At the risk of sounding ignorant, the films in the “Utopia Propaganda” screening of the Rencontres Internationales festival were easier to watch than those from “Link/Unlink.” Don’t get me wrong—I love art films, and the films from “Link/Unlink” were poignant and beautiful, but as I sat in the Entrepôt theater once again last night, I was much more drawn to this second round of films.

Paul Rowley and David Phillips’ Commonwealth still lacked a discernable story, but the starkness and symmetry in the images was breathtaking, and the simple cello score drew my attention. It was obviously very digitized: nothing real could be so perfect. I suppose this was the point of the “Utopia” part of the title of the screening, which is what drew me to it in the first place: the idea of a Utopia, of perfection, is an interesting one, especially today when our attention is so drawn to the imperfect parts of our society and our world. Rowley and Phillips used images of starkly perfect trees, birds, and two-toned red and black images within the rest of the film to show this perfection. However it was done, it was mesmerizing.

Mark Boswell’s The St. Petersburg Paradox focused much more on the “Propaganda” aspect of the screening. It almost played like a feature film—because parts of it were. Boswell took sections of familiar movies and even tapings of rock songs to compile his film, with an eerily deep voice narrating and subtitles that reminded me of Woody Allen’s exploration of subtext. It was very political in nature, but I’ve come to expect that of films shown here. While it wasn’t the propaganda aspect that drew me to this screening, Boswell’s film was one of my favorites: drawing attention to propaganda in America has gotten a little bit bland, but Boswell’s new take on propaganda in general was refreshing and new. I think this may be my favorite part of attending an art film festival—the refreshing novelty of it all.

The films of “Link/Unlink” were, for the most part, documentaries, where the filmmaker brought a camera to the setting and began filming whatever he saw. For this, the obvious choice is a hand-held camera, and so a lot of the shots were shaky, which gave the films a lot of raw realism.

The focus of the “Utopia Propaganda” films, however, seemed to be more on the editing and on creating a cohesive piece of film. Whereas the medium for the “Link/Unlink” films tended towards raw footage, the filmmakers of “Utopia Propaganda really took advantage of the editing room, and because of the tightness of the editing, I, as an audience member, concentrated less on the technical aspects of the films, and more on the stories.