While some question movies’ position in the art world, they are definitely a difficult medium to create. But because it’s such an accessible art form, film is extremely popular among young artists. To recognize this, St. Paul Academy and Summit School’s Film Club hosts an annual student movie night. The sixth such event took place on the evening of April 10th.
Film Club usually gives the SPA Student Movie Award, or SPASMA, to the favorite film of the judges, a group that ranges from faculty members to parents to visiting artists. They announced the winner of the St. Paul Academy Student Movie Award, or SPASMA, a week after the films aired. The Doll House won the award, garnering praise from Film Club “for all-around excellence in narrative, suspense, editing, sound, and costume.” Opponent The Great Cat Spy received the Sound and the Furry Award “for clever cultural commentary and humor.”
The submitted movies and winners were The Doll House, a horror flick with silent-film tendencies by freshmen Anna Biggs, Calla Saunders and Maggie Vlietstra and featuring Saunders’ younger sister Carenna. Junior Michael Wilkens and sophomore Olivia Fitch created The Great Cat Spy, a pun-heavy horror satire. Viewers teetered on the edges of their seats for most of the night. To fill the night, Findlay showed Eoin Small’s 2008 horror film The Hand, Nat Bear’s goofy 2011 action flick Nerf Wars and Kaia Findlay’s creepy 2012 drama Clementine, making up the first half of the event. Small’s film featured the director and leading man chopping off his own hand, Kaia Findlay’s ended with a murder, and even Bear’s comedy had a body count to rival any big-budget action film.
The lack of new films this year is unusual, but not entirely surprising. “When we announce it, I almost always hear from somewhere between ten and twenty different individuals that want to make movies,” Findlay said, “but obviously with the pressures of time around SPA, plans don’t always go the way people want.” He attributes this year’s particularly small crop to the lack of promotion and to the fact that for the first time, Film Club did not hold workshops for aspiring filmmakers, a staple of previous years’ competitions.
This year’s submissions began with The Doll House, which caught the audience’s attention with its tense, fast-moving tale of an abused toy returning to haunt its owner. The film has no dialogue, which only adds to its fatalistic tone and nail-biting horror. “We were a little worried that it would turn out as sort of a funny horror,” Biggs said. “So I’m glad that I’ve heard it creeped some people out,” Vlietstra added.
The Doll House was followed up by the semi-satirical The Great Cat Spy, which came to Wilkens first as a pun on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. “I had a fantasy about making this movie,” Wilkens said, “and during Spring Break I decided ‘you know what, I’m actually going to do it.’” He enlisted Fitch as a codirector, co-writer and actress, and the result was a bizarre, pun-heavy locked-room thriller with occasional semi-intentional goofs, including green blips on the screen said to represent Gatsby’s green light and a phantom-like figure in the mirror cast by cameraman, senior Asher Szachowicz. “The most fun of the whole thing was watching it afterward and realizing what I’d created,” Wilkens said.
