by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 9: Michael Robinson

Circle in the Sand (2012)

Two guys trash a campsite, a third guy is blindfolded in a tent, sound of gunfire in the distance. Three women burying and unburying things on the beach. Each scene involves someone reading haltingly from a book. These two groups have been separated by a concrete tunnel reading “off limits” – when they hear the signal, the women walk through. One beach girl is taken away, the others dig up a jambox then destroy it after it plays a plangent indie song, then create pinhole galaxies in pages of a People magazine. One of the women psychically merges with the blindfolded man, and dirty knives begin materializing nearby. The subtitled text from the beginning reappears: “We wanted to destroy knowledge, but from within knowledge.” I don’t get it, but it’s well put together, with excellent sound design (probably helped that I switched to headphones for this one).

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These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2011)

Extremely jeweled ornamental clothing while a woman speaks of fertility. We go inside a pyramid where a women peers through a secret panel and sees… Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time” video – bizarre stock footage juxtapositions, combining the midcentury feature film, the music video, the jeweled clothing and the pulsating 3D pyramid graphics. Finally the Robinson strobing effect arrives, and it’s beautifully done, with restful black pauses in between.

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Mad Ladders (2015)

When I first saw his Full House short I was mostly annoyed, but the more of these I watch, the more I appreciate his cultural recycling and mutations. This one is structured with a voiceover by a woman explaining a dream or vision. Sounds like a MIDI version of Tori Amos’ “Crucify” at one point.

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Polycephaly In D (2021)

“There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world.” Two men, in desert and water settings, speak psychically from a distance about encounters among earthquakes and landslides, each speaker represented by different colored subtitles. Brief montage of famous film shots of characters looking into camera. Music video imagery and a kinda Clash of the Titans thing. Unexpected Robin & Marian/King Kong mashup at the end, with some Muppets thrown in. I’d started to write this one off as lesser Robinson, then a robot monkey strobing tsunami titan freakout made my heart beat double-time.

by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 8: Pat O’Neill’s Messages

Pandemic-era photo montages.

Messages 1

Utterly delightful, just a slideshow of Pat’s excellent photographs from a lifetime of travels through North America with droll voiceover descriptions, one after the other, no time to waste.

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Messages 2

This is the one where he’s interrupted by explosion sounds.

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Messages 3

I love how he photographs partial or partially destroyed signs, and reads them aloud to create new meaning from the half-words and phrases. Some New Jersey scenes in this.

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Messages 4

These just get better. I don’t know who Pat O’Neill is exactly, but I want to hang out with him.

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Messages 5

He has great recollection of these photographs and the locations and situations when they were taken
All these were edited by Martha Colburn.

by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 7: Fern Silva

Again, I’m away from my Cinema Scope collection, but this time the Michael Sicinski article that put me in touch with Silva’s work is available online.

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In The Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails (2010)

Chintzy dance music plays over astronomical images perverted by interlaced video screens. Reverse monochrome of baby sea turtles heading into the ocean. Some kind of costumed street event. Weedwhacking the jungle. The camera playing with a campfire. And so on, the sound design ranging from innocuous to annoying. Shock ending, the camera suddenly escaping the planet through a hole in the ground!

Per MS, this was filmed in Brazil and “examines human and animal experience at multiple levels of abstraction … this is the film in which the subjective element in Silva’s work is fully incorporated into a total way of seeing, one not bound to individual history or biography.”

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The Watchmen (2017)

Naked man in a field, then a pulsing light, lasting for just long enough that I assumed the rest of the movie would be the pulsing light, but no. Prison yard, prison wall, abandoned prison, prison guard tower – so there’s the title. Various hot dog places. Return to the naked man and the pulsing light, with a voiceover about the watchman. Very mysterious.

MS:

The Watchmen takes as its subject Illinois’ now-defunct Joliet prison, perhaps best known for being featured in 1980’s The Blues Brothers … Silva stands at the heart of the prison and starts spinning his camera, faster and faster, describing the curved walls of the panopticon; not coincidentally, the flicker and blur of this accelerated image, with flecks of light disrupting the darkness, forms a combination camera obscura and phenakistoscope.

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Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder (2017)

A perversely looped version of “Pale Blue Eyes”… a bird trapped in an apartment… the title card made from a Metallica album cover. A guy plays us the intro to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” A red-coated birdwatcher gives an unexpected callback to Brown Thrasher. Reappearing scary hands creep from behind objects.

Hey look, it’s what I hope to get out of watching these shorts:

Hey look who’s in this:

MS:

Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder was Silva’s final film before embarking on the Rock Bottom Riser project … A return of sorts for Silva to the Hudson River region of New York, where the filmmaker’s alma mater Bard College is located, Ride Like Lightning is not explicitly about experimental filmmaker (and Bard professor) Peter Hutton, but shares with Hutton’s work a keen fascination with the Hudson River area, its landscape and shifting seasonal character.

by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 6: Jodie Mack

Hoarders Without Borders (2018)

Shows us what it’s gonna do before it does it. First the camera faces down with fixed focus as drawers of rock samples are pulled into view, the higher they get, the clearer the image. Then real-time view of the process of putting the rocks and their identifying notecards in front of the fixed camera. Then a blast of time-lapse, every rock in rapid succession. A couple of suspect frames (a can of fruit?) to investigate later.

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Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant (2017)

Lightplay on circuit boards, rapid slideshow of circuit boards, then red fields of flowers, then alternating circuit boards with red flowers, a surprisingly pleasing combination. Silent.

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Wasteland No. 2: Hardy, Hearty (2019)

More intense than number one, this overloaded my eyeballs, alternating green plants and their brown roots, loose dirt on a white background, with flowers frozen in ice cubes. For a while there in the middle I seemed to see the green plant falling through space, constantly shifting because of a sustained attack by the flower-cubes.

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Wasteland 3: Moons, Suns (2022)

Less strain on the nervous system than part two, this is time-lapse of flower arrangements melting from their frozen-in-ice states, with no rapid flicker elements.

by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 5: Kevin Jerome Everson

Sound That (2014)

The Cleveland water department searches for underground pipes by putting their ears to a long rod stuck into holes drilled in the ground. Payoff at the end when they settle on a location and the caterpillar rips up the street so they can access it.

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Brown Thrasher (2020)

I was hoping this would center on a brown thrasher, but of course it’s people, it’s always people with Everson. Red-shirted birdwatchers with binoculars, being watched themselves by a jittery, vibrating camera.

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IFO (2017)

The soundtrack is the thing in this one – spoken reports of UFO sightings, first in a taxi, then a military helicopter, then the same taxi again. The visual montage of people outdoors looking to the sky and air-traffic graphics seem secondary, though the people get some breathing room to themselves after the long helicopter story, and I love the extreme film grain on the grey sky.

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Traveling Shoes (2019)

A great one, interviewing members of The Brown Singers and playing the title song, their record, with some obvious visuals (the record spinning on a turntable) and some less obvious (a girl holding the record in a dramatic pose, way out of focus).

by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 3: Bertrand/Yann

Apprivoisé (2017, Bertrand Mandico)

Music video with unsubtitled intro. Flamboyant feather-boa skeleton-hand guy is set loose on a dinner party, his frost breath bestowing jeweled rings and necklaces and cocks upon the guests, but he cannot be stopped, and dismembers their host. Extremely great, obviously.

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Niemand (2019, Bertrand Mandico)

Another music video, this time sung in German, the story about a woman who keeps getting in car crashes, after which neon-eyed cannibal angels steal and eat whatever body part she’s injured.

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Fou de Bassan (2021, Yann Gonzalez)

Checking in with Mandico’s buddy Yann. This is a bit of free-for-all perversity, a misty night scene lit by spotlights and artificial moon.

by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 2: Anthology’s Inaugural Film Program Reborn

When Anthology Film Archives first opened in 1970, its inaugural screening – presented during a private event on November 30 – showcased four highlights from the foundational repertory cycle that would come to be known as the Essential Cinema Repertory Collection … The four films represented a short survey of film history, spanning from the turn of the century all the way up to the (then-)present day.

Voyage Across the Impossible (1904, Georges Méliès)

The hand tinted color is supremely excellent, the handcrafted, cardboard-looking sets and props very nice, and I couldn’t care less about the slapstick steampunk nonsense plot. More or less a sequel to A Trip to the Moon, this time to the sun. Jules Verne died the following year, so could potentially have seen this. When some passengers accidentally freeze into an ice block in the protective cooler car, their guide hurriedly warms them up by starting a fire with some hay… on the sun. I like the copyright notices hidden in plain sight, on cliff walls and the sides of trains and submarines.

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The Midnight Party (1940s/1968, Joseph Cornell & Lawrence Jordan)

Stock Footage: The Movie. Sometimes the shots are flopped or frozen or repeated, with flashes of intertitles in between. The whole thing feels like it was made by mistake.

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The Canaries (1969, Jerome Hill)

Canary songs and chirps are visualized as color blobs, which finally form new canaries made of pure sound and light which float away from the cage, visiting lovers on the beach. I wish I’d thought of this one.

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Film No. 11: Mirror Animations (1956, Harry Smith)

I just watched this last year, probably my favorite of all the Harry Smith films I’ve seen.

by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 1: Camille Henrot

One long-weekend in June, I watched a bunch of shorts, beginning with a bunch by New York/Berlin artist Henrot. Currently separated from my issues of Cinema Scope so I can’t revisit the article that first put her on my radar.

Million Dollars Point (2011)

Movie kinda fades in and out, as if showing excerpts. Hawaiian Christian on the soundtrack, preaching and singing. the visuals alternate between touristy Hawaiian dance scenes rephotographed off an SD TV, and beautiful undersea nature over the dumping grounds of human vehicles.

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Strife of Love in a Dream (2011)

Manufacturing pharma – Atarax – but playing doom-drone music instead of KG+tLW’s “Ataraxia.” Long line of people winding up a mountain towards some event that involves fire and military control… an ornamental theatrical performance… and flash shots of snakes, which eventually take over the film, snakes in all forms, in life and art.

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Grosse Fatigue (2013)

I loved Strife but this still feels like a huge leap forward. Narrator/singer rapidly goes through the history of the universe, the gods, mankind, as the visuals spring from a simulated mac desktop, windows overlapping, heavy on animal images. About 200 more dead birds in this than I would’ve liked, but still kinda great.

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Saturday (2017)

No dead birds here except in the news ticker, but they’re replaced by close-up medical body-horrors. Fun experiments in rotoscoping, certain footage elements remaining in the foreground of the news ticker (which multiplies, its news becoming less informative) or breaking through the letterbox bars. The main topic is televised/radio call-in religious shows and baptism.

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Film Spatial (2008)

“You have to learn not to understand everything.” She’s interviewing an older artist while camera roves around a busy house or studio in closeup. Lot of partially seen artworks and books, frequent visits to the dog on the floor. “In a really good film, it’s not just the content that’s important, it’s the visual impact … The content, in a way, is the pretext.”

by ·Comments Off on Vogel Dada Shorts

Has it been half a year since we left off in the Vogel book? Since then I’ve picked up the revised edition and found some more shorts.

Pianissimo (1963, Carmen D’Avino)

Beginning with the lowest-quality source of the bunch. Turntable and player piano are embellished with stop-motion rainbows. It’s all extremely fun and colorful, and probably one of the great animated shorts of its time, but we need a better copy to know for sure.

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Skullduggery (1960, Stan Vanderbeek)

Phone call over black, the respondent just repeating “hello.” Montages of early cinema and newsreel stock footage with cut-out politician and celebrities added. Stan was obviously a favorite of Vogel’s – I found all three of his films from this section of the book.

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Science Friction (1959, Stan Vanderbeek)

Sound effect loops as a score, not as abrasive as these things often are. I wonder if the mad scientist segment is original photography or stock footage. Less politician obsessed and more focused on doing surprising things to recognizable images, this one is great, real snappy and absurd, while Skullduggery felt like Mad Magazine outtakes. Advertising, the space race, hammers hitting figures in their heads causing transformation (see also: Harry Smith)… by the end, pretty much everything has been launched into space.

Stan, from various sources:

A social satire aimed at the rockets, scientists and competitive mania of our time … If this film has a social ambition, it is to help disarm the social fuse of people living with anxiety, to point out the insidious folly of competitive suicide (by way of rockets). In this film and others I am trying to evolve a ‘litera-graphic’ image, an international sign language of fantasy and satire. There is a social literature through filmic pantomime, that is, non-verbal comedy-satire; a ‘comic-ominous’ image that pertains to our time and interests which Hollywood and the commercial cinema are ignoring.

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A La Mode (1959, Stan Vanderbeek)

An “attire satire” with cut-outs from glamour, art and lifestyle magazines. The audio includes taped music on fast forward and excerpts from TV episodes or radio plays. I hate to have to say this whenever I see absurd comic cutout animation, but of course it reminds me of Monty Python. Stan: ”A montage of women and appearances, a fantasy about beauty and the female, an homage, a mirage.”

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A Day in Town (1958, Hulten & Nordenstrom)

The town is Stockholm, and this is a travelogue, a city symphony in miniature (a city chamber concerto). Some segments are looped. Burst of abstract animation in a skit about a man who wants his name changed. Man with a suitcase of dynamite is chased around by two cops until one cop is poisoned by snake water. Increasingly rapid and random things accumulate until the city explodes.

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Sort of a Commercial for an Icebag (1970, Michel Hugo)

Artist Claes Oldenburg wants to create a soft sculpture, or a motion sculpture showing the release and tension of materials, settles on an icebag shape. He wants to mass produce these, send them everywhere “and see what kind of meaning they acquire.” Artist monologue about his hopes for an icebag society feels like a put-on, but you never can tell with artists.

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The Further Adventures of Uncle Sam (1971, Case & Mitchell)

Sleepy Sam runs a desert gas station, is knocked out and abducted in a potato sack by a would-be customer, witnessed only by a cameraman apparition. A cabal of tanks, bombs and capitalists plans to blow him up and kidnap Lady Liberty next, but Sam’s bald eagle friend sort-of rescues him and they hop a blimp. When you watch underground movies from this era, you’re gonna see a lot of Nixons. After a pause for a satanic shotgun murder montage, our heroes pull off a rescue mission and dance back into the desert.