Competitive filmmaking is an odd idea, but a film competition whereby a winner is chosen according to the number of views amassed by the contestants is downright absurd. If cinematic excellence equated to ‘bums on seats’, Avatar would be the greatest film ever made. Alas, the entrants in the bafflingly ill-conceived Cambridge Campus Moviefest 2011 are fated to endure such misrepresentation.

Students are allocated a seven-day period in which to put together a five-minute short, to be showcased online. The film with the highest view count by November 20th is deemed the winner and screened at a Grand Finale in London. A list of current rankings, regardless of students’ filmmaking prowess, generates a self-perpetuating bias whereby the leading film, currently an absurdist piece called One Man’s Part, is likely to attract further views based purely on its position atop the leaderboard.

Thus the rankings are a little skewed, with the current leader barely distinguishable in quality from the excellent last-placed satire, News Wasp, and the sublime-to-ridiculous array in between. Not to disparage the Homerton Filmmaking Society’s One Man’s Part, an ambitious homage to Stoppard and Beckett in which the nature of reality is blurred into a surreal circular rote. While the premise is good, some conspicuously poor performances exacerbate what is already an insipid dialogue, and those were five minutes I really could have done without.

Collectively, the films are to be congratulated for their cinematography, and considering the budgeting constraints, they are aesthetically accomplished (one assumes the production teams to be populated by arts students). There are signs, however, that the plague of awkward silences and offbeat shots that has beleaguered cinema in general is infecting the artists of tomorrow. The inexplicably bad A Man So Gentle, That He Could Not Walk, doesn’t trouble us with themes or dialogue; rather it is affectation incarnate, complete with disembodied masks and floating umbrellas. Similarly superfluous offerings arise in the form of sixth-placed Found, an unambiguously dreadful compilation of footage from around Cambridge one can only assume was put together in some kind of post-Cindies stupor, and Bulbhead, of which the title really says it all.

Ranked fifth, Julia Lichnova’s micro-biopic My Name is Joe Rubini is a gratuitous account of the Faustian ramblings of a chain-smoking musician one assumes to be ‘kind of a big deal’. Beautifully shot, but angst-ridden to the point of satire, this is either an accomplished Spinal Tap-esque spoof, or five minutes of indulgent fawning - I can’t quite tell. As a reflection on the theatre of rock and roll, however, it is poetic far beyond the impotence of most of its rivals.

The current runner-up, Tale of a Blind Man with a Camera Head, conjures a similar melancholy, this time in the form of a shrewdly-conceived fable on perception, in which a blind man is able to see the world through the lens of a disposable camera. Shot entirely through lens itself, this piece cleverly circumvents the tackiness of budget equipment with the raw authenticity of a world behind plastic, asking whether it is a world worth seeing at all.

Far and away the best, however, if we are in the business of pitting one film against another, is Patrick Sykes’ Motivational Speakers. A study of the compulsive tendency to escape, we hear three personal accounts: a believer, an obsessive nail-biter and an actress. There are no gimmicks, no embellishment; this is an expressive paradigm in which five minutes carry the weight of an entire feature-film. The quiet glory of the church lies incongruous with the visceral ignominy of the nail-biter; neurosis and faith are ironically aligned in soothing a common anguish.

Absurdly misplaced in seventh position, this piece never overtly grabs at success, but represents a triumph of pure emotive force over pseudo-intellectual snobbery and dodgy camerawork.  In an era where power and YouTube hits go hand in hand, one can only hope that with a last-minute rush of interest, justice in the student cinema scene may be restored.

To view the films yourself and vote in the competition visit http://www.campusmoviefest.com/festivals/303-university-of-cambridge