2007 SUNDANCE SHORT! I’m thankful we’re given plot descriptions with the short films, otherwise, with most of the films presented, I’d be lost. With “To Whom it May Concern” I was utterly lost as to what the entire point was. Why is this woman taking pictures of herself? Why is she setting her tripod up silently and taking pictures? Why do we keep cutting to her in a protest against the Iraq war? What are the parallels of taking pictures of yourself in lingerie and protesting? I have no f*****g clue. Personally, I’d like to ask McCabe what the entire point of the film is, and what she meant to accomplish with this task and really long piece of filmmaking. At only thirteen minutes, I sat hoping it would end, and even checked my clock a couple of times.
Why would any of this be coherent? Why is taking pictures in landmarks, and national parks poetic when paired with carnage of protesting the war? Why should we care? Regardless, “To Whom it May Concern” is a brutally sloppy, and utterly asinine attempt at a poetic statement and attempting to align it with world events that have inflicted violent protests and the like. With a better editing job, it may have been quite the surreal statement. But the end result is a pretty asinine project that really leaves us clueless. Stringing a bunch of words together doesn’t make it a song, nor an artist, as Kurt Cobain taught us, and stringing images together doesn’t automatically make it a poetic statement.
