The long story of the short film as an art in Siirt

The fourth Siirt International Short Film Festival, held this year, concluded with an awards ceremony at the Kızlar Tepesi Amphitheatre. Of the 274 films that entered the festival this year, 118 came from outside Türkiye. There was a very significant increase in foreign participation compared with previous years. In fact, as continuity builds in activities of this kind, participation grows and the quality of the participating films rises considerably as well.

Short film, as an art form in cinema, has become very easy to enter thanks to recently developing technology, and production has grown in proportion to that ease. It has become possible to make films on very small budgets, saving on the large investments that feature-length films require. This has made the field one in which participation is more possible and, to that extent, more democratic.

Yet although technology has made short film so much easier, it is an art form that developed long before this ease existed. Almost immediately after the periods in which the art of cinema developed, people began making these films in anticipation that audiences might take to shorter films. Silent and comedy examples such as Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy are, compared with feature-length films, quite short, and in terms of cinematic technique they are examples that required less investment and less technical apparatus than feature films. On the contrary, under the pressure of conveying more intense messages with their brevity, they were obliged to be far more creative.

A shorter running time is a constraint that forces one to think much harder and to be more creative in order to convey the message. Whereas short films produced under these constraints in the past remained a field that not everyone could easily enter technically, and therefore one of little production but greater impact, today's developing technologies have made it easier to enter the field and have made it possible for more people to become producers in this branch of art. Thus the art of cinema, if we put it with some exaggeration, has begun to become an art in which the number of producers nearly approaches the number of consumers.

Walter Benjamin's famous classic essay on the transformation that the work of art underwent in the modern period, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," is of course now quite inadequate for imagining and expressing this rapid transformation to this extent. But if we follow the path that essay opened, a great deal can of course be said about what is brought and what is taken away by a ground on which the distance between the one who consumes art and the one who produces it has closed so much today. We may perhaps have become somewhat better protected against the danger of fascism that could be produced by an approach that attributes a sort of sanctity (a cult) to art or the artist and then converts that sanctity into a political authority. Art is just art; it is an act accessible to everyone and one that everyone can produce on his own scale.

Hyperart, a postmodern development that Jean Baudrillard spoke of, that is, the excessive production of art, was turning into a kind of trans-aesthetics that renders art meaningless. Trans-aesthetics, that is, the aesthetic turning into its very opposite, deserves attention more for its dimension of the democratization of aesthetics and of protecting us against the fascistic authority an artist might produce than for the dimensions that worried Baudrillard.

The short film sector, along with many other sectors, is now making the work of art excessively accessible in an age that is no longer one of mechanical but of digital reproduction. Both for the one who produces and for the one who consumes.

It is said that nobody has the energy any longer to watch feature-length films, which is actually not so true. The need, or the means, of conveying messages through short snippets of video is very widely used, because there is so much of a flow of messages. But we still cannot say that these are an alternative to ordinary feature-length films. Just as many long serial dramas still get good ratings, well-made films too still reach a significant number of viewers. Hyperart is not missing in this field either.

The importance of the Siirt Short Film Festival is of course beyond all this. When it is related to the city's particular history, its regional position and the fate of the region in other fields, it takes on a distinct meaning. Especially for the past two years it has been timed to coincide with the anniversary of the events of 6-8 October, and seven years ago in these days the region was living under a completely different climate. The very concept of a festival positions its own climate, as a separate message, against that climate.

The fact that, among the 118 foreign films at the festival, there was a considerable participation from Iranian cinema, which deserves to open a distinct space for itself in world cinema, shows that this event has come a long way. Indeed, both the İbrahim Hakkı Hazretleri Special Award (Aseman Tousi, with the film "Sharabi") and the First Prize (Fateme Mohammadi, with the film "Daghi") were won by films from Iran.

Under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the festival, whose president is Baran Mayda of the Anatolian Culture and Arts Assembly Association and whose director is Mahmut Baldemir, was supported by the Governorship, the Municipality, Siirt University and the Dicle Development Agency (DİKA). But in this year's organization the very special and distinct support of the Governor of Siirt, Mr. Osman Hacıbektaşoğlu, must also be noted. His attendance at the awards ceremony and his sincere speech put his own signature on the course and meaning of the festival.

When the festival ended, Baran Mayda had already begun planning the next festival, though before that he is busy with the third Bingöl Short Film Festival, which will again be held this month.