by ·Comments Off on T/F-ish Shorts 2021

The Coyote Shorts Program:

Department of Injustice (Travis Wood & Chloe Gbai)

Didactic anti-racist dialogue in an ironic-jokey automated phone tree framework. Looks like street and news photography mapped into a 3D gaming engine, which is neat at least.

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Spirits and Rocks: An Azorean Myth (Aylin Gökmen)

Opens with b/w volcanic rock photography, so a good pairing with last night’s Rock Bottom Riser. The stock footage scenes announce themselves when the widescreen frame goes square. Smoke and trees and rock, textures and landscapes, really great looking.

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VO (Nicolas Gourault)

Former Uber self-driving test riders tell all, circling around an accident that killed a bicyclist in Arizona while the human operator was watching TV episodes on a cellphone instead of looking at the road. Along with news footage and camera views inside and outside the car, we get repeated radar-view driving scenes, what the car “sees” of its environment.

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Maat Means Land (Fox Maxy)

Takes the game-engine mashups of the first short to the next level… also this and the second short featured lizards, and there has been a theme of image manipulation – overall a well assembled shorts program. This film has everything at once, too many to start listing, all kinds of distorted music and styles and presentations, returning to scenes involving indigenous people and land. A sign about killing the colonizer in your head cuts straight to Tupac, extremely reminiscent of the latest Adam Curtis.

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The Truth About Hastings (Dan Schneidkraut)

And finally the Adam Curtis connection brings us to a Nebraska-set numerology-obsessed conspiracy-theory voiceover over shots of a conference-room family gathering full of meats and Husker games, the picture gradually shimmering and smearing to reveal the alien intelligence underneath. “A Runza restaurant exactly nine minutes away – think about it.”

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Plus some non-Coyote shorts we watched over the course of the week…

The I and S of Lives (Kevin Jerome Everson)

Simply a guy rollerskating around the Lives in DC’s Black Lives Matter Plaza… Sicinski compares Everson’s films to Lumiere actualités, I dunno, I find them especially pleasant to watch and hope they become regular, comforting presences in T/F programs. I’m even leaning towards checking out Park Lanes, or at least the shorter Tonsler Park.

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Brontosaurus (Jack Dunphy)

This guy’s name kept coming up – I think he was in the online game show with the Beasts of the Southern Wild director and an especially good MC, and this made us decide to check out his film. I was pretty sure I’d remember an eight-minute short i watched late at night (which somehow offended Katy so we watched the Everson afterwards as a palate cleanser) but now it’s a month later and I’m afraid I do not… the only letterboxd review just says “Raw,” which is no help. I can see I rated it 3.5 stars, that ain’t bad!

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Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse (Pablo Martín Weber)

Another forgotten short, but apparently well loved and referenced in my All Light, Everywhere notes. Fossils vs. creationism, artificial images and Syrian war.

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O Arrais do Mar (Elisa Celda)

The one where we could barely see anything happening, filmed late at night on a Portuguese beach. Some fishing was involved, some hanging out – a long and sleepy movie.

by ·Comments Off on Delphine’s Prayers (2021, Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam)

No music, little camera movement, background noise from others in the house or from a laptop tuned to Nollywood TV, otherwise all focus is on Delphine. Raped + pregnant at 13, prostitution to get by in Cameroon and Belgium, proposed to by two white men and due to circumstances she married the one she’s not in love with. Shunned by family after a sick niece died in her care, but that’s all forgotten after she moves to Europe and they assume she’s rich. She speaks English with a heavy dialect and French mixed in – Katy thinks it’s shady that the subtitler rephrased her dialogue when we can hear her speaking different words. All the titular prayers come at once, in a breakdown near the end. Better than most single-subject monologue films I’ve seen, still not my preferred mode.

by ·Comments Off on Misc Shorts watched March 2021

Cold Meridian (2020, Peter Strickland)

Rehearsal footage from a recent dance piece never publicly performed, edited with a shampoo-hair ASMR lady whispering to her online viewers about their previous site activity. Nice thing to watch while drowsy on a plane – as far as the ASMR stuff goes, the shampoo thing is interesting at least, the whispering is nice, and I don’t get the crinkling paper/cellophane thing at all.

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De Natura (2018, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

Beautiful little film. Two girls are out in nature, and we get shots of sky and trees and mushrooms, all more rapidly edited than the Strickland until it gets dark and chills out at a campfire in the end. Streams and waterfalls much nicer than crinkling paper.

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Olla (2019, Ariane Labed)

Very red-haired Olla is visiting a guy she met online for the first time. He speaks French, she doesn’t know it, but practices while cleaning the house in high heels while he’s at work… so she’s a servant/gf? Nice looking movie, shot on 16mm. She carefully removes his mother from the apartment before blowing it up in the end.

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Which is Witch (2020, Marie Losier)

A man in fancy military dress is frozen stiff, gets dragged into a cave by a deer woman. Then three women wearing statue of liberty crowns dance around him, and he’s released… but still frozen, so I’m not sure what this accomplished. My first Losier, not the Guy Maddin collab, but still the kind of hazy costumed maximalism I enjoy. Thanks to Mandico in the credits, that makes sense.

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Elektra (2020, Asia Argento)

Like a music video montage of scenes from a longer film, which I appreciate in a way since the longer film doesn’t look very good. A daughter is resentful of her mother, both of them in glamorous feather dresses from the company that commissioned this short, until matricide ensues, then a straight-up fashion show in an abandoned palace (Guadagnino hid his movie’s advertising origins better). It’s at least better than the last movie I saw that Argento directed.

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The Little Story of Gwen from French Brittany (2008, Agnes Varda)

Promo-looking movie about an LA film programmer from Varda’s own neighborhood who moved out to the states and made it work. Shout out to Marker’s Immemory!

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After Before (2016, Athina Rachel Tsangari)

Hangout behind-the-scenes and rehearsal and shoot footage isn’t usually terribly interesting, but we are suckers for the Linklater/Delpy/Hawke trio.

by ·Comments Off on Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021, Adam Curtis)

You had me at “Ayn Rand follower befriends Lee Harvey Oswald and creates parody religion called Discordianism, spreading the Illuminati myth as a prank codenamed Operation Mindfuck, accidentally creating the modern conspiracy theory.” We also trace the fall of the communist revolution (and ALL revolutions), invention of mass electronic surveillance in order to catch the Red Army Faction, how counterculture transformed into consumerism, and of course, flawed and simplified models of human thought and behavior leading to widespread disaster. Kill the cop in your head.

by ·Comments Off on Her Socialist Smile (2020, John Gianvito)

After Profit Motive, Gianvito made a couple of 4+ hour docs about the messes that US military bases leave behind in other countries, but here he’s back in Profit Motive mode with a compact doc full of reading material. The subject is Helen Keller, so he plays with narration and silence, also mixes in period sound recordings and tactile nature photography. A dead bird is photographed for metaphorical reasons, and I’m still recovering from all the avian violence in Bird Island but I’m going to allow it.

Keller was turned onto socialism by an HG Wells book, and after socialist party infighting, she joins the IWW/wobblies and becomes increasingly radical – but remains philosophical and witty in her Q&A responses.

by ·Comments Off on Bird Island (2019, Sergio Da Costa & Maya Kosa)

Sketch of a movie following a narcoleptic young man as he takes over for the retiring rat breeder at a bird sanctuary. Flute music over the rat intro gives unavoidable Rat Film flashbacks. Ordinarily I’d be all over a bird movie, but I’m torn on this one. Cutting a rat to bits with scissors isn’t great, but feeding it to an injured owl moments later compensates. Pulling shards from a swan’s wound isn’t great, even though the bird is being helped (Katy ditched at this point). Finally some escaped rats have their revenge on the injured birds (offscreen) and a little birdy has to be euthanized (onscreen). Next time let’s have more birds, less death, no humans.

by ·Comments Off on A Glitch in the Matrix (2021, Rodney Ascher)

Fun to interview people as their online avatars about the idea that we’re living in a simulation, and promising to structure around Philip K. Dick’s visions. A change since Room 237 is inviting skeptics into the room – Chris Ware has a more reasonable outlook than the gamer kidz, and one woman says their ideas are “school shooter mentality,” which would make PKD a School Shooter Jesus. Pretty early I started thinking these guys all have protagonist syndrome, and this plays out in the end, when a Matrix-obsessed trenchcoat kid kills his parents, the movie ruined for me as it lets him monologue about his cool murders. Music by the Clipping guy, anyway.

by ·Comments Off on Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020, Werner Herzog & Clive Oppenheimer)

A doc begun by meteorite enthusiast Clive Oppenheimer, who has previously appeared in Herzog’s volcano and Antarctica movies, so these guys are kindred explorers. Herzog helps make sure we don’t end up with a bland doc about space rocks (a rock doc), in fact he takes a moment towards the end to inexplicably yell about “the stupid doctrine of film schools.” Another time he films some men standing very still (does this a few times, reminded me of that frozen time moment in My Son) and instead of asking them questions, he adds his own voiceover: “What are they thinking? What if the human race went extinct?” The strings-and-choirs music by Cave of Forgotten Dreams composer Ernst Reijseger is gorgeous, as are the visuals. The parade of scientists, priests (and scientist-priests), artists and explorers gives the rare impression of an engaged, intelligent and optimistic global community. Extremely delightful movie.

by ·Comments Off on Between the World and Me (2020, Kamilah Forbes)

Sometimes when you’ve fallen behind on the ol’ blog, you realize that thirty movies ago, you took no notes on a movie that consisted mostly of essay readings by powerful actors, with newly photographed and stock footage visuals, written as a letter to the author’s teenage son about systemic racism. Katy wanted to watch it in case her students, assigned the book to read, try to get away with only watching the movie. Good film – Forbes had previously worked on a doc miniseries on a slam poetry competition, and appeared in a Grand Theft Auto game.