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.

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.