The new kid comes to Columbia this weekend

From just about the moment its Web site finished downloading on my desktop for the first time, the brand-new Journal of Short Film joined concepts like Movioke and Cinemasports in the slowly swelling canon of Things I Cannot Believe I Did Not Think Of First.

I mean, sure--DVD short-film collections are out there: You have got your Full Frame documentaries every year, a couple of volumes of Shorts! and maybe a half-dozen irregular compilations scattered around the indie netherworld, just for starters. But then you have the JSF, which will have its New York City premiere Saturday afternoon at Columbia University's Dodge Hall. First, there is publisher Karl Mechem's quasi-manifesto about "a plurality of voices" and challenging the principle that "corporate media have deemed short film to be commercially unviable." Then, when it arrives in your mailbox in its decidedly low-key mock-up of a leather-bound literary journal, and when you imagine the potential to see a whole shelf of these things--comprising hundreds of peer-reviewed shorts that you would probably never see otherwise--you suddenly get it.

"I just wanted more options for filmmakers and for film watchers," Mechem told The Reeler last weekend from his home base in Columbus, Ohio. "There are just so few methods of distribution for short film. Short film festivals aren't cutting it--there just aren't that many out there. And I get so frustrated with short films online, because there are a lot of them there, but they're totally unjuried, and it's just so hard to know what's good. Inevitably my Internet connection doesn't fight the good fight, and even if it does work, you're a watching it on a tiny little screen.

"And so it's a pretty simple idea. It's modeled off a literary journal, where filmmakers submit their films. And they just want exposure. They want to be published, and there are people out there who would like to see these films. Again, I'm not reinventing the wheel or anything--its model is well-established, but for some reason had not been applied to short films."

Mechem had been mulling the idea for a while before putting out a call for submissions last March. The same Internet that undermined his expectations for short-film viewing effectively pushed his message to all corners of the world, drawing entries from New Zealand to Los Angeles. He brought three discriminating editors aboard and narrowed 100 submissions down to nine for the final product. Virtually all of the films had some sort of prior festival showing, with Jonathan Brough's No Ordinary Sun having claimed this year's Best Short prize at the New Zealand Film Festival and Montreal's Marie-Josee Saint-Pierre's unsettling Post-Partum a veteran of more than two dozen fests and gallery shows.

Sundance Festival veteran Steven Bognar--a fellow Ohioan who discovered the JSF after spotting a flier in Columbus--sent in along his unconventional mother-daughter story Gravel for consideration. "The short film has gone through all these different lives in the last ten years," Bognar told me. "It was kind of dead for a while, and then it was going to be all about the Web and Atom Films and iFilm. And then there were going to be these DVD compilations that were going to come out. But I think they kind of hit too early, because the film industry's understanding of the place of DVD's had yet to kick in--DVD's as something that people would want to collect. And if you could create the kind of collections that people want, then you might have a shot at it. A good short film can be and should be as satisfying a cinematic experience as a feature, just like a good short story can be as satisfying as a novel."

Steven Bognar's Sundance-to JSF short Gravel (Photo: Julia Reichert)

But to get carried away with the model comparisons is to reduce the JSF to a gimmick, which would be a pretty severe misrepresentation. Even as a collection of short films, the Journal unspools with the feeling of a cohesive enterprise with a beginning, middle and an end; its unblinking blend of experimental and narrative films symbolizes the scope of its ambition. Mechem, in fact, acknowledges the first volume's more experimental leanings, which might have seemed neither here nor there after a few successful years and an established following. Yet to some degree, all the rookie risk-taking tends to impugn the JSF's overall quality: After kicking off with Brough's gorgeous, moody Antarctic set piece Sun, nifty shorts like Gravel and Joe Merrell's Corner, Los Angeles share real estate with letdowns like Ashkan Soltani's rough-hewn nightly news escapee Long Struggle and Heidi Mau's rehabilitated student film Back to Misery.

The tenuous balance begs the question: What should such a journal actually be? Can a critical-minded series of short films flourish in this epoch of democratized media? In a way, the JSF represents both the advance AND the decline of the gatekeeper; it is only one outlet for a seemingly infinite pool of short films--the majority of which, by definition of the law of averages, will never possess the aesthetic qualities a larger viewership demands. By that standard, the JSF makes perfect sense as sort of an essential re-establishment of judgment. On the other hand, the technology that makes something like the JSF possible is exactly what a skeptic might propose would undo it; if the filters have been smashed, and worldwide distribution is as simple as creating an online presence, then could the Web remain the windmill to Mechem's Quixote?

Not really, he said. Taken at face value, it might smack of elitism, but I think Mechem's point is this: At least in terms of selectivity, the Internet's nebulousness overrides its utility. And though it probably sounds odd coming from one of the world's 20 million or so bloggers, I cannot say I disagree with him.

"There is this democratic wave of filmmaking," Mechem said. "But the possibility is just endless, and if all these films are being made just with digital equipment and all that, there has to be a way to distribute these. And some of them have to be marvelous work. Perhaps that's kind of optimistic and having a lot of faith in people's creativity, but if something like the Journal, or some other wave of distribution wasn't created, then so much could go to waste. And I can't stand that."

Mechem has shipped copies of the Journal of Short Film everywhere from Taiwan to Germany, and he has received at least a few European entries for Volume Two--for which he is still accepting submissions, if any of you filmmakers out there have anything to share. The least you can do is head uptown for Saturday's screening and release party; overall, the films are worth the trip, and the way film is going these days, you never know if you might be in the room when the next revolution starts.