by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: D

Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above (2022, Ayanna Dozier)

Warholian: a couple making out is only seen from the knees down, then the camera gradually moves up, but I guess the viewer has to provide their own Death From Above since my copy was silent.

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Mindscape (1976, Jacques Drouin)

Terrific light-and-shadow landcape. A painter stendhal-syndromes into his own canvas, which then becomes a slideshow of different scenes, each morphing and shifting. Charcoal… oh no, it’s pinscreen, this must have taken a hundred years to animate.

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They Caught the Ferry (1948, Carl Dreyer)

Motorcyclist getting off a ferry is determined to ride fast enough to catch another ferry. Even though this guy is supposed to be in an impossible hurry, he’s more respectful to the ferryman and gas station attendant than anyone in my city would be. Ultimately it’s the most action packed Dreyer film, and perhaps his only road safety movie. Rosenbaum: “Devoted almost exclusively to the tension and exhilaration of speeding down a country road, it is once more demonstration that Dreyer’s art, principally praised for its spiritual qualities, in fact rests on its concrete realisation of material experience.”

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Woton’s Wake (1963, Brian De Palma)

More movies should open with a ballad. Woton is a silent-comedy maniac running through the streets and rooftops. He does some harmless pranks wearing different wigs and grotesque false noses: stealing women’s earrings with his long tweezers, spying a couple having sex through a skylight and roasting them with a flamethrower, the music all tape loops of junkyard horns. One day he creates a live woman in his laboratory, seemingly by accident. Ends in nuclear war, predating Dr. Strangelove by a couple years. The cloudy cinematography and flabby editing are familiar from other student shorts, but this team reeally went for it in the makeup and music departments. Heavy Seventh Seal and King Kong references, with lots of pie throwing (another influence on Strangelove).

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The Responsive Eye (1965, Brian De Palma)

Listening to guys talk nonstop about an art exhibit of perceptual / optical illusion works. Every once in a while they’ll say something that makes the exhibit seem deeper than a Magic Eye book. The movie would be a great supplement after walking through the gallery yourself, but as a standalone experience you’re missing a whole lot, especially when they talk about the color effects we’re watching in black and white. A bit of De Artificiali Perspectiva in there. One group of critics say the exhibit is neat but they don’t think it counts as art – this would be unfortunate foreshadowing for the rest of De Palma’s career. The actress who played the pregnant teen in One, Two, Three makes an appearance. My favorite bit was when the curator bragged that the artists in this room come from all over the world, and his examples were: English, American, English again.

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Blueprint of a Pleasure Machine (2022, Amit Dutta)

Art museum commissioned Amit to make a Klahr-style cut-up montage from their film advertisement collection. I couldn’t make much sense of the voiceover spy monologue, but the animation was fun.

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Nightangel (1987, Jacques Drouin & Bretislav Pojar)

Jiri Trnka stop-motion, Alexieff pinscreen, National Film Board of Canada collab. Little guy sees the nightangel out his apartment window and runs out to meet her, is hit by a car and blinded for a few weeks. They use lighting so that we don’t see his surroundings until he perceives them, for instance, the table above his head is invisible until he bangs into it, the stairs aren’t there until he’s falling down them. The nightangel watches and helps when things get out of control, and when he can see again, they make out.

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Review (2015, Dustin Guy Defa)

A girl inadequately narrates the plot of Taxi Driver to her friends, just like how I inadequately describe movies in the blog.

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Lamentations (2020, Nathaniel Dorsky)

Looking at stuff silently through filters and screens. Messing around with focus. I tried to nap.

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Permutations and Combinations (1976, R. Bruce Elder)

We are shown some images, including comic book panels, a page of text, and we’re played a few audio clips that sound like someone cycling through ringtones. Then the movie flickers these things at us relentlessly, not always in the same order. If he’s spelling out secret messages using the editing, with each frame representing a letter, it goes too fast to make out – Zorns Lemma this ain’t. I tried to see if you can read the page of text by focusing in advance on the next word each time it appears, but nope.

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Noir et Blanc (2006, Tacita Dean)

Inside some noisy machinery, light and matter seem to warp and shake.

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Islands of Fire (1955, Vittorio De Seta)

Filmed during volcanic eruptions, he shows a fishing community thriving, then everyone running for cover one stormy evening with threats from wind and water and volcano, then upbeat music as everything returns to normal the next day. Jake Cole: “we are merely the unruly, overstayed houseguests of this planet.”

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Surfarara (1955, Vittorio De Seta)

I guess this non-seafaring film of sulfur miners fits with De Seta’s theme of showing people at work outside the cities. He gets to play with the editing towards the end, but there’s not much opportunity for beautiful image making inside a sulfur mine. Someone get these guys some gloves, and probably some face masks!

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Chantal Akerman (2013, Ricky D’Ambrose)

Handheld-shot interview in Nov 2013, covering News From Home, early inspirations, mother and Jeanne Dielman, and editing rhythms. Might’ve been more edifying if I hadn’t spent the afternoon reading a whole damn book on Akerman covering these same topics.

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Colophon (2018, Nathaniel Dorsky)

He finds a light array on a window display, some kind of digital advertisement I guess, and he stands too close so you see the pixels instead of the intended design, with street life in the background. Then after five minutes he goes to the garden and casually plays with focus, light, time, and watery reflections. The first couple minutes (figuring out what is going on with the light display) and last couple (when he starts rack-focusing to some water bugs) are cool. I let it play silent, which didn’t do it any favors.

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The Interview (1978, Michael Dudok de Wit)

Kid with tape recorder attempts to interview everyone in sight, but they all get annoyed. After flashing back on all the interactions of the day, the kid concludes it’s not him but the tape recorder that is annoying, and drops it into the ocean. Cute primitive animation with music and gibberish-speak, Michael’s art-school work.

by ·Comments Off on An Injury to One (2002, Travis Wilkerson)

Opens with some nice blue skies, acoustic guitar, and text advocating for worker revolution. He starts into a history of Butte MT over some Dirty Three music, tying it into the novel Red Harvest. IWW/Wobblies vs. the Anaconda mining company in early century. The company wins, destroys the unions and lords over evil conditions. Mine runs full-tilt during WWI until a horribly fatal fire sparks renewed union interest… enter Wobbly Frank Little, arriving from Bisbee, making this the Che Part 2 to the Greene film. While he’s sleeping among the workers, the company breaks in and murders him. “All the we know of Frank Little’s time in Butte and all that we know regarding his murder comes from company papers and company spies. Thus official history is company history.”

A couple of Low songs “Mass arrests and deportations begin almost immediately” after the government declares war on organizers. Movie is ingeniously designed to make me angry, ending with the poisoning deaths of hundreds of birds. The company continues to assure residents that the water is safe.

from Cinema Scope 13:

Jason McBride: “Butte’s history – and Wilkerson’s film – is bound up with the entire history of the American left, the rise of McCarthyism, the destruction of the environment, and even the birth of the detective novel … Elegant, almost-still lifes shot by Wilkerson himself recall the work of his former teacher, James Benning.”

Wilkerson: “I’ve always been excited by the Third Cinema … something that took from the high and low culture and was highly politicized, raw, a little less perfectly finished, often with social goals that outweighed pure aesthetics. They would always argue for this notion of imperfect film – a film that was perhaps not aesthetically perfect, but perfect along the lines of what they were striving for.”

by ·Comments Off on Careful (1992, Guy Maddin)

They don’t make movies like this, and they never did. I thought I remembered this well, but I was missing most of the second half, plus the quality of light, some acting and scenery particulars, and lines like “a single wobbly stone can pry you loose from the path and serenade you with the whistling wind of the death-plummet,” so it’s always worth watching again.

George Toles named the movie’s town Tolzbad, haha. After Johan’s mountain-madness incest-suicide, his brother Kyle gets a job at the Count’s castle, then hears his mom saying she only ever cared for the count. Kyle kills the count in a duel, leading mom to kill herself in front of mute cobwebbed haunted attic-dwelling brother Franz. The late Johan’s girlfriend Klara gets a job in the mines, tries to enlist Kyle to kill her dad.

by ·Comments Off on Good Luck (2017, Ben Russell)

A grand opening shot, pulling back from a mountain view to reveal the drone music as diegetic, walking with a marching band from overlooking ruins to a street that dead-ends into a canyon. The drummer steps forward and says he used to live here, and his entire neighborhood is now in the pit.

We’re in a Serbian mining company – typical-Ben follow-cam through their workplace and into the crowded high-speed de-elevator to an underground mining city. Long takes of long drills into rock walls intercut with b/w miner screen tests, and interviews about their hopes and dreams (answer: not much of either).

Admittedly a really good transition between the halves, joined by a graphic and the sound of a metal detector, a different kind of drone for a different kind of mining. From 20 guys working in the dark underground, we move to Suriname and 3 guys working on the surface in daylight. Wavery handheld late-night conversations with the men and their women, worries about killings at another site, more hopes and dreams, more screen tests. At least it ends with a song (no dance party).

Presumably the champions of this whole endurance test were Mai 68 Proletariat Cinema people who love anything involving miners. This doesn’t apply to the Cinema Scope Gang, who champion things for inscrutable reasons… Phil Coldiron’s analysis of Russell’s exploded ethnography is convincing, when I can follow it:

Like Frampton, Russell has elaborated a conception of film that approaches a particular limit or model: thought itself, with its infinite capacity for expansion. And like Frampton, this project has necessitated a sustained engagement with both the material of film and with that grand technology whose shadow film continues to toil in, namely language.
…
Russell captures the rhythms by which the plan of capital is expressed and enforced. In working on the level of the workers’ experience, he mirrors the image that the factory is always already producing of itself and offers it for reflection.

by ·Comments Off on The Spoilers (1942, Ray Enright)

A not-too-exciting Marlene Dietrich/John Wayne western. Boring ol’ Randolph Scott (Roberta, Ride Lonesome) rides into town claiming to represent the law of the country but really planning to steal land from local miners. John Wayne is seduced by Scott’s uneasy companion Margaret Lindsay (Jezebel, Fog Over Frisco) until he catches onto their scheme. Dietrich is wise from the beginning. She and third-wheel Richard Barthelmess (that guy from Only Angels Have Wings who looks like a cross between Buster Keaton and Peter Lorre) help Wayne foil the plan, and the mines are saved, yay.

But most notably: John Wayne in blackface!

by ·Comments Off on The Miners’ Hymns (2011, Bill Morrison)

Slow-motion stock footage and photographs of miners and their mines, with slow-motion color helicopter shots of their present-day locations, accompanied by slow-motion music. The movie doesn’t tell a conventional story, allowing you to apply your own knowledge and bias to the visuals. In my case what came to mind was Harlan County USA, Ace in the Hole and every Freakwater song (plus some Mekons/Freakons, Johnny Miner). Anyway, nothing hopeful or positive. The helicopter shots seem to back this up, showing these sites erased by history, covered up with parking lots, shopping centers and housing developments, unmourned. But it ends on a happy note, a massive parade of Durham-area miners marching into a cathedral.

Since each is under an hour, you could easily double-feature this with Coal Money, or maybe more appropriately, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind.

by ·Comments Off on Coal Money (2009, Wang Bing)

Quick-n-dirty handicam following coal traders in Inner Mongolia – mostly it’s people bitching and haggling for 50 minutes. I suppose it’s a useful film as a cinema verite document of a trade, but is this what most of Wang Bing’s cinema is like? Is West of the Tracks (about decline of an industrial district) like this for nine hours, and Crude Oil for fourteen?

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As Harvard puts it: “The hard, even bitter, bargaining and accusations of thievery that erupt at each juncture suggest the free market system to be based on an ever-sliding scale of distrust and insecurity.”

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Wang is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50. C. Fujiwara writes: “If Wang’s cinema is dedicated to uncovering the past of labour, it is also a search, in the middle of an era when labour is being disavowed, disgraced, and denied, for the possible futures of labour.”