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.

by ·Comments Off on Memorial Day shorts 2022

Owl (2019, Kelly Reichardt & Christopher Blauvelt)

A beautiful bird, silent in low light, turns its head in every possible direction.

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Leagues (2015, Lucrecia Martel)

Low POV shots through tall grasses as a motorcyclist bitches at some kids that they can’t let their cows eat on community land. The kids go indoors where they learn about measurement and ownership of land. This felt like an educational piece even before the onscreen text told us that things are bad for Argentinean kids. Martel killing time before Zama.

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A Therapy (2012, Roman Polanski)

One of of those auteur advertisements for a fashion brand, but this one is… good. I mean every minute of this is better than any minute of Carnage. Helena Bonham Carter arrives for her therapy appointment and sets to recounting her dreams (“doctor, what does it mean?”) while Ben Kingsley becomes transfixed by the fur coat she entered with, walking to it unseen by his patient and trying it on.

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The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey (2020, Mark Rappaport)

Joan Crawford in Humoresque, “the greatest closeup ever made.” Mark references his own Rock Hudson movie. While researching orientalism he discovered Turkhan Bey, an Austrian-Turkish-Jewish-Czech actor. Discussion of stars and their admirers, the possibility that Mark is the last person in history to swoon over Bey before his work is forgotten. This was charming, with Mark’s casually delivered voiceover and carefully composited picture – the first of his cinema-history video-essays I’ve watched.

by ·Comments Off on Joel Potrykus shorts

Coyote (2010)

Josh Burge plays an unhealthy loser in this, if you can imagine. Josh wakes up next to a body by the river, walks back to the derelict house he stays in, lip-syncs(?) a song by Chance Jones then listens to Paul Simon and Minor Threat and shoots heroin. Wakes up by the river again, steals and pawns a boombox, smokes crack while playing a stolen tape of french songs, becomes a werewolf, goes out and kills a couple guys, just a regular week.

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Thing from the Factory by the Field (2022)

“You were like in love with Michael Jackson last year. You’re not deep, or dark or whatever.” Teens starting a band bring the new, square girl in town to a field for an initiation ritual. Liz shoots her crossbow into the air and happens to hit a minor demon, then finishes it off with a rock. Now they’re worried that Liz will go to hell, so the churchy new girl takes charge, saying it’s not a sin to kill for hunting, so someone has to eat it. Not very snappy until the end, the whole thing having been a setup for a McDonald’s joke. Made me feel a little ill, so it’s partly successful.

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Visited Joel’s vimeo page… I didn’t watch “Joel Calls Indie Film Type Dudes” yet, but did watch him goofing on Radiohead with an electric toothbrush.

by ·Comments Off on Three by Claire Denis

Voilà l’enchaînement (2014)

Alex Descas and Norah Krief (a Shakespeare actress) are a mixed-race couple, and not incidentally. She calls him a stud, asks him to tattoo her name on his body, he says both remind him of slavery/ownership. Time passes, she’s paranoid, reports him to the cops for domestic violence and he’s arrested. His prison monologue about “the trap” and his ponderings on racism afterwards feels too much like reciting the moral at the end of an educational film, though I like the rhythm of his speech.

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Duo (1995)

Very short, the camera cruising around a painting (of another mixed-race couple) while Descas smokes outside the frame.

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Towards Mathilde (2005)

This played at Big Ears, but we were too busy seeing live music. A rehearsal/process movie, prepping for a show that uses squirky noises and elastic materials, working out to PJ Harvey songs. One of my arms has been stiff lately and I’ve kept a small weight by the bed and the desk so I can grab it anytime and stretch out. I’m not usually inspired to do this during movies, but with this doc focusing so much on arm movements, I got a real workout. The day I watched this the new Denis hadn’t screened at Cannes yet, but the Cronenberg had, and I happened to read a Kristen Stewart interview right after watching this:

The most simple answer comes from a place of wisdom. You don’t have to complicate certain ideas. Like, “The body is reality.” At first, I was really trying to shove that concept in my head: What does it mean to me and the world and on every level? But he was like, “I shoot people.” That’s it! It’s a body. All of that is surprising. These are really lofty concepts, but also they’re not at all.

by ·Comments Off on Hillwood shorts

The opener was… Nerenai? That’s what I wrote down, though it’s not listed on the fest schedule… two women with two guitars, mic and drum machine.

You Can’t Stop Spirit (Vashni Korin)
Portrait of the Mardi Gras “Baby Dolls” shot like a Beyoncé video with dialogue loops and callbacks, fun. This came to mind again during the Big Ears festivities.

In Flow of Words (Eliane Esther Bots)
My fave of the bunch, though I remember it the least well now. Widescreen stories of translators who work on genocide trials.

The Last Days of August (Robert Machoian & Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck)
I knew the Killing of Two Lovers guy was going to be in this program, and recognized his style from the first frame… portrait of dying Nebraskan towns.

Our Ark (Deniz Tortum & Kathryn Hamilton)
3D models and simulationism. Our second Deniz collaborative short.

Nuisance Bear (Jack Weisman & Gabriela Osio Vanden)
Katy gave this a thumbs-down. Widescreen gliding camera discovers creatures on the outskirts of Canadian towns: snow rabbit, dogs, foxes, and the bears, who are caged and deported when they dare to involve themselves in the human civilization that has encroached on their territory and now comes out to gape at them as they migrate.

We showed up for the feature Dos Estaciones (Juan Pablo González), a re-enactment about an extremely buttoned-up woman running a failing tequila factory, but we ditched to get food and rest – it’s a lot of movies to watch over a long weekend.

by ·Comments Off on Experimental and Other Shorts watched March 2022

Earthearthearth (2021 Daichi Saito)

Opens with sunrise/sunsets, light tentatively emerging then retreating, broken up with ugly digital artifacting and with one of those a-g drone tracks that says “I didn’t have any sound in mind but I want to act like it’s a sound film so the viewer doesn’t put on an Abraxas album.” But the drone gets bigger and more complex as the visuals turn into fullscreen desert landscapes, superimposed over different ones, infected by huge color tinting – purple-blues, blue-and-gold. The radiation-green with Argento-red section is incredible, as the drone starts to sound like a processed bowed string instrument. I went back and forth on digital/analogue and finally decided it’s scanned film run through a panel of analog video processing effects – am I right? (nope, chemical-processed 16mm). Just a half hour of looking at lights flicker over mountains, but it’s the most times I’ve said “whoa” out loud while watching any movie this year. Eventually I started daydreaming about putting on The Grandmaster, but the Grainy Cloud Explosions finale was worth sticking around for.

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The Head That Killed Everyone (2014 Beatriz Santiago Muñoz)

Voice reads methodically, as if from a lesson plan, some lines about the energies that go into casting a proper spell. Then a woman does a long dance in medium close-up without music, just the sounds of the night and an approaching thunderstorm. Not as exciting as its title, which I took to be the opposite energy of that Flaming Lips song.

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13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020 Ana Vaz)

Another woman reading, this time onscreen but out of sync, a crackly vinyl loop overlaid on the soundtrack, until it suddenly is not. To be uncharitable to the experimental shorts, they revel in adding and removing elements on a random timeline. Title card. Instead of seeing a scenario, we see someone with eyes closed, her voiceover telling us the scenario she’s envisioning. After a couple of those, the camera at least shows a scene that kinda represents what the person dreamed. I think each title card is a line from the opening monologue, so each chapter expands on a section of that. And they mention blackbirds pretty often, though any birds the camera or mic pick up seem pretty incidental to their “what are images, what is the meaning of anything” conversations. Forgot I wanted to save this movie to double-feature with There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse.

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Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995 (2020 Ute Aurand)

Silent defocused montage of extreme close-ups on colorful things – flowers, farm animals, gramma. A personal diary-travelogue short, a-g-style.

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What Distinguishes The Past (2020 Ben Russell)

Long take of a fireworks display in reverse motion, neat. I’m glad I watched this, because it’s got a playful reversal on what I consider (based on Let Each One and A Spell to Ward) to be Russell’s signature: handheld cam following a person walking in real-time over terrain. This time the people are walking in reverse, shot from the front, composited into the terrain, and it’s all over in four minutes.

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Kyiv Frescoes (1966 Sergei Parajanov)

After Pomegranates and Ancestors, it’s fun to see a Parajanov with modern costumes. This picks up the pace from Pomegranates, practically playing like a silent comedy, though one with impeccable compositions, prominently placed symbolic objects, and few (but some!) actual jokes. Besides being a playful compositional art object, it’s a choreographed dance film and I dunno, maybe a history lesson. I know I’m ridiculous for thinking this might have been about actual Kyiv frescoes, imagining a tour in the style of Varda’s Les Dites Cariatides.

This was to be his followup feature to Ancestors but was shut down during production, so these scenes are outtakes from that project – then he’d develop this new style into Pomegranates. Per The Calvert Journal:

Parajanov intended to set this loosely-structured metaphorical film on the day of the city’s liberation from Nazi troops — but wanted to centre it around a museum, praising beauty and art rather than heroism and patriotism. The production of the film was terminated by the state studio, who deemed Parajanov’s experiments inappropriate for the subject.

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The Balloonatic (1923 Buster Keaton)

The most random of the shorts, moving from a haunted house to hot air balloon to canoe, with fishes and bulls and bears along the way. Buster is a ridiculous idiot here with moments of brilliance – and the girl he keeps bumping into is mostly capable with moments of incompetence, so they’re made for each other. Phyllis Haver is his lead actress – a Sennett and DeMille star in the silent era, before something went wrong 40 years on; she took a lot of pills and died.

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The Blacksmith (1922 Buster Keaton)

I suppose he’s more capable here, but mostly oblivious. A blacksmith’s assistant, he ruins two cars and two horses, and gets the blacksmith (Big Joe Roberts, of course) arrested, ends up on a chase, hopping a train to elope with customer Virginia Fox. The casual use of hot metal and blowtorches produce some wincey stunts. Better use of a balloon in this short than in The Balloonatic.