by ·Comments Off on Major 2017 Shorts Roundup

En levande själ (A Living Soul, 2014, Henry Moore Selder)

A living brain, with ear and eyeball, awakens in a fishtank and eventually succeeds in psychically communicating with its nurse Emma. Happy birthday to me – thanks, Trevor!

Based on a novel by a physician. Ypsilon and Emma and nearly everyone else in Sweden acted in the TV series The Bridge, and the briefly-appearing inkblot psychiatrist (the “ink” was on an ipad, nice touch) was in Fanny & Alexander.

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Sarah Winchester, opéra fantôme (2016, Bertrand Bonello)

“Dance but don’t move. Do the solo in your head.”

Symphony and dance, spooky old drawings and accusing ghosts, and the story of Sarah, inheritor of the Winchester rifle fortune, who became a crazy recluse after losing her family. I liked this even more than Nocturama. Similarities include doom music, seclusion in abandoned buildings, mannequins, guilt.

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The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984, Quay Bros.)

A child visits Master Svankmajer, who removes the fluff and toys from the child’s head and teaches him stop-motion filmmaking. This makes a lot more sense than it did when I watched in the 1990’s, now that I know who Jan Svankmajer is. The cluster of mobile pins still reminds me of Edward Gorey (“Death and Distraction, said the Pins and Needles”)

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Stille Nacht I, Dramolet (1988, Quay Bros.)

Extremely short and amazing, dollman watches as his spoon-world grows moldy with magnetized metal filings.

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Stille Nacht II, Are We Still Married? (1992, Quay Bros.)

A motion-blur paddleball confounds a toe-stretching girl’s pet bunny

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Stille Nacht III, Tales from Vienna Woods (1994, Quay Bros.)

Somebody died in 1892? Spinning smoke bullet, disembodied hand, hovering desk and extra-long spoon. I liked the His Name Is Alive song in the previous film – this one sounds like a buzzing TV from the next room.

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Stille Nacht IV, Can’t Go Wrong Without You (1994, Quay Bros.)

The heroes of part two return, the tiptoe girl now quietly bleeding as the rabbit uses his antigravity powers to protect his eggs from a keyhole-peeping Death.

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An Eastern Westerner (1920, Hal Roach)

At a hotel we saw this Harold Lloyd short on TCM, and since I watched it, I am duty-bound to put it on the blog somewhere, even though I was entirely focused on being aggravated about the picture being squished and don’t remember anything that happened in the movie itself. I guess it’s the one with the famous still of all the guns pointing at Harold’s head?

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Three Monks (1982 Jingda Xu)

Short, flatheaded Red Monk, tall skinny Blue Monk, and fat Yellow Monk arrive separately at a mountaintop shrine and spend their days guzzling water and trying to make the other monk(s) bring up more water from the lake. Eventually they’re all angry, and are stealing water from the shrine’s flowerpot, when a mouse almost burns the place down and they have to cooperate to bring up plenty of water in a hurry. The catchy tunes and musical-instrument sound effects were the best part.

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Feeling Good (2010, Pierre Etaix)

A 1965 outtake scene from As Long As You’ve Got Your Health. Etaix goes camping with a campfire and electric coffee pot. Confusion and bad coffee ensues. Then he’s in a military tent camp and I get lost as to what’s happening, because between bird songs and people whistling and blowing whistles, my birds got quite agitated.

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Pas a Deux (1988 Renault & Van Dijk)

A couple is dancing, looks maybe like rotoscoped with colored pencil, then he transforms into Popeye the Sailor complete with voice clip, then they each transform (pretty seamlessly) into different famous characters. Cool effect, but feels like they’re just screwing around. Katy called it a precursor to Logorama.

Made by a couple of Dutch animators. Gerrit’s final film was based on a Burroughs story and featured the voice of Rutger Hauer. Monique has a whole bunch of films on vimeo

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The Northleach Horror (2016, David Cairns)

Apocalyptic story of a mad scientist doing Frankenstein experiments in an underground bunker, the movie casually killing off characters (and resurrecting them) for laughs. I meant to watch this again and note character names, but my link has gone dead. Fun while it lasted. From the creator of the also-great Cry For Bobo.

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Seances: The Disputed Honours (May 31, 2016)

Some familiar footage from The Forbidden Room, with changes. When Jacques Nolot is hired as a gardener, does he usually steal a magnifying glass? Whole new sequence with a man retrieving a key while two women (Camille and her sister?) cower in the night, only to be sucked into a vortex. Color and tinting changes mid-shot. All new intertitles! “O to quench the thirst of my wheat with the blood of slain mail coachmen.”

I wanted to watch When The Broken Toilets Cry but didn’t figure out the website in time. Can’t tell what to make of interruptions like the one below. It looked like typical streaming glitching at first until I realized the shots emerging through the glitch aren’t part of the scene I’m in.

And since I have nowhere else to mention these, I also watched and enjoyed a pile of Netflix’s comedy specials from this year… Joe Mande… Amy Schumer’s The Leather Special (all the fat jokes and poop stories get old, but I admit I laughed at ’em)… Sarah Silverman (more poop stories)… Louis CK “2017” (this has now replaced my memory of his Omaha show – I should’ve taken notes after each)… Dave Chappelle’s Spin and Texas specials (some bits set off my political-correctness alarm, but they’re perfectly constructed/paced hours)… Norm MacDonald’s Hitler’s Dog… three we burned for the drive to Atlanta: Trevor Noah (who we also saw in person a few weeks ago), Hari Kondabolu “Mainstream American Comic”, and the great Hasan Minhaj… and probably a couple I’m forgetting.

by ·Comments Off on Jack & Diane (2012, Bradley Rust Gray)

Stop-motion Quay Bros. hair-braid title card, then opening shot of a toilet with blood in it, and already I’m conflicted. There’s more bleeding and vomiting and bathrooms than seems strictly necessary (M. D’Angelo: “in many ways this is a film about the effect of passion on the gastrointestinal tract, which to my knowledge is a subject previously unexplored”), and I’m always a fan of injecting stop-motion and monsters into a movie, but somehow it didn’t work here. But the vast bulk of the runtime is a fucking lovely story about two girls, the actresses giving perfect performances, and I want to buy the movie’s poster and stare at it forever. And I don’t usually wish for sequels, but I’d like to see this movie’s Before Sunset. Good opening night pick for LNKarno.

Jack and Diane meet, make out, seem really good for each other, but Diane is going off to London in a week, so neither knows how to handle this. Each girl is kinda a mess in her own way… Jack (Riley Keough, the boss in American Honey, also this year’s The Discovery and Logan Lucky and It Comes at Night… and Elvis’s granddaughter) is mourning her late brother, gets hit by a cab and spends most of the movie with a scraped-up face, is mean to almost everybody. I don’t know what’s going with Diane (Juno Temple of Killer Joe, Kaboom) at the beginning, with no phone or ID, throwing up and bleeding. They do seem more collected when together, though Diane manages to transfer her nosebleed to Jack.

Diane’s poor Aunt Linda (Cara Seymour of The Knick, An Education, Gangs of New York) gets daily abuse. Kylie Minogue (same year as Holy Motors) plays a Jack ex-lover. Amazing character detail: Jack, wearing a Ministry t-shirt, says sushi is “good with ketchup.” Good texture to the movie thanks to the Múm score, the soundtrack (first time I’ve heard Shellac in a movie?), bursts of Quay visuals, richly colored cinematography. First I’ve seen by either Gray or his collaborator So Yong Kim.

Mike again:

Another thing I cherished: Has there ever been a movie that introduced an identical twin and then deliberately made so little of it? The scene in which Karen calls Jack pretending to be Diane, while terrific for its own sake, seems to exist primarily to raise the possibility that it’s actually Diane in the porn video, using her sister’s name in an unfamiliar situation. Karen is otherwise never seen; one might fairly conclude that she’s never seen at all. Indeed, if not for the fact that Diane’s aunt mentions her, it would be easy to conclude that Karen doesn’t really exist, so blatantly symbolic is her function. (See also: Jack’s dead brother, Jack’s facial bruise.) Like the monster metaphor, this would threaten to capsize the movie were it not so unemphatic; unlike the monster metaphor, its import is so glancing (there’s no overt suggestion that Jack suspects anything, and the subject never comes up again) that it doesn’t seem superfluous.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched Late-ish 2016

The first roundup of misc shorts since the last one.

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Tome of the Unknown: Harvest Melody (2013, Patrick McHale)

Wirt and Greg are heading somewhere, manage to get a ride with pumpkin-man John Crops to vegetable city, where they accidentally unleash the fury of the crows. Would play as a deleted scene from Over The Garden Wall if not for bluebird Beatrice’s different voice and some more cartoonish facial expressions. I’m guessing with the Harvest Melody subtitle that he’d planned to make more standalone shorts like this, but then they made the full series.

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The Umbrella Man (2011, Errol Morris)

A web mini-doc on a single detail of the Zapruder film: a single man with an umbrella on the cloudless day Kennedy was shot. Interview with JFK assassination expert Tink Thompson, who sets up the mystery, then explains it was discovered that the man was making an obscure visual protest against a policy by JFK’s father.

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Demon in the Freezer (2016, Errol Morris)

“Why is it so important to make the monkeys sick?”

The argument over preserved samples of smallpox virus – whether they should be kept, and for what purpose? Floated: vaccines and biological warfare with the Russians. I don’t know a whole lot about smallpox but it sounds horrible.

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Dog (2002, Suzie Templeton)

A sick/dying/dead dog, a father, a boy, a murder, a patch of either blood or mold upon a wall, and the most disturbing stop-motion I’ve seen this side of Robert Morgan.

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Oskar Kulicke and the Pacifist (1952, Kurt Weiler)

I loved The Apple, so watched some more puppet shorts by Weiler. Bricklayer Oskar endures the whining of a pansy pacifist then sets him straight, asking how the pacifist will like it when he’s conscripted after a U.S. invasion. No, pacifism is dumb and learning proper use of arms is essential, Oskar concludes.

The U.S. military elite:

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Heinrich The Dysfunctional: A German Elegy (1965, Kurt Weiler)

Surprising to watch this right after the other, since it’s about a failed German invasion of Poland in 1472 due to misfortune and royal idiocy. King of Libnitz attacks Cracow in order to obtain liquor and a young bride. After recruiting a traitorous young goat farmer, the king makes it to the enemy castle, only to be pissed on by the local kids and sent home on a manure cart, all his cannons destroyed. “The fatal flaw of the heroic German character: thirst trumps wisdom.”

Last-minute reprieve for the goat farmer:

Ceremonial welcome:

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Nörgel & Söhne (1968-70, Kurt Weiler)

Three-part story of how the nomadic Nörgel clan developed tools and farming, then trade, then currency. Character-based stop-motion with some fun material tricks with liquids, animals and the heavens. Nörgel becomes more of a brutal slavemaster the closer he gets to modern capitalism, and in the end he retires and reads Marx’s Das Capital (historical chronology is shifty in these movies) and regrets the awful thing he’s done.

Barter calculations:

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Street of Crocodiles (1986, Quays)

Live-action man spits into the machinery, activating it, and releases stop-motion man who creeps into a dusty world of pulleys and screws populated by hollow-headed dolls. Wonderful string music. I still don’t know what it all means, been meaning to get the Bruno Schulz book forever now, but it’s all so dusty and textural and mesmerizing in its mysterious movements.

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Quay (2015, Christopher Nolan)

Eight-minute trip to the Quays’ workshop featuring some Street of Crocodiles puppets and commentary on their methods. I suppose splashing Nolan’s name across the blu-ray package was meant to get new people interested in their work, kinda like “JJ Abrams presents Phantasm: Remastered“. I hope it’s working.

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Esperalia (1983, Jerzy Kalina)

A guy goes slow-mo crawling through the forest overlaid by patterns and rotoscope lines, seeing visions and phantoms, with an increasingly disturbed soundtrack.

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The Public Voice (1988 Lejf Marcussen)

Magnifying glass reveals the blueprints beneath paintings, the lines behind the lines behind the lines. Slow zooms in and out as patterns and figures slowly prove to be details within other works, a visual art history folded into itself. I didn’t recognize most of the work, but there’s some Dali and Bosch in there.

by ·Comments Off on The Return of Snow Day Shorts

It snowed in Atlanta so everything shut down for an entire week. As is now traditional, I celebrated by watching a pile of shorts I’d long been planning to see (some as part of the Auteur Completist Initiative).

The Dreamers (1982, Orson Welles)
Welles as an old man narrates the story of opera singer Pellegrina Leone (Oja Kodar), who lost her singing voice in a fire. It’s all Welles and Kodar doing monologues. Maybe all of Welles’ films come down to monologues. Constructed from fragments, with black screens where footage was missing, narration recorded with the sound of rustling script pages. Ooh look, a Don Quixote reference. Not the most exciting of the many late-career Welles fragment films… personally I’d like to see more of The Deep.

Orson in his magician hat:

Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969, Kenneth Anger)
Good camerawork, but ridiculous movie. I think with his images Anger is trying to say that the military is a death-obsessed homosexual cult. I think with his audio Mick Jagger is trying to declare the death of interesting music. I think with his performance, Anton LaVey is trying to expose himself as a silly clown.

That is a nazi flag, but what is he burning?

Le Lion Volatil (2003, Agnes Varda)
Julie Depardieu (Guillaume’s younger sister) works for a psychic, while an aspiring magician named Lazarus Combes (Anton LaVey would be pleased) works at a tourist-trap dungeon around the corner. Every day on their lunch breaks they meet in front of the Lion of Belfort memorial – the same one featured in Rivette’s Pont du Nord and Paris s’en va. Their brief almost-romance doesn’t pan out, but more interestingly, Julie starts hallucinating variations on the lion – first it has a giant bone in its mouth (as supposedly suggested by Andre Breton), then it vanishes and is replaced by a giant housecat. Special effects + Vardaian whimsy = happiness.

Les Dites Cariatides (1984, Agnes Varda)
A tour of caryatids – human statues used as building columns or ornamental facades – throughout Paris, with poems by Baudelaire. “The Peloponesian city of Karyate aided Persia in a war against other Greeks, but Persia lost. The Greeks took revenge on Karyatian collaborators, slaying all the men and enslaving the women. They were paraded as spoils of war. The noble women were triumphantly shown in their lovely gowns and finery. To illustrate their punishment, architects used these statues on public buildings instead of columns.”

The Calligrapher (1991, Bros. Quay)
Three short (15-sec?) segments rejected as BBC2 ident bumps. My favorite kind of Quay film – awesome stop-motion with no human actors, repetition or long-winded confusing mythological story.

Storytime (1968, Terry Gilliam)
This came out while the show Do Not Adjust Your Set (a precursor to Flying Circus) was in production. Opens as a poorly-animated (in Gilliam’s magazine-cutout style) story of a cockroach named Don, who is then stomped on by a man called Jeremy Trousercrease… and so on, each minute-long concept leading into another. Even features a “we apologize for the previous cartoon – the animator responsible has been sacked” disclaimer, which would be reused in Monty Python. Not exactly a lost masterpiece, but a fun little series of cartoon gags.

Pandoora (2002, Takashi Miike)
Just a cheesy samurai music video – does not count as a Miike movie. It ends with our hero about to face off against a giant mantis. What, were they expecting a sequel?

Male (1962, Osamu Tezuka)
Lots of play with frame sizes and positions as a male cat narrates, talking to the man of the house, about how sex should be simple and private and should not end in stabbing your partner to death.

The London Story (1986, Sally Potter)
A woman conspires with a door opener and a retired photocopy machine operator, takes a government minister out to the theater and while he sleeps, replaces his speech about the future of Britain with a new one, causing panic in the media the next day as the conspirators enjoy a choreographed dance on a bridge. Delightful.

Reasons To Be Glad (1980, Jeff Scher)
More of Scher’s fanciful drawing and incredible editing based on rotoscoped (?) images and set to a Dinah Shore song.

The Bum Bandit (1931, Dave Fleischer)
Oh my. A Popeye-muttering train robber gets out-toughed by a passenger in the form of Proto-Betty Boop (still with the dog ears), the robber’s abandoned wife, who steals the locomotive and the bandit, closes the shades and makes with the sweet pre-code lovin’.

Betty and the Bum:

Negro passenger with stolen chickens:

Russian Rhapsody (1944, Robert Clampett)
Watched this recently on the big screen but it never gets old. Hitler’s plane is taken out by gremlins from the kremlin. Why don’t we have wartime cartoons anymore? I want to see the Penguins of Madagascar take on Osama Bin Laden.

Vinyl (1965, Andy Warhol)
In the 60’s it was revolutionary to make slow, cheap movies with bad gay actors, but not anymore. There are probably three filming as I type this. This isn’t technically a short film, but I gave up after thirty minutes, having dozed for the previous ten. A dude recites Burgess and dances to pop music – and it’s all one shot. Wikipedia says it was filmed unrehearsed, which I don’t doubt, and says it’s one of the “1000 films to see before you die,” which I do.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched March 2009

The Ugly Duckling (1939, Jack Cutting)
Katy said the baby swan wasn’t ugly enough, but I think it’s that (1) he’s different from the ducks and therefore ugly to them, and (2) when he sees his reflection in the funhouse ripples of the water he appears ugly. IMDB says it was the final Silly Symphony cartoon, but it wasn’t very musical… no songs about what it’s like to be a duckling.

Katy: “They’ve turned The Ugly Duckling into a marital dispute.”
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Me: “Hey there were six baby swans in that shot! There are only s’posed to be five.”
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Atlanta (1996, Miranda July)
Miranda July’s performance as both the 12-year-old swimmer and her overbearing mother is wonderful. However, this is “video art”, which means it’s like a short film but it’s full of video static and looks like shit. The sound was defective on my copy, and since it’s all interviews, the sound is kinda important.
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The Summit (1995, The Bros. Quay)
For the first minute I thought “hey wow, the Quays have made something totally different from their usual pretentious goth stop-motion” and I was happy. A few minutes later that thought still stands, but I am not happy. In what language are these guys giving monologues in a featureless room? Oh wait, I get it, “summit”. Funny. Some sites list this as a short satirical art piece, another calls it a 70-minute failed pilot. I saw the short version. The Quays come out and shake their hands at the end. Jonathan Stone, one of the two guys, was in Institute Benjamenta.
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Jumping (1984, Osamu Tezuka)
Half a funny concept piece about someone who is an awfully good jumper and the places he ends up (incl. stereotype-africa and hell itself), and half a showoff reel of first-person perspective animation. Excels at both… wonderful.
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Sisyphus (1975, Marcell Jankovics)
Another showoff reel, this time of bodily poses and stress as Sis. rolls the rock uphill, but this one not as delightfully enjoyable as Jumping, and all full of horrible gasping groaning noises.
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5/4 (1974, Hieronim Neumann)
A split-screen stunt used to more wonderful effect than Timecode (or About Time 2), sometimes seeming to fragment a single image, and sometimes looking like different takes of the same action. Playful. Music is light and quiet and not in 5-4 and there are spacey 70’s-sci-fi sound effects whenever something cool happens, which is most of the time.
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by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched October 2008

Three Little Pigs (1933, Burt Gillett)
Musical short feat. “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf” song. Great sound work by Carl Stalling. Uncle Walt did the voice of the brickhouse pig, one of only a couple credited non-Mickey voice roles. OMG, inside the brick house there’s a framed picture of sausage links on the wall with the caption “father”.
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Mirror of Holland (1951, Bert Haanstra)
Greeeeat movie. He shoots reflections of Holland on the river, then flips the camera so they’re rightside-up. Looks for cool subjects and cool effects off the water. All woodwind and harp music, no narration, gorgeous. Didn’t know there was a golden palm for shorts at Cannes, but this won it.
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Quiet As Kept (2007, Charles Burnett)
“That little-ass FEMA check sure don’t go very far”
Actors are real actorly, especially the kid (he’s in Ned’s Declassified). Video is real videoey. Script is real good, a sketch about a family of black New Orleans ex-residents post-Katrina, but the movie is ehhh. Oops, All Movie Guide calls it a documentary – bozos. Can’t find anyone talking about this online, probably because when Killer of Sheep came out on DVD, everyone got in line to praise it and didn’t want to look out-of-touch by talking about the not-great shorts it was packaged with.
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Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur (1949, Sidney Peterson)
Distorted film of actors, string music, and voiceover, none of which has anything to do with the other. “To pose, or not to? I love him, I love him not? Or rather, since I love him less already, why not? An old man mad about paint, Frenhofer…” Yep, definitely from the same source as La Belle Noiseuse. “Once upon a time there was an old man who had been painting one painting for ten years. His name was Frenho… for what? … He started looking for a model to compare. All he wanted was the most beautiful woman in the world to prove to himself that his painting was more beautiful than any possible woman.” It’s all in here: Marianne’s man (also a painter) offering up her modeling services, Porbus the art dealer.

The script/narration is pretty swell but I wouldn’t be following if not for having seen the Rivette, and the visual is just nothing to me… a clock, a fencing match, cats, blurry nonsense, movie would be just as good with a black screen. Sorry, Sidney Peterson. Hmmm, at the end a fencer stabs the painter.
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Eurydice – She, So Beloved (2007, Bros. Quay)
Very underlit ballet. Kinda dull. I preferred The Phantom Museum (and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary).
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Victory Over The Sun (2007, Michael Robinson)
Weirdly shaped monuments and the whispering wind. Would probably help if I could understand what the chanting people are saying. There’s some abstract 3D Animation thrown in. Towards the end goes into sound from some cartoon… Transformers? Some very familiar symphonic music. Pretty nice… I didn’t love it by any means, but I like it better than the disappointing Light Is Waiting.

Waaait, I looked this up online and found all sorts of stuff about it, something about being shot on the former sites of Worlds Fairs, but now I can’t find where I wrote that down.
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The Wizard of Speed and Time (1979, Mike Jittlov)
Oh My God. This is three minutes of pure joy. Now that I have found this movie, I will watch it always. It’s my new The Heart of the World, using jaw-dropping stop-motion to express pure cinema love. The look is dated, but the music is swell, and Mike is a grinning god.
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by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched May 2008

Rare Exports Inc. (2003, Jalmari Helander)
One of those one-joke comedy shorts. The joke is that this elite group of skilled hunters are capturing wild “father christmases” and training them to sit at mall displays listening to children request gifts. It’s got a nice visual style (if you dig watching naked old men get captured, hosed down and beaten), and I guess besides the Eija-Liisa Ahtila short it’s the only film I’ve seen from Finland.
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The Official Rare Exports Inc. Safety Instructions (2005, Jalmari Helander)
And since I didn’t like it much, I watched the sequel and didn’t like that much either. Like all sequels, it’s longer with more effects and new characters. This time the santa-hunters teach safety and behavior lessons and execute an unrehabitable santa.
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OïO Cinepainting (2003, Simon Goulet)
Took over a decade to make with the participation of 100+ Canadians. Looked like gloopy claymation swamp monsters wrecking countless painted glass vases.
I liked it, would watch again.
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Workers Leaving The Factory (1995, Harun Farocki)
A catalogue of scenes of workers leaving factories, including the Lumiere film shown about ten times along with Intolerance, Red Desert, Clash By Night, I think Modern Times, Man of Iron, Metropolis, some German movies, and an industrial advertisement for heavy-duty equipment to protect your factory from attackers. Female narrator tells us that there oughtta be more scenes of workers leaving factories, or that there are too many, or that we need to see inside the factories instead of staying out at the gates? I dunno, because she speaks with all the excitement of a hired narrator reading academic text from a translated script, and it put me to sleep twice – impressive for a 35-minute movie. Saves its poetic deep-thought summary for the end: “If we line up 100 years of scenes of people leaving factories we could imagine that the same shot had been taken over and over… like a child who repeats its first word for 100 years to immortalize its pleasure in that first spoken word… or like far-eastern artists who repeatedly paint the same picture until it is perfect and the artist can enter the picture. When we could no longer believe in such perfection, film was invented.” Cute, but I prefer Kaurismaki’s take on the Lumiere short, and all these shots of people leaving work make me want to see Joe vs. The Volcano again.

From the director’s article on the film:

I have gathered, compared, and studied these and many other images which use the motif of the first film in the history of cinema, “workers leaving the factory,” and have assembled them into a film, Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers leaving the factory, video, 37 minutes, b/w and color, 1995). The film montage had a totalizing effect on me. With the montage before me, I found myself gaining the impression that for over a century cinematography had been dealing with just one single theme. Like a child repeating for more than a hundred years the first words it has learned to speak in order to immortalize the joy of first speech. Or as though cinema had been working in the same spirit as painters of the Far East, always painting the same landscape until it becomes perfect and comes to include the painter within it. When it was no longer possible to believe in such perfection, film was invented.

In 1895, the Lumières’ camera was pointed at the factory gates; it is a precursor of today’s many surveillance cameras which automatically and blindly produce an infinite number of pictures in order to safeguard ownership of property. With such cameras one might perhaps be able to identify the four men in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) who, dressed as workers, enter a hat factory and rob the payroll. In this film one can see workers leaving the factory who are in fact gangsters.

The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it. Films about work or workers have not become one of the main genres, and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines. Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind.

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The Phantom Museum (2003, Quay bros.)
Starts with John Carpenter-style music, setting up the camera and lingering too long on each shot, but it picks up the pace soon. Don’t think they were being modest with the post-title card calling this a “random” trip through the museum of medical oddities. Showing off items they thought were interesting, bringing them to life with stop-motion whenever possible. Nothing much revelatory in the hospital (except the spiked chastity belt, ooh) or the film, but it’s nice that the Quays are still out there.
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by ·Comments Off on In Absentia (2000, Quay Bros.)

Doesn’t exactly make sense until the ending, where it is dedicated to a woman who wrote letters home from an asylum, so worth seeing again with that in mind from the start. Watched an old TV rip of this while pondering whether to spend $25 on their new DVD set. Really don’t need the director commentaries and I haven’t even gotten around to Piano Tuner of Earthquakes yet, so probably not.

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Lots of close-ups on pencil leads here. For the first half, my lowered expectations of the Quays’ work since seeing Institute Benjamenta were unaltered, but then it started to come together with the completely awesome music by Stockhausen, images growing less abstract and almost wanting to join a narrative of some sort. Some of the weirdest music I’ve heard… don’t know if I need to get an album or if, like Morricone, I’ll like it better set to images like these. Anyway, turned out to be a fine little 20-min film, in whatever station-logo-blighted form I managed to watch it.

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