Roundup: Venice Int'l Film Festival makes big use of cinema technologies

The films competing for the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, which will end here on Saturday, have used all means of cinema technology to tell their stories at best, experts and viewers told Xinhua.

Giuseppe Ferrari, a video maker at Bmovie Italia production company, said he especially appreciated the special editing of 11 Minutes, a film by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski.

The film puts together stories very different one from each other within a single film, Ferrari noted, through an editing which highlights a contrast between the slow storyline of single stories and the hectic storyline of the whole film.

Skolimowski resorted to various technologies to depict a cross-section of urbanites whose lives and loves intertwine in an unsure world where anything could happen at any time, Ferrari pointed out. Thus an unexpected chain of events can seal many fates in a mere 11 minutes.

"For example, the film makes big use of the so-called snorricam, or a camera device rigged to the body of actors which faces them directly so that when they walk they do not appear to move, while everything around them does," he told Xinhua.

"I met all contemporary cinema technologies at this film festival," said Filippo Vallegra, a young filmmaker. Anomalisa, directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, is a stop-motion animation film shot with puppets. The all-star epic Everest by Baltasar Kormakur, out of competition, was screened in 3D as the opening film of the festival.

In particular Heart of a Dog, centered on the beloved rat terrier of director Laurie Anderson -- an American creative pioneer known as writer, director, visual artist and vocalist -- burst open the conventions of the documentary format and the essay film in a collage-like distillation, Vallegra told Xinhua.

Much of the film was shot on a variety of small digital cameras, including iPhone, drone cameras and GoPro. The simple animation employed in the film's surreal opening chapter, in which Anderson dreams of giving birth to Lolabelle (her dog), is the artist's own.

While Anderson was working on the film, her brother sent several cartons filled with 8mm home movies and asked her to transfer them. "And the footage was so beautiful. When you slow down 8mm film it is almost hallucinatory," she told journalists at the festival.

"In fact some parts of films at the festival look like a sort of exercise in style in which directors seem to have fun in giving to audiences a picture of all the expressive possibilities of cinema technologies, from digital to hand camera to slow motion and others," Luigi Mascheroni, a journalist at Il Giornale newspaper, explained to Xinhua.

In an interview with Xinhua, the festival's director Alberto Barbera underlined the vitality brought into cinema by technology. "There are many and very diverse models of cinema, as well as a continuous need for innovation. The cinema of 20th century was dead. There has been the digital revolution," he said.

Some viewers, however, also warned that the big use of modern, low-cost technology is not always a virtue for the film festival.

"Once only those films supported by valuable ideas and significant investments could participate in the competition," a cinema passionate, Stefano Zaffagnini, noted.

"Today many stories which would normally have not a chance are made possible just by easy technology, so that we also watched films that would have not deserved to be here," he stressed. Endit