by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: C

Secret Weapons (1972, David Cronenberg)

In a 1977 future during the North American civil war, a drug company has taken over the country and “the holy police are experts in psychic attack.” Weird Jazz on the soundtrack, my favorite genre of late. Not bad, definitely feels like a Crimes of the Future (1970) followup. Inventor slips away and meets with the motorcycle gang resistance, some kind of TV pilot setup for a brainy urban sci-fi warfare thing that never came to be (unless you count the entire rest of Cronenberg’s career)

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Days Before the Death of Nicky (2024, Denis Cote)

Woman is driving. Cuts are accompanied by brief blackouts and quiet static, then each new shot rotates to a different type of film or video camera, always affixed to the middle of the back seat looking forward. It’s ten minutes before we hear a voice – her singing to herself. A few times we see the camera adjusted or acknowledged, a few times we see someone else, including the last scene when she’s gone missing and some guy discovers the car.

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Cruel Optimism (2017, Paul Clipson)

A tough one to blurb. Loud ambient music as brightly colored grass and clouds turns into skyscrapers and neon and back again, always with layers and particles and patterns flying every which way. Perfect HDTV demo material for some alternate reality avant-garde Best Buy. The music is by Lawrence English, an Australian who knows Merzbow and Xiu Xiu.

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Light Year (2014, Paul Clipson)

Ambient grumbling string music this time. The focus is on light glistening off river water as seen through various metal bars and fences. Even if it doesn’t fit the theme of the film, he can’t help himself from rushing into the neon city night again towards the end. So far everything I’ve seen by Clipson has been great. Music is by Tashi Wada, a Californian who knows Julia Holter.

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Ten Second Film (1965, Bruce Conner)

Ten seconds of rapidly edited film leader and demo stuff, nice.

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Permian Strata (1969, Bruce Conner)

Scenes from a bible movie where people get stoned set to Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women” Do you get it? I hope so, because that’s all there is.

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Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1976, Bruce Conner)

Slow sepia-toned scenes of things grounded and heavenly and spectral, while foreboding ambient music plays. Real good, my favorite since Cosmic Ray.

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Cosmetic Emergency (2005, Martha Colburn)

She adds disfiguring layers of paint to magazine models, then finds a quote that the US military gets free cosmetic surgery so she adds breasts and lipstick to pictures of army guys. One of the only movies to feature a Jad Fair song.

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Time Travelers Overture (2024, Martha Colburn)

Another musical cutout collage spectacular, this time to an antic Brian Marsella track. Besides making really fun animations, Colburn has some of the best music taste in the business.

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The Nail Clippers (1969 Jean-Claude Carriere)

Michael Lonsdale checks into a hotel with his wife, and things start vanishing as soon as he looks away from them, including soon all his possessions, his wife, then himself. Carriere was mainly a writer, alternating at this time between Luis Bunuel and Pierre Etaix – and it shows.

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As Long As There Is Breath (2020, Emily Chao)

Looking out windows, whooshing around, the soundtrack whooshing too. At only two minutes, it felt like a trailer for itself.

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No Land (2019, Emily Chao)

Two more minutes, a slow zoom in and (reversal) out of a tree-mounted TV playing a flicker film. Maybe the challenge was to reference Wavelength and Arnulf Rainer at the same time? Silent.

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Baby Blue Benzo (2024, Sara Cwynar)

On the widest screen possible she constructs another self-conscious super-montage with overlapping narrations about desire, consumerism, images, automobiles.

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Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000 (1962)

Wow, Cocteau sits in La Villa Santo Sospir, faces the camera, and talks for 25 straight minutes, the camera cutting closer and closer to his face. It’s no The Human Voice. I got distracted and looked up whether the villa is still standing – yes, they did a pandemic-era restoration of the place, but it’s hard to get details from their broken website: “Today, the restoration is ne few final details left to perf living tribute to its remarka blending modern updates Jean Cocteau’s visionary ar his work as relevant and ev.”

by ·Comments Off on The Shrouds (2024, David Cronenberg)

Making up Vincent Cassel as Cronenberg and having him mourn his late wife could’ve gone so hard into self-indulgent territory but instead this soft dialogue drama (with Crimes lighting and lots of handheld images-on-screens) gradually careens into paranoid techno-thriller territory with plenty of sex and hardly any murder. Ends with nothing resolved, in the middle of a dream sequence. Short but powerful bursts of Howard Shore music which have either introduced new sounds to his toolkit, or else the Movieland’s speakers have blown out. Diane Kruger plays the dead wife (missing an arm in dream/flashback), and her conspiracy-horny sister, and the AI built/puppeted by the sister’s ex-husband Guy Pearce. Choice lines about sex and flesh and surgery, and Vince (a supposed visionary who outsourced everything and takes no real action here) is told he’s made his career out of bodies. Japan and China and Korea and Iceland and Hungary all figure in. Need to watch this two or three more times.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched December 2024

L’emission a deja commence (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

Puppet people talk about truth in media and introduce a series of pissing-fruit cartoons. How do you explain this sort of thing to potential investors?

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The Last Cartoon (2022, Bertrand Mandico)

Kind of partly a cartoon – some abstract brightly-colored patterns – but the performance-art people take over, narrating in French and English about conflicting futures of cinema.

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Four Unloved Women Adrift… (2023, David Cronenberg)

The autopsy mannequins make heated moaning sounds.
Mostly close-ups, only showing the full scene at the end.

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The Menacing Eye (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

If my first short had been a stylish silent 2-minute backstage knife-throwing drama, I would also have grown up to become Jerzy Skolimowski.

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Little Hamlet (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

A small group hanging around a half-demolished building plays out a silent slapstick story with musical narration which is sort-of a loose version of Hamlet.

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The Miu Miu Affair (2024, Laura Citarella)

Meant to be another fashion ad like the Luca and the Lynch, but LC makes a Trenque Lauquen spinoff, a mystery about a missing fashion model that gets increasingly hazy and vague. it’s not great exactly, but it’s great for one of these.

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Let Your Heart Be Light (2016, Romvari & Campbell)

She trims the tree while half-watching Meet Me in St. Louis on a laptop and drinking from her Chantal Akerman mug, then switches to a mix of trad-xmas songs before Sophy comes over to hang out.

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I’m Hungry, I’m Cold (1984, Chantal Akerman)

The one who looks familiar is Maria de Medeiros (The Saddest Music in the World), the less hungry one is Pascale Salkin of Gang of Four. The most charming and fast-paced Akerman movie since Saute me ville?

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and some auteur music videos…

PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old I Dying (Cocina & Leon)

The Wolf House team creates the illusion of a days-long journey within a single room, so cool. Man gets chomped to death by a beast, man’s dog grabs one of his bones and buries it, it grows into a tree.

New Order – Blue Monday (Breer & Wegman)

The main things happening here are (1) Breer animation, (2) a dog balancing on furniture, (3) the band members being bothered by floating tennis balls. These things get integrated in fun ways (e.g. the band members watch a flipbook of Breer’s drawings of the dog).

The Breeders – Divine Hammer (Richard Kern)

The focus is on Kim pulling poses indoors, and the other three have a minor thread going on a tour of strip clubs. They should’ve cut out the shots of Kim as the Flying Nun.

The Roches – Hammond Song (Lewis Klahr)

Lewis does his clip-art mashup thing. Lucky me to find this right after discovering the group – I’ve been playing their debut album this week. He made this forty years after the song came out.

Mystical Weapons – Colony Collapse Disorder (Martha Colburn)

Instrumental guitar rock by Sean Lennon and Greg Saunier, the only song here I didn’t already know. More clip-art, the religious and planetary icons giving flashbacks to the Harry Smith shorts. Faster cut than Klahr and with added digital glitch edits (or else my copy was defective).

by ·Comments Off on A History of Violence (2005, David Cronenberg)

Opens with Stephen McHattie’s young partner Billy killing a kid. These actors would reunite in Tarsem’s Immortals with John “no relation” Hurt.

Their fatal visit to Viggo’s diner plays hell on the family. Son Jack (a punk drummer in the Germs biopic) goes from self-denigrating violence-avoidance to kicking asses in the school halls. You don’t see wife Maria Bello much even though she gave the best performance of 2005… she was in Prisoners and some recent crappy horrors.

Ed Harris shows up the very next morning calling Viggo “Joey,” stirring up trouble that’ll get him and his boss (oscar-nom William Hurt) killed. Not pictured: Sheriff Peter MacNeill, one of the Crash-ers.

by ·Comments Off on Crimes of the Future (2022, David Cronenberg)

Story of a man who simply wants to eat breakfast.

On second viewing I’m still confused as to the repair workers’ murderous motivations, or how Timlin heard the conversation about tattooing anchors and “mother” and snuck inside that kid. If the cop is lying about everything that could explain it. On third viewing I’ve decided the movie’s double-agent loyalties and its inconsistency about scar tissue are nothing to fret about.

Scott Speedman costarred with Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld series, which have Resident Evil-ish posters, which makes me tempted to watch them. Ah no, I guess not.

Best movie I’ve seen in a while. Some hits from the sites:

David Cairns in Shadowplay [comparing to eXistenZ]:

There are factions in ideological conflict over questions of authenticity, but instead of Phildickian Big Question #1 (What is reality?) this is more about Phildickian Big Question #2 (What is a human being?). Evolution seems to be getting out of hand… is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Kristen Stewart in Vulture:

It’s really fun to have three scenes. If you don’t nail it, you’re wallpaper. Timlin is so locked up, self-oppressed, wants to be good at her job, and totally represents the rigidity of the government that they live under. And she experiences an awakening in a split second … I’m very rarely asked to play weird little characters like that.

Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker:

No lines are overtly comic in the sense of being meant as funny by those delivering them, but the audience always knows when to laugh at a particularly weird exchange even as Shore’s score keeps a straight face … A lot of the dialogue is unapologetically Big Picture thematics, repeatedly drawing links between suffering and its ability to generate art while wondering if the two are really inextricable. But this thematic flexing, which is simultaneously direct and vague (and hence seemingly infinitely suggestive without actually committing to anything), is less absorbing than Cronenberg’s style, a finely honed, mysterious ability to make medium-shot coverage of characters talking on chiaroscuro-shaded stage builds weirdly entrancing.

Amy Taubin and David Cronenberg:

AT: I laughed throughout.
DC: You are the right audience.
AT: And I cried a lot.
DC: And that’s even better.

by ·Comments Off on Crimes of the Future (1970, David Cronenberg)

Not the new feature, but the director’s early gay art film, before the technical innovation of sync dialogue. Definitely connected to the new film – one doctor’s body keeps growing mysterious organs – the word “secretions” appears often.

“I am Adrian Tripod, the director of this place, the House of Skin. In a sense, my present incarnation was generated by the mad dermatologist Antoine Rouge. The House of Skin began its existence as a residential clinic for wealthy patients who were treated for severely pathological skin conditions induced by contemporary cosmetics.”

Most of the the women in Canada are dead from Rouge’s Malady. Our narrator reports that mad prophet Antoine Rouge had disappeared after seizing control, the House now fallen into the hands of two interns. Our guy visits the Institute of Neo-Venereal Disease and spends a good amount of time giving foot rubs, is later invited to join a pedophile conspiracy worshipping underground spheres.

I’d seen this before – I think it was a bootleg VHS alongside Stereo – mainly leaving an impression from the architecture and the way it’s presented, which I still think about. The color of the HD restoration is really great, and the ideas are groovy, so I was being generous while watching, telling myself “the movie is not long and slow, the sound loops are not annoying,” but it is and they are. Glad to revisit it anyway – anticipation is very high for the new one.

by ·Comments Off on Videodrome (1983, David Cronenberg)

Watching this for the first time in many years, right after Unfriended 2, a double feature of movies about perverted signals. Unfriended is purely digital, while this is the most analog movie ever made, just incredible. Multiple characters have already died but live on as a video signal. Pre-Hellraiser S&M horror and tech-flesh fusions. An optician named Barry Convex, everything here is great. The VR headset and the unwitting assassin plot tie this pretty closely to eXistenZ.

by ·Comments Off on Crash (1996, David Cronenberg)

Practically double-featured this with Exotica, another mid-90’s Canadian Elias Koteas sex thriller. James Spader is a commercial producer banging his camera girl, while his wife Deborah Kara Unger (great in this) gets with some guy in an aircraft hangar – 3 sexual encounters in the movie’s first 6 minutes. After Spader kills Holly Hunter’s husband in a head-on collision, she’s pretty cool about it, making out with him when he gives her a ride, leading to another crash. All this sexual/mechanical energy attracts primo perv Vaughan (Koteas). “Vaughn makes everything look like a crime, doesn’t he?”

Thank god there were enough degenerates in Canada to bring this project to life. A movie where everyone limps, and I’m struggling to think of any two characters who didn’t end up fucking each other. As in Naked Lunch, Cronenberg took scenes from another book (The Atrocity Exhibition) and used the author’s real name as a character. It won a prize at Cannes at least, and I just recently watched Crash’s cannesmate Three Lives.

Cronenberg on political correctness: “I think as soon as you allow politics of any kind into your movie, you’re doomed as an artist.”

by ·Comments Off on Naked Lunch (1991, David Cronenberg)

First movie watched on the New TV, and first time I’ve seen this in hi-def. The creature/typewriter effects hold up, as does the circular story blending the Burroughs stories with his own strange life, and the acting by Peter Weller and Judy Davis (same year as Barton Fink, wow).

“Rewriting is censorship.” Exterminator Bill is in trouble at work because his wife is shooting up his bug powder (“It’s a Kafka high; you feel like a bug”). “I am your case officer,” says the anus of the bug the cops leave him with, “Your wife is not really your wife.” After Bill catches writer Hank on top of his not-wife Joan, they do the ol’ William Tell act, then the bigger bug at the bar gives him a ticket to Interzone and says he’s to write a report.

Sands, Kiki, Eclectus:

Hitlery Hans (Cronenberg regular Robert Silverman) introduces him to Kiki, who introduces him to another Joan’s husband, typewriter aficionado Ian Holm (I forget how Julian Sands fits in, but he’s there, in a white suit of course). Sinister doctor Roy Scheider reappears as a lesbian mind-control druglord at the end, and the whole thing combines sex, drugs, death, literature and insects in ways that nothing else ever has.