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.

by ·Comments Off on Jennifer Reeves shorts

Girls Daydream About Hollywood (1992)

Rapid-fire cut-ups of film and TV and sound clips, slowed down and distorted and strobed, about misogyny and other fun topics.

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Monsters in the Closet (1993)

Stories of queer youth: sex, crimes, and sex crimes. Sound and visual are again subject to speed tampering and flickering.

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The Girl’s Nervy (1995)

Single-frame flickers of beautiful colors covered in fractured-web patterns. Towards the middle a circular field in the frame makes me think nervy = optical nerve, then in the last segment we’re outside among flowers and the patterns look like veins in a plant leaf. Three 1930’s songs, the first of which sounds reversed.

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We Are Going Home (1998)

More reverse audio, images that look embossed, or posterized, whatever that photoshop filter was called. Double(?) exposures turn people into phantoms or twins, pull them apart from the background, the color flitting from pink to blue like a 3D movie in collapse. People walk slowly, someone is buried, breasts and toes get sucked on.

by ·Comments Off on Pear and Vogel 20 shorts

Pear (2024 Joel Potrykus)

Two-hander about trauma, and Joel’s second movie of the year about suicide. Woman re-grows her dead husband in the back yard, but he’s not the same.

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De Düva: The Dove (1968, Coe & Lover)

A silly-assed Ingmar Bergman parody in fake-Swedish (challenging Death to a game of badminton) has no business being this good.

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The Cuckoo Waltz (1955, Emile van Moerkerken)

Processions of people (or zoo animals), some serious and some less so, speed-manipulated so they dance back and forth in slow-fast-motion. Cute.

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Fashion (1960, Yoji Kuri)

No real build to this, just a five-minute boogie of film-scratch animation playing off some cut-out figures with an all-drums soundtrack for five minutes.

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Love (1964, Yoji Kuri)

Absurd love story – tall woman chases short man with a butterfly net until she captures him and makes him her pet. Much dialogue, but only the word “hi.”

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The Window (1965, Yoji Kuri)

Windows, more like it – apartment building with windows lighting up to follow the hijinks within.

by ·Comments Off on Alexandre Larose shorts

930 (2006)

Rorschach black/white blobs in a slow reversal strobe, shifting to other things but always returning to what looks like a graveyard image morphing into the back of a person’s head. The sound turns from circus music at 10% volume (to trick you into cranking up your speakers) to nightmare industrial grinding at 100% to bubbly noise-reduction artifacts at 25% to a piano tune recorded in a room with terrible acoustics. Actually filmed inside a train tunnel, so that headstone image was the tunnel entrance. Larose is Canadian, roughly my age, and supposedly did more interesting work later, so let’s go.

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Artifices #1 (2007)

Ordinary traffic/street lights streaked into timelapse lines with ambient-doom music. It shows you the dot form and the line form, so know what you’re looking at, then a mirror view of the camera’s rotation apparatus at the end, so you know how they made it. Under/overscanned with visible sprocket holes, an impressive condensation of technique and imagery in three minutes.

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Ville Marie (2009)

Shapes and forms, sometimes human, in reverse-image flicker motion. Green person next to towering inferno. Unexpected face kaleidoscope. Trance-pulse, rainbow blotch, lot of different things visually as the soundtrack moves from haunted-house ambient to light piano to projector noise.

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La Grande Dame (2011)

Changing perspectives on building window grids, silent

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Brouillard #14 (2014)

Holy cow, what is this? Could be someone walking the same grassy path towards (and into) the water sixteen times, the images overlaid and masked so they bob and weave into each other, but I’m not sure if that would account for the trees being blown apart into pointillist abstractions. It adds up to a very cool trance effect, made even better by the song “Aghora” by Bill Laswell, which I added since it’s the right length.

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Saint Bathans Repetitions (2016)

1. Grainy indoor low-light scenes with a window in the background and a low hum on the soundtrack, not as cool as the bass parts in the Bill Laswell song, but the image is unstable, subtly changing into different scenes without you realizing how.
2. Similar fragmentary image instability but in nice clear color. A guy and his sixteen trailing shadow-images travel easily through the house, his actions causing exponentially-layered creaking-wood sounds.
3. Vague b/w dream of the previous segment.
4. b/w mountain textures
5. b/w but less vague, the guy and his shadows sit on a couch, the soundtrack clattering echoes in response.
Ohhhh, the layering was done in-camera, Larose must be a mad genius.

by ·Comments Off on Some Cartoons watched in late November

Plane Crazy (1928, Ub Iwerks)

The whole barnyard pitches in to build Mickey a rubber-dog-powered airplane, but it explodes immediately, so he sticks a propeller and a turkey tail on a jalopy to get some real power. After terrorizing everyone during takeoff, including some sweet first-person views that might account for this movie being on Jerry Beck’s list, he gets Minnie in the air in order to sexually harass her, but she ditches him mid-flight.

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Balloon Land (1935, Ub Iwerks)

No spoken words in the Mickey, this one’s got singing. In a world where everyone/thing is made out of balloons except for the dreaded Pincushion Man, who threatens to pop our dim heroes who wander into the woods. He follows them into town and goes on a mass murder frenzy until the armed forces fight back with tree sap and knock him off the edge of the world. The young couple gets away with bringing grave peril into town since the only witness who could’ve fingered them was killed.

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Music Land (1935, Wilfred Jackson)

Princess Violin of Symphony island and Prince Alto Sax of Jazz island have a tryst which starts a war, until the opposing sides chill out and hold a wedding instead. Great character design in this one, with the voice of each character “spoken” by the instrument it represents.

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Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (1938, Wilfred Jackson)

Just a string of parodies of movie actors ending in a full-cast dance-off. Gross Katharine Hepburn blackface gag, good Marx Bros and Cab Calloway.

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A Wild Hare (1940, Tex Avery)

The original Elmer vs. Bugs mind-game cartoon. Lost an oscar to The Milky Way.

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Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid (1942, Robert Clampett)

Now a well-established character, Bugs faces off against a dim vulture (condor?), the bird version of Elmer. The buzzard’s voice was a parody of a well-known ventriloquist dummy, created by Edgar “father of Candice” Bergen, whose other well-known ventriloquist dummy was parodied in Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.

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Screwball Squirrel (1944, Tex Avery)

Having co-created Bugs, Daffy and Porky, Tex fell out with the Looney producers and moved to MGM, where he appears to have created new versions of Bugs/Daffy (squirrel) and Elmer/Buzzard (dog) to torment with even wilder gags. Full of fun meta jokes, far beyond Screwy talking to the audience – the action hitches when a turntable playing the music score skips, he pulls back the screen to see what happens in the next scene, he interrupts the iris-out to extend the action. Has the same ending as The Palm Beach Story.

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Baseball Bugs (1946, Friz Freleng)

Bugs in invincible trickster mode plays every position at once, singlehandedly takes on an entire baseball team – some good gags and frantic energy.

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The Big Snooze (1946, Arthur Davis)

Fed up with being tormented, Elmer rips up his contract with the cartoons and goes off to take a peaceful nap under a tree. Bugsy Krueger takes sleeping pills and invades Elmer’s dreams, feminizing him and setting wolves after him, terrifying him into rejoining the chase. One of the shorts Bob Clampett left unfinished when he quit the studio and moved to Screen Gems, where he created Beany and Cecil.

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Tweetie Pie (1947, Friz Freleng)

Another Clampett castoff, redesigned by Freleng. Sylvester (here named Thomas) is chasing an bird outside in the snow, which is then adopted by the cat’s owner. Dig the rube goldberg contraption. Ends with the bird just pummeling the cat with a shovel. The first Warner short to win an oscar (vs. a George Pal puppetoon).

by ·Comments Off on Nausicaa and more by Agnes Varda

Nausicaa (1971)

Episodic in different styles, like The Silence Before Bach, and more engaging about Greece than her friend Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy. A big improvement over Lions Love. Varda’s last movie before Mathieu was born and she took a few-year break, returning with Daguerrotypes.

Interview with Pericles, arrested and tortured in Greece after the 1967 coup. Flamboyant sketch about greek art led by advertising guy Mr. ID, jeered by an unseen audience when it ends. Salesgirl selling greek art books instead of bibles (of course you can pay in installments). Newscaster-like guy gives us a history lesson on the coup. Interview with a greek soldier who fled. A geologist found work as a night watchman, misses the sun and the sea, his friends and family now in prison.

Varda makes her first appearance in the next segment, a gathering of exiled Greeks, and a drama starts to come together. We get a recurring character in the salesgirl, and some scripted drama as a young Gerard Depardieu steals her books. The girl and her roommate are hosting a Greek refugee journalist in her apartment until he can get his own place.

Street interviews with tourists who love Greece and don’t think about the politics, and a visit to the Club Med office. A scene purportedly set in Greece, but the backdrop of sea and mountains is transparently fake. Narration by one of the guys who tore down the nazi flag from the Parthenon during WWII. Skit with a girl named Democracy being whipped by her authoritarian mother, asked to sign a loyalty oath.

Democracy hiding under the table:

Episode narrated by Varda about her family history. She talks about a harbor trip she took with the actor playing the refugee journalist, throwing her producers under the bus for not having enough crew to capture sound on their trip.

A factory secretary tell the journalist her secret family history – she turns out to be the mom of one of his hosts, the one from Golden Eighties. After he sleeps with the non-Eighties girl, instead of having them speak to each other, Varda reads both their lines from the script as narration.

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Documenteur (1981)

A vaguely depressing one, made during Varda’s second Los Angeles residency, the same year as Mur Murs (and also interested in street murals). Sabine Mamou (Varda and Demy’s editor) and her son (Mathieu Demy) are in LA, she is a typist bouncing between residences, staying with friends until she gets her own place. The movie is very into watching local people, not clear where the actor/documentary line is drawn, with wordy narration, full of wordplay and association.

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Pasolini/Varda/New York (2022)

Shot on a walk through NYC in 1966, with sound and editing done the following year, then lost until Rosalie restored it in 2022. Pasolini has essential thoughts about New York and filmmaking.

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Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux (1958)

Maybe her most picturesque movie, an elegant tour of fortresses and castles, with a light jazz soundtrack and poetry excerpts. Torn between thinking this is great and thinking it’s a piece with the tupperware advertisement she directed. Reading the Carrie Rickey book now, which says this was an important step in getting Varda connections and respect and funding for her next steps after La Pointe Courte.

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One Minute for One Image (1983)

Commentary on photographs by (mostly) other artists. Old woman’s face, naked boy held by old women, boats with person in foreground, hand surgery, family in open house, mass grave (this has second narrator Jacques Monory), handshake with fish hand (below), family portrait (with guest commenter Agnes’s mom), mud wrestling, hippie facing soldiers, mirror shard and purse contents on street (a still from Cleo from 5 to 7), kids on a Chinese wall, nude mirror polaroids.

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Les Enfants du Musée (1964)

Short doc of a youth program at the museum for aspiring artists.

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Les 3 Boutons (2015)

No shade on Varda, this is just an overpriced fashion commission. Teen girl leaves her goat farm after receiving a package full of magic fabric, floating through the city in a robe, losing three buttons and gaining three wishes. Good color, nice focus tricks, and standard ugly CG. Also checked out the DVD extras/follow-ups to Daguerrotypes and a couple others – there is a wealth of material on Criterion.

by ·Comments Off on Glass Life Shorts

Glass Life (2021, Sara Cwynar)

Photo-studio collage scroll with extreme digital compositing, music and voiceover tracks reinforcing or canceling each other, choice quotes from every modern philosopher, many objects and alphabets recognized from the gallery exhibit we saw, this 20-minute film itself refactored from a different exhibit. Daniel Gorman gets it.

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Neighbours (1952, Norman McLaren)

Two guys get along until a sweet-smelling flower grows on their property line and they ultimately murder each other’s families and each other to gain possession of it. It’s bad politics, say both Alex and McLaren’s studio boss, but terrific live-action stop-motion, and the source of the Mr. Show knees-levitation effect.

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Oz: The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967, Harry Smith)

Smith loves transformative destruction, so the woodman whacks a tree with his ax, turning it into a pile of furniture and creatures, which eventually whirl around to form mystical fountain patterns. Psychedelic kaleidoscope setup starts with a Suspiria dance and leads to his most magickal images yet. Hoping to see this again next year with a live John Zorn performance, so instead of being obvious and playing Zorn with it now, I put on the middle third of Prefuse 73 One Word Extinguisher, which worked great during the dance scenes.

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Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928, Hans Richter)

When Tom Regan said “Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat,” he had probably just watched this, a silly movie about flying hats and the men who chase them. Fun to see stop-motion with live actors 24 years before the McLaren short. My version has a new Sosin score since the original sound version was burned by nazis.

Lost hat:

Lost head:

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Cosmic Ray (1962, Bruce Conner)

Nude dancing and fireworks set to a boogie-woogie Ray Charles song, after an excessive amount of countdown leader. It’s Conner, so there are quick shots of nationalism, Mickey Mouse, the atom bomb.

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Walking (1968, Ryan Larkin)

More and less abstractly-rendered people and their walk cycles. Now that I’ve seen the Hubley short and the Disney doc about birds, that’s all the 1969 oscar nominees, and I’m gonna say they are all winners.

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The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1954, Ted Parmelee)

Speaking of Hubley, here’s a UPA short. Talentless loser’s girl Fifi runs away with the circus to be with the handsome and graceful trapezeist Alonzo, turns out she’s a gold digger who leaves every man after they’ve showered her with gifts. Maybe the Popeye or W.C. Fields versions are better.

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The Daughters of Fire (2023, Pedro Costa)

A Costa musical: after six minutes of split-screen, three women singing about their suffering, the last two minutes is landscapes. Paired at Cannes with Wang Bing’s Man in Black.

Giovanni Marchini Camia:

Continuing in the ever-darker visual trajectory of his previous films, in Daughters of Fire Costa pushes even further towards an obsidian palette … Over a string quartet rendition of 17th-century violinist and composer Biagio Marini’s Passacaglia (Op. 22), the three women, all professional singers, intone a hymn-like song whose lyrics speak of solitude and suffering, toil and exhaustion, and fortitude in the face of neglect. Given that the women are Black and singing in Creole, and that the themes they invoke are familiar from Costa’s films about Cape Verdean immigrants, it’s a surprise to learn from the end credits that the lyrics belong to a traditional Ukrainian lullaby.

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Bleu Shut (1971, Robert Nelson)

Goofy prank film with structuralist tendencies – a no-stakes boat-name guessing game punctuated by half-minutes of weirdness (naked man in mirror chamber, dog gets Martin Arnolded, scenes from classic films, porn with intertitles). After minute three, a woman explains the rules of the movie and gives some coming attractions. I once saw about a third of this from one room away at an art gallery, maybe the same day we watched The Clock, and have wondered about it ever since.

It’s 19 minutes before either guy gets a single name right. The game show is abandoned towards the end for three minutes of people sticking their tongues out, then Nelson explains what the movie has been about, or he starts to before he’s interrupted by technical difficulties. Chuck Stephens did a Cinema Scope writeup, but I feel I’ve covered things pretty well.

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The Garage (1920, Roscoe Arbuckle)

Our guys work at a garage, managing to get every thing and everyone covered in black oil without making any racist jokes, nice. The boss (a White Zombie witch doctor) has a cute daughter whose annoying beau manages to burn the place down, and it becomes a rescue operation. I got a good laugh from the ending of the Buster-has-no-pants segment.