laudable but at times alienates the audience.

UPix has already begun production on their main project for next semester, but for now it's content to usher you into the comfortable chairs of SSS 114. So sit back, relax, and enjoy all that undergraduate creativity has unleashed.

Photo by Cindy Sherman.

Collage and graphic by Sarah England.

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