by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: B (I)

Black Box (1979, Beth B & Scott B)

Kidnapper/torturer Lydia Lunch wants “to cure you, to free you from error.” Man leaves his hot girl and crappy apartment for a sec, gets kidnapped off the sidewalk. Lydia keeps threatening him with the black box, then throws him inside. It’s a small room where you have to listen to Beth B’s music while someone flicks the lights on and off, so, exactly what the viewer of this film is going through. Just a few shots, real talky, with dialogue that feels improvised except for the Doctor’s and Lydia’s big speeches, not so much an actual movie as Decoder was.

The last thing you see before going into the black box:

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I-94 (1974, Bette Gordon & James Benning)

Flicker film, strobing between a woman walking away from camera and a man walking towards, with a man’s and a woman’s voice talking about the way they’re seen by other people, the tapes running at the same time but each voice distinct so you can focus on one person’s story or the other (but not both). Among the earliest work by either director.

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69 (1969, Robert Breer)

Thin-lined geometric shapes swing through white 3D space, then flicker fill colors are added, until the whole thing goes bonkers in the last minute.

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70 (1970, Robert Breer)

Escalation of 69, the color-flicker shapes are still swinging through space, with added sprays and blobs, and less chaos.

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Fuji (1974, Robert Breer)

My favorite of his, conceptually. A few shots of a train ride past Mt. Fuji have been traced and re-traced, rotoscoped with different treatments, until the mountain becomes a vague spray pattern, a triangle, a line, all rapidly and entertainingly shuffled together.

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Now You Tell One (1926, Charley Bowers)

Very good Bowers stop-motion adventure (he has a magic potion that can make anything grow, such as shoelaces, or a tree full of cats) wrapped in a needless backstory (he tells his tale at the local Liars Club and they give him a medal) with a good punchline (“sir I’m in love with your daughter” / “you idiot, that’s my wife”).

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A Visit from the Incubus (2001, Anna Biller)

Great theme song, explaining the Incubus tale. The rest of the songs don’t measure up, but the colors and costumes are top notch, and she gets real mileage out of having modern actors act like they’re in a 1950s technicolor musical western. Her long-awaited follow-up to The Love Witch should be coming any month now.

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Matin’s Breakfast (1974, Patrick Bokanowski)

The most interesting bits are when an actor appears to have been graphicized, or he’s running through a composited picturebook scene. But sometimes I wonder if they didn’t film the titular breakfast scene (chaos in a kitchen) and it wasn’t working, so they turned the footage into a slow-mo/freeze-frame avant-Begotten art film.

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The Artificial Humors (2016, Gabriel Abrantes)

Half-hour short about a soccer ball-shaped floating robot, its AI programmer, and the girl it’s in love with. The three of them leave the village where it’s been training and go to Sao Paolo, where it’s reprogrammed to be a successful stand-up comedian. Big movie music, seamless effects, cool parrots.

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The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady (2019, Gabriel Abrantes)

Another very slick-looking half-hour short that ultimately feels simpler and less interesting than his best work. An obvious comparison would be Night at the Museum, if I’d seen that.

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Lupo the Butcher (1987, Danny Antonucci)

“Sonamabeetch I keel you” says the butcher as he accidentally chops himself to death. Good animation – this got the director a string of MTV gigs, then he created Ed, Edd n Eddy. Marv Newland was involved in this somehow.

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She Puppet (2001, Peggy Ahwesh)

Someone is playing Tomb Raider, not very well. Feminist(?) machinima, Lara Croft dies over and over, with the exact same sound effect, and sometimes different narrators reflect on the nature of humanity. Made me wish I was watching the one Spaced episode where he feels like drowning things. Sun Ra and Michael Snow both appear in the credits.

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Il Capo (2010, Yuri Ancarani)

Wordless HD close-up on the guy on the ground who directs the heavy machinery tearing up a marble quarry. I learned that they shovel sand and rubble under the slab to give it a cushion to land on. Closeup on the guy’s hand with missing fingertip was a nice callback to Lupo the Butcher. Played True/False the same year as The Interrupters, The Arbor, and Fake It So Real.

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Aliens (1993, Michael Almereyda)

“David Fincher didn’t know what the hell he was doing.” Cameraman films two kids playing an Aliens video game under an Aliens poster. They have a distracted, casual conversation about massive box office hits and Sam Raimi movies, making UHF references.

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To The Unknown (2017, Michael Almereyda)

That’s more like it – piano and poetry (by Kenneth Koch) as Almereyda films a crippled cat on different days.

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Moonshine (1918, Roscoe Arbuckle)

A strange one, with meta intertitles, referring to the actors and stunts and extras. Our guys are lawmen after a gang of underground bootleggers. Arbuckle keeps getting captured, and does a quick pillsbury-doughboy giggle whenever they poke him in the belly with a rifle, then fakes his own death and is immediately recaptured. Alice Lake gets into the stunts as well, Al St. John is a reliable foil.

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Swing Shift Cinderella (1945, Tex Avery)
The Screwy Truant (1945, Tex Avery)
The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945, Tex Avery)

A good batch to watch together, since they all reference each other. Wolf & Hotgirl are main characters in Cinderella and McGoo, and she does a wolfy song and dance in both. Wolf appears with Bugs Bunny knockoff Screwy Squirrel in Truant, which borrows the opening title gag from Cinderella, Droopy plays Dan McGoo, and a lotta wolves and dogs get hit with a lotta hammers.

by ·Comments Off on Woman at the End of the World (1938, Jean Epstein)

The woman is Anna (of a couple episodes of Les Vampires), and she runs a bar on an otherwise uninhabited island (how does she restock?) with her young son and shellshocked husband. A ship full of sailors and workers arrive on the island searching for radium, not yet realizing their bosses are either incompetent or scam artists and they’ll find nothing. But while there, they cause as much trouble as possible while trying to get the woman’s attention.

A couple of famous cinematic policemen are in this, and one (Inspector Fichet of Diabolique) pushes the other (Inspector Parot of Eyes Without a Face) off a cliff. Epstein still loves the sea and gets some lovely seaside images, but it’s less an adventure story and more a romantic triangle (or octagon) drama. He does try to liven things up with wipes between scenes – mostly inappropriately, like when he star-wipes out of the murder confession scene.

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Les Berceaux (1931)

Operatic vocal song about cradles and the sea, with Epstein adding lovely visuals of cradles and the sea – the first music video. Dimitri Kirsanoff would use the same approach on the same song a few years later, suspicious.

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Le Tempestaire (1947)

Late Epstein has gone post-sound back to his silent roots. This one’s an ambiguous sea poem, near-silent, with sparse trancelike dialogue (every line spoken at least twice), cocteauian effects (stills, slow-mo, reverse), and some very low horizons (that’s interesting). Girl is afraid since her man went out in the storm, she tries the lighthouse (aka the sound cinema with its pulsing light and newfangled radio) then returns to the reliable old ways (storm whisperer with a crystal ball). More than half of this is shots of the sea, patiently watching as it gets more stormy, then less stormy, without some damn narrator having to tell us what we see.

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Fires of the Sea (1949)

Mostly an informational doc about the importance of lighthouses. We’re introduced to a particular lighthouse through the young new keeper (Robert Pattinson), who gets rattled during a storm but sticks it out.

by ·Comments Off on Two by Luke Fowler

Electro-Pythagorus (2017)

Apparently Fowler makes interview/essay docs about oddball musicians. This one’s about synth wizard / music professor Martin Barlett. Both Martin and the filmmaker seem to enjoy small homemade things and handwritten letters – much of the movie is letters and papers being read aloud.

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The Way Out (2003)

And this one is about another music weirdo, Jim “Xentos” Welton. I couldn’t tell if the Coven-like dubbed staged scenes in unfocused small-gauge film were a put-on, turns out they’re Xentos originals. People are interviewed, and sometimes Fowler will play a CD while the camera looks at a crack in the wall.

by ·Comments Off on Paper Trail and animated shorts

Paper Trail (2026, Don Hertzfeldt)

Following the life of a guy named Steven through marks he has made on paper, all kid drawings then love letters then lease agreements then forty years of signing off on bland work documents. Subtle! Will revisit it at a later date (haha).

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Duck Pimples (1945, Jack Kinney)

Hoped from the title this would be a Daffy, but it’s a Donald – fortunately one of his more insane ones. Home alone and easily scared, he’s attacked by scary stories from inside radio and books, culminating in an imagined crime story between himself, a thug, and Jessica Rabbit.

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Joy Street (1995, Suzan Pitt)

Depressed woman kills herself… loopy balloon creature comes alive from her ashtray and dances whimsically around the house before discovering her. Then I honestly don’t know what happens, but the animation is top-notch as per Pitt’s usual, and the woman’s alive at the end as Debbie Harry sings over the closing credits.

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Fun on Mars (1971, Sally Cruikshank)

Absolute anarchic dance-party nonsense. If I’d known what this would be like, I would not have watched it right after Joy Street since it out-wackies that movie’s whimsy. This 1971 movie set to an early 1930s song would be the equivalent of someone now making a short to a song from… oh no, a mid-80s song.

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The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943, George Pal)

Bart is cursed with a seemingly infinite supply of hats until he trades with the dickhead king. A “Madcap Model,” not a Puppetoon. I like that it’s full of light and shadow.

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Praise Be To Small Ills (1973, Tadanari Okamoto)

A rare Katy pick, this was a musical story about two men who lived with demons: one a sickly father of many children who managed to get by for forty years despite being weakened by a demon, the other a big strong manly man whose entire family was exploded by 13 demons on the night their first baby was born. We chose to ignore the life lesson you’re supposed to learn from all this (??) and focus on the music and cool paper-diorama animation.

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Gorilla My Dreams (1948, Robert McKimson)

Also not a Daffy but a bugs, who washes up on an ape island and gets adopted by a baby-crazy ape mom then gets attempted-murdered by her husband. Fortunately no cannibals here, just quick a Tarzan cameo.

by ·Comments Off on Three 1976 Shorts with Unpromising Titles

Table (Ernie Gehr)

Flicker film of a table setting, with a teapot and some cups and saucers, maybe some scissors back there. A shot from one angle in red light, another shot slightly offset in blue light, a third in white, giving the impression of a 3D movie gone haywire in editing, or a preview of late-period Ken Jacobs. Watched this as the director intended (a video copy at home, which was seemingly rephotographed off a film projection, while listening to Makaya McCraven in the headphones).

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Window (Stan Brakhage)

Stan aims his camera at/through a window for ten minutes. Unfortunately for the haters, this is incredible, because Stan is able to aim his camera at/through objects until they reveal their spirits inside.

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Leisure (Bruce Petty)

“Everybody expressing themselves simultaneously was causing tension and blood pressure… work had been planned for, and leisure had not.” See, this is why I sketch out the month’s moviewatching in advance, to lower the blood pressure. “Plans were laid to get fitness into offices, design into chairs.” Very jumbled and busy, by design. Pencil sketches meets cutup animation, the narrator sounding like he’s advertising to us.

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 Three by Roscoe Arbuckle

Oh Doctor (1917)

Arbuckle’s doctor is a horrible man, abusing his son Buster, straying from his wife at any opportunity, and gambling away the family savings on a hunch. Some people try to scam him but he beats them up, steals a bunch of cash, prospers. An evil movie!

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The Cook (1918)

A whole different thing, Arbuckle & Keaton coordinating impossible stunts in a kitchen with a running gag that all food orders come out of the same giant pot. Sure it gets weird when The Joker arrives at the restaurant and tries to dance some ladies to death.

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The Bell Boy (1918)

More ingenious gags, plus some silly haircuts. Ended up watching this one twice.

The Joker (Roscoe’s nephew Al St. John) demonstrates how not to ride a horse:

by ·Comments Off on Four by Phil Solomon

Psalm I: The Lateness of the Hour (1999)

Blue flickers in the inky blackness, sometimes watery-reflective or anomene-textured, sometimes seemingly clips from other films with the Psalm III edge-enhancement filter. Apparently silent, so I played my own very groovy music, which was the highlight of the experience

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Last Days in a Lonely Place (2007)

None of these movies have titles or credits, and these next two form a Grand Theft Auto trilogy along with Rehearsals for Retirement called In Memoriam (Mark LaPore). Predating the kids’ craze for liminal spaces, Solomon finds meditative room in some low-res 3D game engine. Yes it’s the dreaded machinima, but thank goodness that beyond these shorts and Grand Theft Hamlet, that craze never took off, so we can appreciate these as singular objects. Ambient music with Humphrey Bogart clips.

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Still Raining, Still Dreaming (2009)

Mark LaPore codirected the short Crossroad with Solomon in tribute to David Gatten, and died that same year. This one’s even more ambient and liminal than before, though slightly less greyscale. Almst no movement except the shifting of digital daylight and video compression artifacts, the audio a bootleg Indian broadcast.

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Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow (2013)

More ambient than ever, leans too hard on its audio track: the closing monologue of The Dead, without any good video game visuals.