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Clnemocracy
Denver, Colorado
August 25, 2008
Elections are fodder for speculation, commentary, and squabble - eliciting much the same sort of banter as artistic competitions. And the sentence "This is an election year" can certainly signal populist artistic responses to the political climate and process, such as the Partisan Project and Art the Vote. So, while innovative, it also seems natural that the 2008 Democratic National Convention's host committee teamed up with the Denver Film Society to sponsor an open-source film competition of shorts, apdy named Cinemocracy.
Cinemocracy entrants responded in five minutes or fewer to the question, "How do you define democracy?" Filmmakers then uploaded their videos to cinemocracy.org with viewers posting on-line votes and comments from March 15 through August 15. Videos with the top ten votes were then screened at the Cinemocracy Rocks: Film, Music, Mountains Festival at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, the opening night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Given the short format, Cinemocracy participants could have easily emulated the overly simplified rhetoric of our country's political mouthpieces. Recently, there have even been competitions for 3-minute shorts, nearly redefining the short genre into something akin to a truncated infomercial. Despite the short shorts and a few hackneyed slogans ("democracy is government for...