The Digitally Filmed Pizza Revolution

Andrew Rusin

What is the essence of cinema?  What subjects should be its concern?  It is a debate literally as old as the medium itself.  As the formalists would have it, cinema’s artistry lies in the ways in which it transforms reality to reflect the filmmaker’s vision, particularly by means of editing and composition; theirs is a cinema of rhetoric and consequently of spectacle.  The realist theorists, conversely, advocated for a cinema of revelation and contemplation, believing passionately in the medium’s unique capacity to lay bare reality in its uncorrupted purity and thus to, in practice, illuminate the quotidian beauty of everyday life.

But what if there were a Third Way?  What if it were possible to formulate a universal precept for precisely what cinema ought to do—a single, transcendent definition of the medium’s essence?  An impending Chicago film festival may very well have found the answer: pizza.

What else?  Yes, it is the moving photography of pizza which is to be cinema’s final calling.  Think about it.  What brings people together like the movies?  Pizza.  What brings people together like pizza?  The movies.  Follow this tautological road, and you shall reach the truth.

Whether you want to participate in this ongoing digital film revolution or merely observe it, come to the Hungry Brain on Tuesday, November 16th at 9 p.m. for the Pizza Film Festival.

The festival is currently accepting submissions of pizza-related movies.  If you want to submit your film but are concerned that it isn’t pizza-related, don’t worry; the criteria are fairly loose.  Only a portion of the approximately 15 shorts that will screen deal explicitly with the food.

“What I love is that some of the films are about pizza, and some just use pizza as a prop in the background,” says festival organizer Tia Ayers, who has no relation to Bill Ayers or, by that logical, to President Obama, but she does have a relation to pizza.  “As an example, my short film Dine & Dash is about two guys who order a pizza but can’t find their wallets when it arrives.  Michael Sanchez and Kevin Lee’s short Dummy is just about a guy at a costume shop.”

At the festival’s “press conference,” master of ceremonies C.J. Toledano goes a step further and says that you simply have to insert a random pizza graphic into your film in order to qualify.

How did the Pizza Film Festival come to be?  “[It] actually started as a joke,” Ayers says.  “I made a short film with pizza in it, and I was having a hard time getting it into festivals.  I started imagining a world where pizza is not respected in cinema and how great it’d be to have a festival that appreciates it.”

In addition to pizza at the festival, which is free to attend, there will also be prizes (although, as we all know, pizza is the best prize there is).  A number of sponsors have provided gift certificates that will be raffled off that night.

But suppose you don’t particularly like pizza (i.e., are insane).  Why should you bother coming?  Ayers addresses these concerns: “If you like comedy and short films, you might still appreciate the festival.  But if you have some kind of psychological problem with seeing, discussing or being around pizza, then this is not the event for you.”