by ·Comments Off on Rock and Roll Shorts watched in March

La Disco Resplandece (2016, Chema Garcia Ibarra)

Kids hangin’ out movie, getting into harmless trouble (breaking into a former dance club, arriving sleepless and temp-tattooed to a serious ceremony the next day). Common directorial themes I can connect to the feature include UFOs, but unfortunately not cockatiels.

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Boogie Woogie Sioux (1942, Alex Lovy)

Not amusing enough to be worth all the dated racism, story of a native tribe on a hot day and the rain-dance band that fortunately is driving through town.

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V:

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— ——- (A Rock and Roll Movie) (1967, Thom Andersen)

Fantastic montage of contemporary rock-related things, from the sensual (dance and performance) to mechanical (pressing plants and jukeboxes). Snippets of every rock single of the time, the sound cutting with the picture but never synced to what we see on the screen.

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Parade, or Here They Come Down Our Street (1952, Eames)

Toys and dolls and marionettes puppeted into a parade to the usual Sousa theme. This would appear to have been an influence on my former employer’s Boomerang network packaging. Gives the sense of a serious collector showing off his classic toys.

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Odessa Crash Test (2013, Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

Repeatedly/gratuitously showing the actual spine-crunching fate of a baby sent down the stone stairs in an uncontrolled buggy. Either my copy was glitchy or the filmmakers thought static and freezing would add more fun to their experiment.

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I Thought The World of You (2022, Kurt Walker)

Wow, a short doc about Lewis. No spoken words, just written messages on screen, light sound design gradually building to the full songs – a more delicate take on the rock biography for an elusive subject. Apparently this is what “hauntology” is.

by ·Comments Off on 2551.01 (2021, Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

Laborious “Mad God but not good” vibes. The strobing pounding metal grotesque masked riot scene was a decent open, continues with monochrome cruelty (in every scene there’s some poor sucker who the others are beating). Throw in clowns and banana peels, silly music/sfx (laugh track?) in case we take the grim masked drama and Abu Ghraib references too seriously. The sudden stop/start of fast electro music just made me wonder if I could find the “Come On My Selector” video in high-def. In the end, it’s just an excuse to make lots and lots of masks, some of them really cool. Apparently during pandemic year one I spent an evening watching Nor-Pfaf movies, but now in the post-pand 2020s I remember nothing of previous years and rely on the movie memory blog more and more.

by ·Comments Off on Notes on Notes on Film (Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

Notes on Film 01: Else (2002)

Five-panel video up top, starring a woman in what look like camera tests, sometimes holding numbered cards, while down below the word IF transforms into THEN and ELSE via lines slowly sliding. Big string music, the sliding lines are fun but the woman is far more eye-catching. The URL in the credits has expired.

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Notes on Film 05: Conference (2011)

A cacophony of cinematic Hitlers, one after the other, their voices replaced by distorted static which gets louder according to how much each Hitler is shouting. After a Mel Brooks appearance we see film leader then a Hitler in a movie theater, so maybe all these Hitlers are being screened for another Hitler. The footage has all been processed with some heavy grain so it’ll match better.

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Notes on Film 04: Intermezzo (2012)

Escalator chase scene from Chaplin’s The Floorwalker remixed to a rock song. “Play Loud,” it says, so I did.

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Notes on Film 06A: A Messenger from the Shadows (2013)

Another multi-film montage, but this time Lon Chaney instead of Hitler – an improvement. The montage is fun, but really works because of the great music and sound design. More distorted-Hitler when people talk on the phone, at least one piece of actual sound footage. Love the climactic death-and-destruction montage.

Watched all these because of a rave article in Cinema Scope 56 about Notes on Film 06B, which takes the Lon Chaney approach but with Boris Karloff, and which I cannot find.