by ·Comments Off on Vogel 13: The Secret Cinema

The Secret Cinema (1967, Paul Bartel)

Jane’s bf Dick dumps her for not caring enough about the cinema, she runs home crying and tears down her Jacques Tati poster, then the next day she overhears her sexual-harasser boss complaining at the bf over the phone that he went off-script during the breakup. Turns out a cinema society is ruining Jane’s life while covertly filming it, and all the cool cinephiles in town are laughing at her in nightly screenings. Are they bowfingering Jane (I haven’t seen Bowfinger)? Jane is killed off as conspirator Helen is chosen as the next subject. Why has it taken me so long to catch up with Bartel’s films?

Jane accepts the boss’s invitation to a club:

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Black TV (1968, Aldo Tambellini)

Shakily filming a flickering TV set, sometimes zooming rapidly in and out, then the image edited and split-screened to a different edit so they never match up. The sound is harsh noise then a loop of the aftermath of Senator Kennedy getting shot, then (blessedly) back to the harsh noise. Pretty intense – “TVs screaming at you” summarized one lboxd viewer. Once again I didn’t have the patience or viewing conditions for The Flicker, this was a good substitute.

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Damon the Mower (1972, George Dunning)

Poetry and animation, with the full page and frame numbers visible, then two animations side by side. The right half is usually the mower (old-school sickle-style) and the left is anything from dancing creatures to exploding mills. Cool at the end when the swish of the sickle starts to reposition the animation paper within the frame. Looks like Dunning made a ton more shorts and also Yellow Submarine.

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UFOs (1971, Lillian Schwartz)

Super trippy video animation with equally trippy electronic music. This might have spawned both Pac-Man and the phrase “liquid television.” I’ve seen her Pixillation, and I guess she made lots more movies if you can find ’em.

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H2O (1929, Ralph Steiner)

Steiner gets just the kinds of wild patterns that Schwartz would painstakingly produce with her video equipment, by aiming his camera at the surfaces of water in motion. Reproduces pretty poorly as stills, the movement is the point.

by ·Comments Off on Me & Shocktober Shorts 2024

Me (2024, Don Hertzfeldt)

A Don Hertzfeldt dystopian jukebox musical? This made my heartbeat shift in a weird way. I’m going to try to stop thinking about it for the rest of the night, will revisit at a later date.

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GUO4 (2019, Peter Strickland)

Montage of still photographs set to (good) pounding noise music. Nude male locker room wrestling? Filmed after In Fabric, a time when he was clearly going through some things.

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Notes on Monstropedia (2017, Koji Yamamura)

I think it’s Edward Gorey with some Adult Swim thrown in, and inexplicable harpsichord music – either the combo isn’t working or the translation is off or it’s just not clever enough. A lesser work from the Mt. Head / Country Doctor animator.

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The Curse of Dracular (2023, Jack Paterson)

Cute claymation retelling of the British Dracula movies as written by the director’s dad when he was nine. Worth it for the ending, when a five year-old says “don’t like you” and kills Dracular easily.

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The Tell-Tale Heart (2008, Robert Eggers)

Ornate live-action movie with stop-motion tendencies, maybe Quay-inspired, and the rich old man played by a muppet. This movie loves clocks, and it’s right, clocks are cool. Shocking to hear spoken dialogue for the first time three-quarters through the film. The actual heartbeat part is very short, this guy is driven mad pretty easily. What is this “inspired by” credit when it’s a straight adaptation?

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The Events at Mr. Yamamoto’s Alpine Residence (2015, Tilman Singer)

In a similar secluded fancy euro-house to the Cuckoo home, tennis girl opens a package unleashing a self-expanding white balloon that consumes everything. Everything I watch this weekend reminds me of The Prisoner. I don’t know that this was “any good” or “made sense” but it is fun to make and watch movies.

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The House of the Plague (1979, Zlatko Pavlinic)

The plague is personified as a purple-eyed woman in mummy bandages. This is animation in a loose sense, drawings cross-faded. A woman coming home into town gets blackmailed into bringing the plague along. The plague-process images are cool but the movie’s main stylistic triumph is the rhyming (in Croatian) roboticized narrator.

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Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (2023, Tomonari Nishikawa)

I’m glad this rhythmically edited montage of fireworks with a garbage soundtrack brought joy to the avant-garde cinephiles last year. Fireworks are cool, it’s true.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched Sept 2024

Revenger (1958, Dusan Vukotic)

Scarf Guy catches his wife cheating, goes to the gun store and imagines every possible scenario, none of them especially good, so he buys a butterfly net. That part must’ve made more sense in the original Chekhov story. Getting around to watching more by Vukotic after enjoying Cow on the Moon and Cowboy Jimmy.

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The Playful Robot (1956, Dusan Vukotic)

A nutty one with excellent music. Scientist in a sort of Wallace-automated Jetsons laboratory creates a sentient humanoid robot then tells it to clean the lab while he naps. Instead it creates two smaller child robots so it can also nap, but they focus more on messing with each other. Not sure why a flying saucer bird hatches from an egg at the end, but the scientist wakes up and isn’t at all displeased by this messy racket.

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The Struggle (1977, Marcell Jankovics)

Very good and short, feels like Bill Plympton turned classical. A muscley sculptor chisels away at a block while it chisels away at him, until the block has become a muscley human figure and the sculptor is old and busted. I still remember Marcell’s Sisyphus animation 15 years later. Won the (short) palme d’or.

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Eyetoon (1968, Jerry Abrams)

Blobby abstract art flickers, fast-motion driving demo, geometric and psychedelic patterns, sex drugs and rock & roll – for the first half it can’t decide what it wants to be, then it settles on being an avant-porno for the second half.

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Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho (1934, Fred Waller)

Cab, even more of a goofball than expected and making the most of his floppy hair, rehearses with his pajama-wearing band in the sleeper car of a train, then they perform at the Cotton Club. Train Porter Sam buys a radio to keep his Chicago hotwife entertained while he’s away, Cab finds out the hotwife is alone and entertains her in person. Corny and hardly technically perfect, but there aren’t a lotta opportunities to see Cab dancing to his own songs.

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Senor Droopy (1949, Tex Avery)

Wolf the star bullfighter is trouncing the bull, who then turns the tables. Nobody takes Droopy seriously, then the bull disrespects his dream girl and he gets mad. It’s Tex Avery, it’s Droopy, it’s good.

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Chumlum (1964, Ron Rice)

A parade of double-and-more-exposures. Ron got Jack Smith and the Warholites to dress up and act freaky with percussive music by an ex-Velvet. It’s only 20 minutes and at least five of that is a girl swinging in a hammock chair. I’m sure it’s very transgressive but nobody appears to be having much fun except maybe Ron in the editing room.

Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope:

A hallucinatory micro-epic filmed during lulls in production of Smith’s Normal Love … a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze … a thousand and one Lower East Side nights melting together in a cosmic slop of languid poses and limp half-dances, a smoke-fragile erotica that climaxes and dissolves the moment it hits your eye … it was only in the crazy crucible of Chumlum that Smith’s frittering, flailing “play” out in front of the camera seemed to find a mostly-in-focus chemical twin behind the lens.

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Los Angeles Plays New York (2016, John Wilson)

John Wilson shot and edited a piece for a fashion guy who refuses to pay, so… he sues his friend Clark, standing in for the MIA fashion guy, after filming a fake fashion short with Clark as the supposed client, and they get booked on a boring new Judge Judy-affiliated court show and bring in a hidden camera. John then worries whether this short film violates his agreement with the TV studio and they’ll sue him over it, so he claims it can’t be released… then how am I watching it?

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Mr. Hayashi (1961, Bruce Baillie)

A great idea to make three-minute sun-bathed interview/portraits, there should be a thousand more of these. This one’s with Mr. Hayashi, part-time gardener – that’s about all we learn about him.

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To Parsifal (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Bruce’s Leviathan – he rides a fishing boat and watches water and birds. After the halfway point he moves to land, exploring the railroad and its surrounding vegetation and insect life, all while listening to Wagner.

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Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Death/applause intro, then a hazy drift of city superimpositions. Long take tailing a motorcycle in San Francisco (not a known habitat of the Dakota Sioux) over the titles with church music. He does play with focus in a purposeful way (the ol’ rack from a distant American flag to nearby barbed wire) but sometimes the picture is so soft and blurry that you wonder if he remembered to focus at all. Parades, war, advertisements filmed off a TV with shaky reception. Repeated applause, motor vehicles, and bananas. Shots from X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes! The city pays little mind as a dead man is removed from the sidewalk to an ambulance, and the sea and the motorcycle roll on.

Horizon at the bottom of frame? That’s interesting:

by ·Comments Off on Four by Man Ray & Sqürl

The Starfish (1928)

He’s loving distorting the camera view and irising in, cross-fades, the poem as intertitles to the action. The starfish motion diorama halfway through is very great.

I stand by what I wrote last time. Watched the new restoration with music by Sqürl which I love whenever there’s guitar/feedback and/or drums (the all-keyboard sections feel too tame for these films). Man Ray and I were alive within a year of each other.

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Emak-Bakia (1926)

What I said before, and add double exposures, plus Man Ray inventing the anamorphic lens-twisting effect 55 years before The Evil Dead.

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Return of Reason (1923)

Film-surface object patterns, an underlit carnival.
Sqürl getting into it with the drums and keys, intense.

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Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice (1929)

Faceless dice men drive out from Paris, leading to some excessive shaky-cam driving scenes, arriving at a very modern castle. Judging from the sliding panels full of canvases it’s the home of a rich art collector – is this movie a tour of a rich benefactor’s fancy house, like that one Cocteau? Apparently.

by ·Comments Off on Rose Lowder’s Bouquets

Bouquets 1-10 (1994-1995)

Excellent to see these with the intro by Gloria Vilches of a Barcelona film society, since she goes into Lowder’s history and filming methods – utilizing the 16mm bolex camera’s ability to advance or rewind to a specific frame and capture stills. So Lowder will shoot every other frame, then move to a new location and fill in the alternate frames, or any new pattern variation she thinks up on-location. Unusually for me, I’m watching these silent films without adding my own soundtrack, figuring they’re each one-minute complex creations and I need to pay strict attention.

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Poppies and Sailboats (2001)

From the Cinexperimentaux 5 disc – unfortunately the poppy field does not hold up under DVD compression, but this is the easiest way to catch on to the perceptual experiments. With an even blend of poppy frames and sailboat frames, the boats are sailing through the flowers. Start to adjust the rhythms and you get something else, a harder flicker or a poppy field with sailboat ghosts.

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Bouquets 11-20 (2005-2009)

Less interleaving, more slow/fast and even real-time focus on single moments, more attention paid to flying and walking creatures.

Rewatched these while reading her notebooks, less for the frame-by-frame structure of each piece than for the context and location (mostly small French organic farms). She emphasized that the films aren’t structually pre-planned, that the notebooks are documents of the filmmaking decisions that have already been made

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Bouquets 31-40 (2014-2022)

The online copy of 21-30 isn’t great, skipping for now. I’d like to hear how her definition of a Bouquet has changed, because for instance Bouquet 1 (rapid flicker of beachy fauna/flora) isn’t so similar to Bouquet 40 (long take of a leather worker with a chicken credits stinger). The Light Cone notes are detailed, revealing that some Bouquets are sequels to previous episodes, and also that the chickens at the end of #40 were eaten soon afterwards by a fox.

Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope 96:

Lowder creates constantly modulating patterns of outrageous intricacy. A more sustained accounting of these films would require taking their reels in hand and working frame by frame. While this would make available a more detailed description, it would not help with the fact that language requires placing one word after another, a process that plays out in a kind of time that is entirely remote from Lowder’s striving towards simultaneity – a richness of experience that is, for her, true realism. The images that we see in films such as the Bouquets, in some sense, don’t exist.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 12: Sharits/Breer/Kubelka Part 1

I found a whole bunch of shorts by three filmmakers covered in the “Straining Towards the Limits” chapter, this is going to take multiple viewings.

Paul Sharits:

Word Movie (1966)

Not even four minutes, but an intense structuralist flicker film. You can focus on the words flipping rapidly across the screen, or the stable letters in the middle of the screen (whether there’s a pattern or they’re spelling something out) or one of the two reverby voices reading flatly and alternating words with each other – but not any two of those things. I dig it.

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Piece Mandala/End War (1966)

A few sex poses, flipped L-R, flickering with white fields then gradually adding new colors, with bookends of a pulsing dot and a sidetrack scene with a comic-suicidal guy. From what little I’ve seen, this does look like the work of someone who hung out with Yoko Ono.

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Ray Gun Virus (1966)

Good one, just flickering color fields but not too aggressively edited, so you can pleasantly space out to it. That’s given you turn the volume way down, since my copy comes with a relentless rumbly mechanical sound. No point in taking screenshots of the flicker films, and of course watching these on TV is especially pointless to begin with. Artforum’s got an extensive Regina Cornwell article on the Sharits films.

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Peter Kubelka:

Mosaik im Vertrauen (1955)

Mysterious montage of varied sources, I think he’s Rose Hobartting a bunch of euro narrative and news films. Is it on purpose that sometimes I can’t see at all what’s happening on screen?

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Adebar (1957)

One-minute shadow dancing music video with lots of freeze-frames.

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Schwechater (1958)

Looks like obsessively cut excerpts from some film scene, much of it with the contrast blown out.

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Robert Breer:

Form Phases 1 (1952)

Playful little line drawings based around acute angles, sometimes with color added

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Form Phases 2 (1953)

A dot becomes a line becomes a circle becomes a square becomes the background to a whole new series of shapes, and so on. Repeats and montages itself. One cool bit where the picture divides into identical overlapping translucent images which slide apart.

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Form Phases 3 (1953)

I think it’s watercolor drawings on clear glass filmed from below, the paintings appearing magically like in the Picasso movie, cool.

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Form Phases 4 (1953)

Back to the morphing-lines graphic design of parts 1+2 but more complicated, creating new rules around shape overlap and intersection and interaction.

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A Miracle (1954)

Very short one, the miracle is the pope juggling in a window, then falling to bits.

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Image by Images IV (1955)

More jaunty line/shape interactions, with a few new things. Brief flashes of photographic images (a hand, spectacles), and sound. Unfortunately the sound is mechanical noise, a la Ray Gun Virus but less annoying. It might even be the sound of the movie’s production tools, like in The Grand Bizarre.

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Cats (1956)

Another very short one, with sound credited to Frances Breer. The cats get deconstructed.

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unrelated bonus short that I couldn’t fit anywhere else:

Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986, Heyn & Krulik)

“Are you fucked up?”
“Half and half.”

Outside a 1986 Judas Priest / Dokken show in Maryland. This show took place on May 31st, and setlist.fm says Judas Priest closed with a Fleetwood Mac cover. Some girls tell the cameraman that they’re going to Ocean City after this; maybe I saw ’em there. I think it’s really important to watch this on a traded VHS with your buddies while mocking the people onscreen, not on a laptop while eating lunch alone. We’re told that metal rules and punk sucks – guess I should watch Decline of Western Civilization Part 2 and see if that’s true.

by ·Comments Off on Concorso Shorts 2019

Some shorts I could find online that played Locarno in 2019

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Carne (Camila Kater)

I figured watching an animated short unsubtitled would be fine, turns out it’s wall-to-wall narration in Portuguese. From what I can follow, five women’s stories about their bodies, chronologically through the life cycle, each in different animation styles (stop-mo, watercolor, flash, clay, Breer).

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In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)

Dry, serious sci-fi displayed in wide split-screen. Older woman in hospital bed is confronted by younger clone who questions her implanted memories and her purpose in the purgatorial present-day while the survivors of a global plague are kept indoors and underground.

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Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)

A movie about islands and earthquakes with distorted colors and cool sound design is for sure gonna remind me of Rock Bottom Riser. Gets caught up a little too hard in video effects wilderness but still my favorite of this bunch.

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Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)

Italian narrator (speaking French) is weird and sad about encountering a neighborhood of poor African immigrants.

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White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

Adapted from a salon worker interview and a promotional film about giving white people afros, interspersed with Toni Morrison quotes, the picture highly distressed with film junk.

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Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)

Ninety percent of this is sexy Brazilians dancing, what is not to love?

by ·Comments Off on Criterion Channel shorts watched July 2024

Watched some shorts on CC. I only mention the source because we know how I love to lean on the screenshot button, but streaming restricts my personal freedom to steal images. And also because they deserve to be mocked for still using the Baby’s First Streaming Platform template, which says “season one” under the titles of short films.

She and Her Cat (1999, Makoto Shinkai)

Talky, narrated by a cat who is sexually attracted to his female human owner, passing the seasons together. Limited animation, mostly gently panning across stills. Not too exciting, but I suppose its success got Shinkai (who also narrated) the budget for Voices of a Distant Star. When Your Name blew up, this got a sequel/remake, and Shinkai returned to narrate.

Voice of a Distant Star (2002, Makoto Shinkai)

The UN Space Force naturally needs morose teens to pilot giant space robots, preferably while wearing their school uniforms. Star pilot Mikako likes a boy called Noboru (same voice actors as the cat movie), and though she’s stationed on Jupiter’s moons they still text using 2002-model flip phones. When she’s sent further away to fight evil aliens, it gets harder to communicate since each message takes years to arrive.

Chuu Chuu (2021, Mackie Mallison)

Medium takes, then quick edits… digital stability with low-gauge colors… focusing on an aging Japanese grandma. Then a section discussing touchy family relationships and identity from the perspective of a doorbell cam. Not as many birds as I was hoping for, but there is a birdwatching section towards the end, then a projector throwing fast-cut home movies over a kid’s face.

Fly, Fly Sadness (2015, Miryam Charles)

Story of an explosion that affected everyone in the country, so now they all have the same girlish speaking voice, coincidentally the voice of the director, who narrates over short clips and loops. CC didn’t care to correct the subtitles.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 11: Stephen Dwoskin and Structuralism

Color Film (1971, Standish Lawder)

A reminder that experimental film is actually fun to watch. We re-read the chapter on minimalist/structuralist film in the Vogel, then watch “a fine example of pure minimal cinema,” expecting the camera to just be facing a wall or something, and instead I get a blast of color and movement set to a raucous Zappa song.

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Eisenbahn (1967, Lutz Mommartz)

Not fun but surely hypnotic, facing square out a train window. Occasional edits, and light obstructions when we can clearly see the cameraperson’s reflection, but I’m not dedicated enough to get a still frame of those.

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Naissant (1964, Stephen Dwoskin)

The same length as the train movie, both of them bringing to mind Vogel’s comment “there is no aesthetic reason for the film to last nine minutes instead of ninety” Funny to watch this the day after Je Tu Il Elle, as it’s a long wordless focus on a seemingly troubled dark-haired girl sitting in bed. No bag of sugar or letter writing, and this movie stays closer to her face and cuts far more often. The girl is Beverly Grant, a major underground actress who was in Flaming Creatures the year before.

Vogel also points to Kiss and Sleep by Warhol, but instead let’s watch more Dwoskin (I’ve only previously seen his Dirty).

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Soliloquy (1969, Stephen Dwoskin)

Almost a remake of Naissant but this time we see mostly her hands, and we hear her thoughts in voiceover. She’s divorced, depressed. “I wish I were pretty.”

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Moment (1968, Stephen Dwoskin)

Close-up with no editing this time. Another dark-haired girl, smoking and masturbating. Who needs Warhol, anyway? The soundtrack is some kind of horrible industrial howl.