Sunflower Siege Engine (2023, Sky Hopinka)
“It’s time to go home and float breathlessly on currents of willow and pine.” Poetry and activism, photography and text, in a satisfying package. Love the nature with variable-color text overlay, less so when it changes mode to a laptop in dark room, since I am presently watching this short on another laptop in a dark room.
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E-Ticket (2019. Simon Liu)
A blast of images cut into strips, forming hypermotion image quilts – I loved it.
Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope – great article with an intro about lyrical films in general then following Liu’s career to this “relatively un-lyrical” short:
Liu pushes traditional image-making to the limit of legibility: the photographs are cut up and collaged, creating patterns of colour which dance in the manner of the visual music of 1930s and ’40s, while fragments of signifying material ranging across at least three continents flickers past, at times present onscreen for only the fraction of a second given over to each frame. What ultimately emerges, in contrast to the rapid movement through specific locations seen in the prior two films, is an abstract sense of global circulation as such, a fact of life in the age of air travel.
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Sun Song (2013, Joel Wanek)
Sun Ra gets the epigraph, but no song here: a silent bus trip, checking out light and faces and patterns. About as good as a silent doc filmed on a bus can be, I guess.
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Midnight (2024, Takashi Miike)
This is the best auteur-made phone ad yet, and the closest anyone’s gotten to touching Speed Racer in 15 years. The pure-imagination automobile action fares better than the human action scenes where the lead kids are supposed to be fighting off henchmen. Miike is adapting a Tezuka comic, cramming all the color and speed and story into a movie under the length of a Simpsons episode, and cutting to panels from the original drawings so you can see how faithful he’s being. Midnight is a psychic taxi driver who wears a mario hat and drives a souped-up supercar. He picks up a girl whose trucker father was murdered for his transit turf, and together they defeat transit gangsters led by a guy with an electroshock-blasting hand puppet.
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Pas de deux (1968, Norman McLaren)
Some of the best motion sculpture ever made, absolute loveliness. It almost loses a half-star because of the panpipes, but you can always mute those and watch it with a Bug Club album instead. Dancer in a black void is lit from the sides so her legs are only glowing outlines. Then she begins to multiply, leaving behind mario-kart ghost-riders that follow in her path. Future versions of her appear as poses for her to perfectly hit. She’s busy duplicating and mirroring when a new dancer appears, and together they leave incredible motion trails, as the camera gets ever closer to the action.
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Sand or Peter and the Wolf (1969, Caroline Leaf)
Made entirely with black sand on white background, unbelievable. Peter hangs out with his friends crow, duck, and cat, but there’s a wolf on the loose – and the wolf seems to be aware that he’s made of sand, so his possibilities for disguise and escape are endless. I was prepared from the Suzie Templeton version to lose the duck, but now the wolf eats all three creatures, oh no. Peter sneaks up at night and demolishes it, somehow rescuing his buddies.
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I Met a Man (1991, Caroline Leaf)
A one-minute MTV short set to a not-very-MTV vocal song, illustrating a very windy day. Action-packed, impossible to convey through stills.
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Berlin Horse (1970, Malcolm Le Grice)
Footage of a silent film in which a horse runs in circles is processed in a multitude of ways, then split-screened with a variation of itself, out of sync. The music by Brian Eno is likewise running in circles and out of sync with itself, via editing or a delay pedal. I was going to calculate how many times you could watch Berlin Horse within the runtime of The Turin Horse, but watching it more than once in a row might drive a person mad, so maybe not.
Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope:
Someone’s four-legged friend runs round and round a small corral … until time slips a gear and the world bursts into flame. Horse becomes horses, white horse, black horses, shadows and negatives, looping and layered. A zoetrope, a merry-go-round, then the colours kick in: Muybridge on mushrooms.
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Visitation (2013, Suzan Pitt)
I really don’t know. There’s a poem of apocalyptic prophecy at the top and tail… shadow people and light people… a horse processing plant… a woman’s head cooked in the oven… closeups of shifting patterns over clattering percussion.
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The Dentist (1932, Leslie Pearce)
WC Fields kills a guy golfing then throws a tantrum, throwing his clubs and caddy into the pond, being a real asshole to everybody. Trying to keep patients at his dentist’s office while preventing his daughter from going out to meet the iceman. Filmed before Hollywood figured out that boom mics have shadows… I’ve seen Brian Yuzna’s The Dentist II, and it’s been a while but I don’t believe the two are very similar.
with patient Billy Bletcher (Owl Jolson’s dad in I Love to Singa):
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The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933, Clyde Bruckman)
Finally we get to the WC Fields short with the best title, and it’s a different kind of silly movie than the others, awkward and unusual, drawing attention to its artifice. There’s no straight man here, everybody’s bizarre. He’s in an snowy fishing cabin, receives a friendly visit from a policeman, serenades him by playing a zither while wearing mittens – we see the song visualised, about a young man who drinks the fatal(?) glass then gets his face kicked by a salvation army girl. Fields takes his sled dogs home to his wife. Their son Chester comes home from jail, and after everyone has talked themselves in circles, they throw him out again.
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L’X Noir (1916, Leonce Perret)
The mysterious Black X is a New York diamond dealer by day, pestering rich women. He’s a criminal master of disguise with an undercover league of henchmen, but the first lady we see him try to rob spots him waving his X-flag around, then ties him up and gets help. Story ends with him escaping comfortably, setting up a franchise that never came. This is fine – I’d have rather folllowed the continuing exploits of resourceful rich lady Valentine Petit, who out-acts contemporary stars here, than loser X.
Silent, I played the new On Ka’a Davis album. Perret was a Feuillade accomplice (no surprise there) who worked into the sound era.
Tying a timecoded X to the bed by his neck:
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Max’s Holiday (1914, Max Linder)
Max has just been married in secret, and his new wife is excessively sad that he’s leaving to hang out with a bachelor uncle, so he helps her stow away in his train car then his suitcase. At the train station every extra looks into the camera… I don’t think they were extras, that must’ve been a real train station. Max continues stuffing the wife into uncomfortable places, then when they’re discovered he finally just tells the uncle he got married and he’s fine with it.
Linder was a comic film star before Arbuckle or Chaplin got into he movies, and 1914 was said to be his creative height before he went to serve in WWI. Lightly charming, can’t say I’m running off to get the blu-ray of his complete works, but can’t say I won’t consider it if the price comes down.
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The Water Nymph (1912, Mack Sennett)
This was the very start of Sennett’s Keystone Studios, when Mack was his own leading man. I like him, he looks like a Bob Odenkirk character. The gag is that before introducing his new girlfriend Mabel Normand to his parents, she’s going to hit on his dad at the beach. Everyone in this behaves like they’re eight years old.
