by ·Comments Off on We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (2023, Joshua Gen Solondz)

We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (2023)

Lotta different modes here, gradually cutting or blending between them. I really liked the strobe-trance section where someone is adjusting a white mask over their black stocking mask. Just a note: instead of pulsing harsh noise over this kind of scene, could experimental filmmakers not try repeating a gentle chime or alternating a couple nice chords? At least when movies are silent I can put on a Coil or Matmos album and be the perpetrator of my own punishment. Nice blend of check-the-gate 8mm and extreme digital editing. Love the metal-font intertitles too. Some pretty late voiceover then the sound of a crackling fire. After Ken Jacobsing some guys early on, he Martin Arnolds them later. Katy was reading on the couch, looked up at the halfway point and declared the movie “dumb.”

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

We Don’t Talk is part travelogue and part diary film, a combination of the artist’s bizarre version of domestic bonhomie and his resistance to reducing the larger world to consumptive tourism. Setting these two elements into dialectical action, Solondz produces an aggressive, throbbing film ritual that alludes to common experiences — travel, physical affection, scenes from daily life — but thwarts the tendency to reduce them to mere spectacle … Solondz alternates between different moments of a singular action, with a sharp electronic burble heard in every other image. A figure in a black hood is placing the N95 over their face in one half of the edit, and is removing it in the other. In addition to being a potent image, one that creates a kind of circular pumping action onscreen, it also provides a new twist on Solondz’s fixation on the body in space, as an interior that both threatens and is threatened by the outside … This concern with the body under duress, and the comprehensive breakdown of domesticity and public life, takes on a more direct valence in this film because, in a sense, the air is quite different in the COVID era.

–
Tourism Studies (2019)

Opens with whispering about Tupac Shakur(?) before the soundtrack gets typically harsh. Strobe-edits between shots with different aspect ratios, compositions squared-off vs diagonal. Racetrack and test pattern and more homemade costumes. “Psychotronic savagery” per Sicinski.

by ·Comments Off on Pumpkin Movie +2 (Sophy Romvari)

Pumpkin Movie (2017)

Sophy in one city is skyping with a friend in Halifax while they carve jack-o-lanterns and discuss sexist aggressions from the past year.

–
Norman Norman (2018)

Repeat appearance by the director’s Macbook as she looks up videos about dog cloning while her own dog (Norman, elderly, in rough shape) lays with her on the bed.

–
In Dog Years (2019)

Interviews with owners of messed-up dogs, some near the end of their lives, with all focus on the dogs and their stories, the owners’ faces not shown. “In memory of Norman,” oh no. I was supposed to follow these up with Nine Behind / It’s Him / Grandma’s House, but already shaken by dying dogs I couldn’t take on dying grandmothers.

by ·Comments Off on Cat Soup shorts

Cat Soup (2001, Tatsuo Sato)

I don’t know Sato’s work, but I know animation producer Masaaki Yuasa, and this has got the wavy woozy quality of Yuasa’s features. A cat hits the town with his catatonic sister, whose soul was half-ripped by an evil shaman, and they experience all the major elements (desert, sea, time-freeze, soup) before landing back home. Incredible. One scene is set at the “Big Whale Circus,” making this part of the Werckmeister Harmonies universe. Sato is known for a series called Martian Successor, also did animated sequel series to both Ninja Scroll and Tokyo Tribe. There’s a separate Cat Soup series from the director of a Battle Angel Alita series.

–
Little Pancho Vanilla (1938, Frank Tashlin)

Kid claims he’s a bullfighter, gets catapulted into the arena, lands on the bull and is awarded first prize. Not top-tier Tash, it passed the time.

–
King-Size Canary (1947, Tex Avery)

Oh yeah, what if the cartoon had actual gags in it, wouldn’t that be better?

–
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011)

After a major storm, books become birdies and Morris becomes a bookseller where reading turns the enchanted town residents from b/w to color. It’s all too precious for me, but wonderfully assembled – no surprise it won the oscar (over the Brave-era short La Luna). The directors are suspiciously named Brandon and William Joyce – also suspicious that each one co-directed a different 2014 11-minute Edgar Allen Poe short.

–
Seventh Master of the House (1966, Ivo Caprino)

Traveler asks a guy for a bed for the night, and gets sent to the guy’s father, and so on… then he gets the bed. It’s not much of a story, but it’s always good when our refined puppet animation devolves into increasingly bizarre characters until the final guy is shrunken to a quarter the height of his beard and resting in a horn hung on the wall. Some festival must’ve had a 12-minute minimum length so they added a framing story of a whitebeard man sitting in the snow writing this story (women do not exist in Norway).

–
Three Inventors (1980, Michel Ocelot)

2D doily-paper cutout stop-motion, oooh. Family of inventors keep creating wonderful things. The town “notables,” having no vision or creativity themselves, conclude that the inventors must be criminal philistines, and a mob burns their house down, destroying everything that is beautiful.

Mouseover to operate the magic lace pipe-organ sewing-machine:
image

Aftermath tells us it was only a movie:

–
George and Rosemary (1987, Snowden & Fine)

Guy is obsessed with gal across the street, when he finally builds up the nerve to march over there he learns she’s been obsessed with him too. Oscar-nominated, but against two of the greats: Your Face and The Man Who Planted Trees.

–
There Once Was a Dog (1982, Eduard Nazarov)

Guard dog is old and busted so he gets kicked out of the house, makes a deal with a wolf to get back into the family’s graces then repays the wolf with stolen food. Cute story and animation, and the would-be sentimental ending provided the biggest laugh of the night.

–
Glens Falls Sequence (1937, Douglass Crockwell)

The kind of paint-meets-clay blending that I love in The Wolf House. In standard-def I can’t even tell the difference between the 2D and 3D layers sometimes, or maybe it’s all 2D, but it’s wonderful. Feels freeform, making up new patterns according to whim, but returning to some (sexual/creature/religious) themes, like McLaren meets Bickford. I was gonna say the music is sometimes overwhelming, but I got caught up in the visuals and forgot that it’s a silent film and I’d hit play on Matmos A Chance to Cut.

–
Simple Destiny Abstractions (1938, Douglass Crockwell)

A later film, but feels like the early demos that became Glens Falls. We’ll call it the bonus tracks. An advertisement painter, Doug made crazy motion experiments at his home in eastern New York state.

–
Mind the Steps! (1989, Istvan Orosz)

B/W Escher-sketch of a perspective-defying apartment building, sometimes telling little stories of residents or political oppression and sometimes just transforming things into other things. Scraps of warped sound effects and harmonica made me forget I wasn’t still playing the Matmos.

–
Syrinx (1966, Ryan Larkin)

Sexy forest gods keep materializing then dissolving into abstraction. Music video for a flutey Debussy piece.

–
America is Waiting (1981, Bruce Conner)

Also a music video, for a good Byrne/Eno song. Not just a montage of fun stock footage, he warps the meaning of some shots by running them in forward and reverse. Lotta fun. I should’ve read that giant Conner book in the Ross library when I had the chance. At least there’s Screen Slate:

The success of [Mongoloid] led to an invitation from Brian Eno and David Byrne to make America is Waiting, a parody of paranoia that remains depressingly relevant. Using sourced material from the 1950s, he criticized reactionary politics, Western individualism, the Reagan administration, and military violence. When MTV rejected the video as part of their early programming that same year, it proved that corporate media always sanitizes rebellion.

by ·Comments Off on Vulcanizadora (2024, Joel Potrykus)

Back to basics, just Joel and Joshua Burge alternately amusing themselves with fire or glowsticks and driving each other nuts in the woods. As their growing tension and weird vibes and the movie’s awesome poster indicate, the end goal is a double suicide, but squirrely Joel can’t follow through, so his head is exploded by a supercharged firecracker while Josh gets a half-hour coda of legal issues and regret. Really messed-up movie, a perfect addition to the Joel/Josh canon.

–
Ludovico Testament (1999)

Best-case scenario of early homemade short films. This is exactly the sort of lifesize stop-motion that I would’ve made in my VHS-cam days if I’d seen The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb the year it came out instead of eight years later.

–
Gordon (2007)

Gordon takes his kid to the playground and dies unexpectedly, then comes back a few months later as a zombie, his face deteriorated but his suit still in nice shape. Family has moved away, and nobody can stand to look at him, so he bums around town to Beck’s “He’s a Mighty Good Leader,” his teeth and fingernails falling out, then returns to his grave.

–
Joel Calls Indie Film Type Dudes (2020)

Conceptual comedy, Joel calls all the industry people in his phone to ask how the quarantine is going for them, then doesn’t listen to their responses and hangs up in a hurry. The joke is on Alex Ross Perry, who gets called four times, each time listing him as the director of a different film.

–
Unemployees (2023)

Dani and Kandy are slacker idiots with an ill-thought-out plan to get jobs and be fired then collect unemployment. After stints in an office, a factory, and a cafeteria (all filmed at Grand Valley U in Allendale MI) they take a field labor gig and discover that money does grow on trees – but trees that cause horrible skin infections.

by ·Comments Off on Strange Codes + 3 (Arthur Lipsett)

Strange Codes (1975)

I meant to pair this with Everything Everywhere Again Alive but fell behind, so put together a little Lipsett fest instead – good thing, too, since I fared better with the earlier shorts. Lone eccentric makes a film at home, playing with all his props and displaying his collection of weird objects and games and papers, without coming up with an exciting way of presenting these thing cinematically. The sound alternates between Chinese opera and a cut-up monologue about 1962 computer technology. “Maddeningly impenetrable,” raves Cinema Scope. Will Sloan watched the extras.

–
Very Nice, Very Nice (1961)

Audio and photographic montage, good fast editing and very nice photo choices, I’m into it.

–
21-87 (1964)

The montage technique (not as flipbook-fast as Very Nice) with motion footage, a great 1960s time capsule with a cut-up audio track that keeps returning to religious music/topics.

–
Free Fall (1964)

Highly variable cutting speed, from flipbook to long-held stills, now mixing photos with motion footage while intercutting human and animal/insect portraits and behaviors. A lotta fun, especially on the audio track.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched May/June 2025

Naked Blue (2022, Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie)

Not actually naked, but wearing a blue skeleton suit, a girl is hanging around a studio, then the smoke machine turns on and she dances for a camera, but not ours, which seems more of a low-fi behind-the-scenes angle, giving the sense of a backstage parent filming their kid’s motion capture performance for a video game or music video. No sync sound, big classical music slapped on top of it – oh, now I see the music is the whole point of this, it’s a new piece by Devonté Hynes. The dancing girl is the daughter of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Louis Garrel.

–
Five Days Till Tomorrow (2022, Lewis Klahr)

Klahr does more of his thing, this time to a minimalist piano piece. There are recurring characters but I couldn’t come up with a story except maybe “Luchador at the World’s Fair is haunted by circular objects.” I like how he uses cut-out characters with missing edges or word-bubble fragments, character art perfection not being the goal, also dig the subliminal flash-frame edits.

–
Om (1986, John Smith)

This guy again. Really good gag short, a misty monk turns out to be a barber’s cig-smoking customer, his tape-looped infinite om doubling as the sound of the electric razor.

–
Atman (1975, Toshio Matsumoto)

This is the Funeral Parade of Roses director pulling out some Takashi Ito moves, spinning around a seated demon in a breezy outdoor space, the camera moving and zooming at every speed from freeze-frame to freak-out. Pretty nice weirdo-loop music by Yoko Ono’s first husband.

–
Relation (1982, Toshio Matsumoto)

Another short from the long gap between Funeral Parade and Dogra Magra. Early 80s video art that actually holds up. Starts with an ocean scene split-screen at the horizon line, with the sky in fast-motion over a slow sea, then adds more frame splits and pictures-in-pictures after replacing the clouds with a left-to-right scrolling graphic finger, making the ocean look like a claw-machine of the gods.

–
How to Conduct a Love Affair (2007, David Gatten)

Crossfaded shots of (perhaps) large wrinkly paper sheets with charcoal drawings hanging under a slight breeze. Then bottles and hands, a bit of a nice green color after I’d thought it was a black and white movie. Opens with still text about patience in love affairs, ends with crossfaded sentences on black about colors and waiting, all silent.

–
Swain (1950, Gregory Markopoulos)

Young man is freaking out at the zoo so he goes to the sculpture park instead and has a nice wholesome time. He moves on to the botanical garden, but he’s being chased by a bride. Pretty sweet despite the quality of my copy – don’t suppose I’ll ever have the chance to see this properly. The Maya Deren vibes are pretty strong. Silent, so I played the first three tracks of Def Jux Presents volume 1, as the director no doubt intended. What ever happened to Cannibal Ox… oh wow, their third album came out this year and nobody liked it.

–
Bliss (1967, Gregory Markopoulos)

Vacation slides cut into vertical strips and visually jukeboxed together, flashing and overlaying, then joined by burning icons. I turned off RJD2 because this one has brief barnyard sounds over black halfway through, but then it’s back to silent church strobing for the second half.

–
Dance Chromatic (1959, Ed Emshwiller)

Ed edits a dancer in time and space across the screen, turning her into a graphic element, then does motion paintings in response to her moves. Very cool, somebody get Norman McLaren on the phone. Clangy percussion score.

–
The Bones (2021, Cociña & León)

Oh hell yeah. It’s got the house-destruction and wall-paint-creep from Wolf House and the walking-in-place trick from the PJ Harvey video, but the focus this time is stop-motion puppets. A girl unearths a pile of bones, reverse-burns them into a jumble of fleshy body parts, then Mr. Potato-Heads them in various configurations, marries them to each other, and disappears. Presented as if it were a reconstructed film from 1901, but even if so, there was no need to distress the soundtrack (increasingly disturbed piano music) since they didn’t have audiotape in 1901. Also, having just watched Leaves from Satan’s Book (1921), I can vouch that movies back then were not as satanic as this one.

Zero Kama in the studio:

–
Conversations of Donkey and Rabbit (2020, Ildikó Enyedi)

Are there really 20+ of these? I don’t think so. Long distance conversation: Rabbit has been reading Plato and is excited about birds and flowers, Donkey casually disagrees with her about how trees work. Nicely staged and photographed, very pandemic-feeling.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 17: The Joke and shorts

The Joke (1969, Jaromil Jires)

The joke was a cynical line he wrote to a girl he liked in a piece of intercepted mail which got him sent to a tribunal and kicked out of college – I didn’t mean to program a monthly theme of getting kicked out of school along with Education and Downhill. The flashbacks are wonderful, nobody plays the lead character as a young man, the camera is his stand-in, and his memories overlap the present, so the words of his expulsion tribunal are dubbed into a church ceremony he’s wandered into.

In present day our guy (Josef Somr of Morgiana) meets up with Helena (of the 1984 AI horror-comedy Grandmothers Recharge Well!) with a revenge scheme, meaning to seduce the wife of one of his accusers. All goes smoothly, except that the married couple are separated so the husband is happy that she’s found a new man, and Helena’s assistant is in love with her, and when our guy tries to ditch her she attempts suicide (Canby found this part “very funny”).

when your girl Marketa says she will stand by you:

when your revenge plot has fallen apart:

It was banned for decades, of course… based on a novel from the writer of The Unbearable Lightness of Being… Jires’s followup would be Valeria and Her WOW.

–
Zid / The Wall (1966, Ante Zaninovic)

Decent little animation with hot music. Man in bowler hat sits patiently by a giant wall, until aggrieved naked man comes along and tries everything in his power to get through it, finally headbutting it and himself to death. Bowler man walks calmly through the new hole and waits at the next wall.

–
The Fly (1967, Marks & Jutrisa)

Yugoslavian animation. Impassive guy tries to squish a fly but it escapes and doubles in size every quarter minute until it’s large enough to annihilate the man’s world and send him hurtling through space. Aware of their power over each other, they decide to be friends? Someone had fun with the all-buzzing sound design. Not to be confused with The Fly or The Fly.

–
Be Sure to Behave (1968, Peter Solan)

Girl in prison solitary washes up, pees, paces, watched always by an eye in the door. She imagines scenes suggested by crack patterns in the wall. Then she’s dressed up all nice, blindfolded, escorted to a park and released. She narrates all this too – unsubtitled, whoops, but it’s a soviet psychodrama of some kind. Czech, Vogel had the subtitles:

In this film a woman prisoner, harshly incarcerated, is suddenly released as unpredictably as she had been imprisoned; “Stalin is dead,” she is told, and then, significantly, “Be sure to behave.”

–
Jan 69 (1969, Stanislav Milota)

Czech funeral doc, aka Funeral of Jan Palach. Jan has died young, burning himself in protest of Soviet occupation, and the people are all turning out. Silent, set to doomy choir music.

–
Don Kihot (1961, Vlado Kristl)

Not what I was expecting given the title. Confusing flying machines, a cross between WWII planes and faces with bristly mustaches, bustle about. This tall robot must be the Don, taking on all the mustache pilots at once, going rogue in a police state. Big showdown arrives and the Don pauses to make out with a magazine, then either wins or loses, I couldn’t follow the abstract character design. Some pointedly handdrawn backgrounds (no straight lines) and inventive prop stuff. Unreleased in its native Yugoslavia, Vogel: “Don Quixote has become mechanized and is threatened by a technological society bent on destroying his individuality. He defeats it by exposing it to the power of art and poetry; but the art work is itself ironically distorted, raising a question mark.”

–
Among Men (1960, Wladyslaw Slesicki)

Stray dog draws the attention of some kids playing war and they attack it. It’s sold to a medical research place but escapes. Rounded up and leashed by animal control, rescued and taken to a friendly animal farm, but flees again, hungry on the streets. This city is portrayed as a shithole, with nice photography at least. This predates Balthazar and some other stories of innocent animals in a selfish human world. Vogel: “The most important of the famed Polish Black Series documentaries which dared to touch on negative aspects of socialist society.”

by ·Comments Off on Un Chant d’amour (plus Goldin and Giolo)

Un Chant d’Amour (1950, Jean Genet)

Contact between adjoining prison cells. Almost narrative, then it doubles back on itself or fantasizes itself out of the prison, or introduces a murderous prison guard.

Basically the same image in Be Sure to Behave:

–
The Demands of Ordinary Devotion (2022, Eva Giolo)

Objects and processes, an excellent example of this sort of thing, nicely edited with a great focus on sound.

–
Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose (2023, Eva Giolo)

Scenes from bigger spaces, ambient outdoor sounds in less controlled environments, cut with short snips of people indoors making noises on everyday objects when used unusually. How does a horn sound when you rub it, or a plant when you hug it, videotapes when they’re stacked? “Stop filming a train station, you’re not Chantal Akerman,” I demanded of the movie, not realizing it was made as a tribute to her, part of an omnibus feature. Forgot I’d watched one of Eva’s a couple years ago. Her follow-up to this was filmed on an island and her latest short sounds anthropological, getting further from the enclosed spaces of Demands and Flowers.

Michael Sicinski makes the new one sound pretty fun, and writes that these two:

exhibit Giolo’s particular brand of editing, which tends to allow individual shots to play out before being replaced by an entirely different sort of material. Shots with humans tend to be followed by ones without, landscapes succeeded by interiors, brown, natural colors followed by saturated reds and blues.

–
The Other Side (2021, Nan Goldin)

One of the famous slideshows, and it is really a slideshow, a parade of images (sometimes images of parades) with short crossfades, set to a mixtape. I probably liked two of the seven songs and most of the images, many of which were in vertical formats ill-suited to my wide TV.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 16: Jazz, Race, & Poetry

Same Vogel chapter as The Spanish Earth, “Left and Revolutionary Cinema: the West.” Useful to note that Vogel is never posting lists of his favorite movies, but the ones that illustrate a particular quality or movement – he spends half this chapter complaining about early 1970s Godard.

Unfortunately, the resultant films – from British Sounds to Tout Va Bien – prove that to “will” political cinema into being without the mediation of art is self-defeating. Despite brilliant sequences (reminiscent of the “old” Godard), these works are visually sterile, intellectually shallow, and, in terms of their overbearing, insistent soundtracks didactic, pedantic, dogmatic.

–
The Cry of Jazz (1959, Edward Bland)

“Rock and roll is not jazz.” Argument within a college(?) jazz club about whether only Black people could have created jazz, the white boys arguing that there are plenty of white players so race has nothing to do with it. Narrator Alex explains how music works (repeating chorus, changes/harmonies) and how jazz has evolved, culminating in the hottest group of today, the Sun Ra Arkestra. While the kids are stuck arguing in their musicless bland room, our camera hits the streets and the clubs seeking examples for Alex’s explanations. After a savage scene comparing Black life (pool game) to white life (poodle getting a haircut), eventually there’s a short debate over whether Americans have souls, concluding ambivalently: “America’s soul is an empty void.” For a half-hour movie that begins looking like a MST3K educational short, this sure takes some wild turns.

The two restraining elements in jazz are the form and the changes. They are restraining because of their endless repetition, in much the same way that the Negro experiences the endless daily humiliation of American life, which bequeaths him a futureless future. In conflict with America’s gift of a futureless future is the Negro’s image of himself. Through glorifying the inherent joy and freedom in each present moment of life, the Negro transforms America’s image of him into a transport of joy. Denied a future, the joyous celebration of the present is the Negro’s answer to America’s ceaseless attempts to obliterate him. Jazz is a musical expression of the Negro’s eternal recreation of the present. The Negro’s freeing worship of the present in jazz occurs through the constant creation of new ideas in jazz. These new ideas are born by improvising through the restraints of the form and the changes. Jazz reflects the improvised life thrust upon the Negro. Now, melody is one element which can be used in improvisation. The soloist creates this melody through elaborating on various details of the changes. The manner in which each change shall be elaborated upon is a problem of the eternal present. As Negro life admits of many individual solutions, so does the way in which a change can be elaborated upon. Of course the Negro, as man and/or jazzman, must be constantly creative, for that is how he remains free. Otherwise, the dehumanizing portrait America has drawn of him will triumph.

Editor Howard Alk worked on Dylan movies, and one of the jazz club girls grew up to be Magnolia‘s Rose Gator. Bland went on to arrange for Sun Ra in New York and compose orchestral works. From his NY Times obituary:

The British critic Kenneth Tynan, in a column for The London Observer, wrote that it “does not really belong to the history of cinematic art, but it assuredly belongs to history” as “the first film in which the American Negro has issued a direct challenge to the white.”

–
I’m a Man (1969, Peter Rosen)

“Police are always frightened.” John walks through a Connecticut town carrying a spear in order to provoke white people, then calls his wife to say he’s about to be arrested. The doc(?) interviews people from John’s court case: the whites think he’s incompetent, the blacks realize he’s an intellectual. John sees himself as a militant, says he expects to die poor and hated, but aims to increase freedom for his kids.

–
Wholly Communion (1966, Peter Whitehead)

Something completely different: document of a post-beatnik pre-hippie poetry reading in June 1965 at Royal Albert Hall. “This evening is an experiment” – with minor crowd disturbance or drama or movement, it’s mostly just guys reading poetry with better-than-decent sound recording.

Ginsberg listens and waits his turn: