by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 9: Michael Robinson

Circle in the Sand (2012)

Two guys trash a campsite, a third guy is blindfolded in a tent, sound of gunfire in the distance. Three women burying and unburying things on the beach. Each scene involves someone reading haltingly from a book. These two groups have been separated by a concrete tunnel reading “off limits” – when they hear the signal, the women walk through. One beach girl is taken away, the others dig up a jambox then destroy it after it plays a plangent indie song, then create pinhole galaxies in pages of a People magazine. One of the women psychically merges with the blindfolded man, and dirty knives begin materializing nearby. The subtitled text from the beginning reappears: “We wanted to destroy knowledge, but from within knowledge.” I don’t get it, but it’s well put together, with excellent sound design (probably helped that I switched to headphones for this one).

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These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2011)

Extremely jeweled ornamental clothing while a woman speaks of fertility. We go inside a pyramid where a women peers through a secret panel and sees… Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time” video – bizarre stock footage juxtapositions, combining the midcentury feature film, the music video, the jeweled clothing and the pulsating 3D pyramid graphics. Finally the Robinson strobing effect arrives, and it’s beautifully done, with restful black pauses in between.

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Mad Ladders (2015)

When I first saw his Full House short I was mostly annoyed, but the more of these I watch, the more I appreciate his cultural recycling and mutations. This one is structured with a voiceover by a woman explaining a dream or vision. Sounds like a MIDI version of Tori Amos’ “Crucify” at one point.

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Polycephaly In D (2021)

“There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world.” Two men, in desert and water settings, speak psychically from a distance about encounters among earthquakes and landslides, each speaker represented by different colored subtitles. Brief montage of famous film shots of characters looking into camera. Music video imagery and a kinda Clash of the Titans thing. Unexpected Robin & Marian/King Kong mashup at the end, with some Muppets thrown in. I’d started to write this one off as lesser Robinson, then a robot monkey strobing tsunami titan freakout made my heart beat double-time.

by ·Comments Off on Ultra Dogme Program 3: The Death Channel

In between short films, we watch couple-minute Mitchell & Webb segments about a post-apocalyptic game show. Unknown Male 282 doesn’t survive, and we are urged to remain indoors. Also, a stir-crazy, homebound Madonna sings a parody of her own song into a hairbrush, but this was on instagram so the endless scroll of horribly rude user comments next to the image is unavoidable.

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It Is Here Where We Are (2018, Andrew Busti)

A 14-second flicker film loop of planets and circles and HERE.
I watched it a bunch of times, sometimes chanting along with the HERE voice.
I have Busti’s vimeo bookmarked to watch more shorts for a different but related thing, so more on him later. Busti teaches in Boulder, wonder if he knew Brakhage.

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Apt. 309 (2014, Rosario Sotelo)

“Remain indoors.” Quarantine cinema, shot inside an apartment with a Timecode split-screen, unusual way to make art out of the everyday.

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Victory Over the Sun (2007, Michael Robinson)

Real standard-def macroblocky quality to the trees. Some serious chanting/recitation in this. Futuristic architecture covered by weeds and trees gives a post-apocalyptic feel, then we go into flicker-film hyperspace and back again.

Apparently last time I watched this moments before seeing The Wizard of Speed and Time for the first time, which pretty much erased it from my memory (and that music that sounded “very familiar” is November Rain, duh), but this is good – apparently I like Robinson now, and can move past the Full House thing.

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Life is an Opinion, Fire a Fact (2012, Karen Yasinsky)

Death scene on VHS, paused and blown up so each pixel is visible.
Hand-drawn man on fire.
Rotoscoping and filming a TV, both techniques to borrow someone else’s motion (and the latter reminds me of Paul Schrader’s Dark).
Reading material is provided for most of the films, and the Yasinsky interview is the best thing so far.

The older I get, the less I believe in just about everything involving institutions and ideology. But I believe in art, I have faith in the artistic impulse, and I believe in artists, not in some master / genius kind way but in the simple fact that our works, our gestures, are expressions of altruism in the face of the utter venality of our time.

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Barneys New York (2020, Sara Cwynar)

Visiting the final sales inside a high-end store, the slashed discount prices still unreasonably high. Completely silent – I filled the audio in my head with memories of the Sabres of Paradise / Red Snapper song from that late-90’s Warp comp. Could be multiple camerapeople, but I think Sara came back on different days, once with ink all over her left hand, and once without. More Cwynar another day, but remember to come back to this one, because I want that camera mount she’s using.

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37/78 Tree Again (1978, Kurt Kren)

Another one I’ve seen, another silent, and another movie where the trees are too low-res, sorry ubuweb. Last time I watched this I excerpted Huber’s article about this being the greatest movie ever made. My opinion of it has risen, watching in this program, rather than alongside Kren’s actionist crapola.

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Strange Space (1993, Leslie Thornton)

Rainer Maria and hospital tests on dying Ron Vawter, grid graphics and pictures-in-picture by Thornton, mixing in what looks like moon rover images. The second intriguing short I’ve watched by Thornton.

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Rehearsals for Retirement (2007, Phil Solomon)

As I said last time, “Argh, machinima.” I think it’s Grand Theft Auto, not Second Life, and reading about Solomon, I realize that Untitled (for David Gatten) is in fact the short I watched as Crossroad, and both of these were written up in Cinema Scope 30, if I could find my copy. Anyway, a single chord drone, and moody, foggy textures (weird thing about watching avant-machinima on youtube is you don’t know if the low-res texture is part of the original or not) with a dark figure looming in the foreground, airplanes in the distance. Weirdly, it’s really good.

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Lachrymae (2000, Bryan Frye)

Fireflies in a cemetery. In the side reading, Frye writes about found footage and copyright law, but fireflies in a cemetery brings to mind childhood summers in Virginia, and I’m going on my own journey here and have little interest in the reading.

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All My Life (1966, Bruce Baillie)

It’s perfect that the program ends with the fourth (at least) film to display low-res flora via poor digital transfers, accompanied by a Manohla Dargis article saying: “You can watch All My Life and other Baillie films online, but don’t.” This loops back to Sicinski’s intro statement: “We did not count on toxicity or being under house arrest. We didn’t count on everything suddenly becoming television.” He could’ve picked 1080p HD Jodie Mack shorts with nice bitrates and perfect color on vimeo, so all these blurry TV trees were chosen for a reason. Anyway this was fun, and there are at least six more Ultra Dogme programs to check out as we remain indoors.

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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