EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS: FUGITIVE PRAYERS

REVIEW BY TRAVIS KIRBY

Fugitive Prayers, a selection of 9 experimental shorts seeking "the spiritual in the material, the abstract in the concrete.," included films such as How To Pra (Bill Morrison), fugitive l(i)ght (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof) and Naked (Pawel Wojtasik), that were all ten minutes of pure imagery. It also included such bizarre shorts as Phantom Canyon (Stacey Steers) and The Haunted Camera (Nancy Andrews), which appeared to have a vague storyline, but they were impossible storylines to follow. The only decent films of the nine were Market Street (Tomonari Nishikawa), a single-frame study of Market Street in San Francisco through the past 100 years, and Passers-By (Jos de Putter), a film from the Netherlands that captures snippets of bus-stop conversations. The rest of the films were pure torture.