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.

by ·Comments Off on 2019 Shorts

It Has to be Lived Once and Dreamed Twice (Rainer Kohlberger)

Soothing sea of television static and electric popcorn sfx. Soft voiceover wanted to tell us about carbon dioxide on earth, and the background noise of living, but I was adrift until an evil racket woke me up at the halfway point. She goes on about the nature of thought and matter and individuals while the image features a Frankenstein face melting in a digital snowstorm.

Blake Williams in Cinema Scope:

A half-hour sci-fi essay on posthumanism, cinema, and artificial intelligence, the work all but announces itself as its generation’s La Jetée. Beneath a monotonous voiceover (written by Kohlberger and spoken by British-German singer-songwriter Anika) that drowsily questions the nature — and the disappearance — of being and thought (“Something is not right…”), we find Kohlberger’s most complex assortment of digital textures yet. Drawing from an image bank that the artist says was generated from approximately half of science fiction cinema history, it has to be lived flips through channels of deeply crushed visual information, the frame a radioactive wasteland of scrolling zebra patterns and lo-fi grey goo. The effect is one of radical liminality, caught in transitions between form and formlessness, declaration and lyricism, foreshadowing and aftermath … We see things we know we’ve seen but no longer recognize, and consider thoughts constructed from sentences that themselves know they cannot achieve clarity (“Everything we’ve received so far has been confusing or incomprehensible”). Short of generating images that might be determinably “real” or artificial, it has to be lived meets both sides halfway, documenting the afterlife of subjectivity from the perspective of sentient objects. Like the glitch aesthetic that these images have settled into, this is a promise of failure at the end of the age of the individual, presented with a fundamental ambivalence that is as frightening as it is pacifying. If everything we know and hold is destined for renewal and reprocessing, subject to boundless capacities to be reconfigured into anything, then who is to say it all won’t be even better than before? For in an age where everything is an image, the sky may well be the limit.

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Palace of Colours (Prantik Basu)

Narrated creation myths over very colorful shots of landscapes, natural rocks, painted walls
Such a peaceful 26-minute movie it might take you a couple hours to watch due to pausing for a nap in the middle.

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27 Thoughts About My Dad (Mike Hoolboom)

Listed everywhere as 27 Thoughts About My Father, but the film itself and the full transcript at the director’s website say “Dad.” Mike tells his 27 stories about Canadian immigrant (via Holland via Indonesia) engineer dad while the early visuals are his experiments with light and focus, trying to create Malick scenes and/or advertisements. Some scenes are extremely digital, and the scene that’s all shots from 2001: A Space Odyssey made me wonder if the earlier shots were from actual Malick scenes and/or advertisements.

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Cezanne (Luke Fowler)

Rapidly edited shots from mostly outdoors, sometimes the title/name appears, light atmospheric birdsong on the soundtrack.

by ·Comments Off on 1975 Shorts

Firing Range aka Polygon (Anatoliy Petrov)

Professor’s son died in colonial wars, the prof invents an autonomous tank that can detect fear and sets it loose on his own army in revenge. Nice little sci-fi war drama, too bad about the grotesque rotoscoping. Not the Old Man and the Sea guy, this is a different Petrov, and okay it’s from 1977 not ’75, sometimes my dates are off.

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Great (Bob Godfrey)

Comic attack on the British empire, very good illustrations with Monty Python-style motion gives way to slightly more traditional animation full of newspaper-caricature characters, and settles into focus on Brunel, a builder of very large bridges and ships, with photographed segments and musical numbers. Not one of my favorite things, but I also believe there should be more farcical musical bio-pics of obscure historical figures. Won the oscar over Sisyphus and a Bafta over Caroline Leaf. A very naughty Brit, Bob is also known for Instant Sex and Kama Sutra Rides Again.

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Perspectives (Georges Schwizgebel)

Roughly drawn figures keep changing form and direction over nice colored backgrounds and oppressive piano music.

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Ventana (Claudio Caldini)

Thin rectangles flit past over some ambient music. Made me sleepy.

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Sincerity II (Stan Brakhage)

Playing with the dog in the yard, playing with the wife in bed. I thought my copy was faded and orange with exposure problems, but sometimes you’ll get a clear, balanced shot or a strong blue-green, so who knows. Sincerity was Stan’s multi-part “autobiography” composed of footage shot by himself and friends. With ten minutes left we start seeing Stan himself, and the editing goes haywire. Naked children, a family train vacation, some trick photography play with the kids, a visit to Canyon Cinema. Silent; I listened to the latest Mary Halvorson album since her group is playing Roulette tonight.

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The Seasons (Artavazd Peleshian)

Opens alarmingly with a man and a sheep going over a waterfall. Then the frame is taken over by clouds, then a mountain – maybe the title was mistranslated from The Elements. Cattle and sheep drive, men and horses getting a truck unstuck from rainy mud, a hay-sledding party, a sheep-sledding party. After all the hard work, everyone (even the sheep) get fancied up for the wedding of the man from the waterfall scene. No narration, but a couple of intertitles – postsync sound and nice orchestral score. Ah, this is Armenia, the title refers to the Vivaldi music, and it’s shot by The Color of Armenian Land director Vartanov.

by ·Comments Off on Deborah Stratman: Land, Birds, Circuit

O’er the Land (2009)

Military marching, war reenactments, an RV sales pitch, immigration cops, narration by a guy who ejected from a plane and bounced through a thunderstorm.

Guys who refer to machine guns as “freedom”
Firefighters, flamethrowers, waterwall

Wild birds in some kind of audio experiment
If i understand the credits, the archival-sounding stories were performances

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Ray’s Birds (2010)

Ray runs a raptor center – Stratman films his public demonstrations and splinters them into fragments.

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Hacked Circuit (2014)

The first voice we hear is someone getting a crank call from a flock of birds, so there are birds in all her movies. High-tech studio where a foley artist is recreating sounds from The Conversation. Our camera roving, invisible, goes into the studio and back outside in a loop, and jeez, that wasn’t a single take, was it? Michael Sicinski saw it at True/False.

by ·Comments Off on Cauleen Smith volcano shorts

Cauleen Smith came to town to open an art exhibit and screen two nights of shorts programs – I made it to one of those.

Songs for Earth and Folk (2013)

Subtitle conversation between EARTH and FOLK
Soundtrack by The Eternals, aka Damon Locks

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Sine at the Canyon, Sine at the Sea (2016)

Racism and outer space
Seems tragic that letterboxd just lists “Cast: Richard Spencer”
Learned: Kelly Gabron = Cauleen Smith.

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Triangle Trade (2017)

Volcano and puppets
Collaborators include Jérôme Havre, a Toronto sculptor, and Camille Turner.
Music by Justin Hicks.

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My Caldera (2022)

Part one of The Volcano Manifesto (this + Mines + Deep West). Volcano Manifesto is also the title of an actual manifesto, released as a chapbook at an art exhibit, which was also titled My Caldera, and featured the handmade banners people were holding in Deep West. Metal soundtrack by Salvadore & Diego Rafael Rivera. “Cameraless print” process, awesome. Per the notes: “The scratchy, chaotic aesthetic is created through Smith’s proprietary process of placing TikTok video stills onto 35mm film then rendering it in 4k as an artifact of the original footage.”

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Mines to Caves (2023)

Geology / wild animals
This one’s also an installation.

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All The Money (2024)

Photographs / fire
Music video for a Moor Mother song from her insane album The Great Bailout.

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The Deep West Assembly (2024)

“to understand the world through extraction”
populations irrupt / volcanoes erupt
Closes with a sign-language interpretation of a Nina Simone song.

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see also:
Last Things (Deborah Stratman, rocks)
Rock Bottom Riser (Fern Silva, volcanoes)

from Cauleen’s essay “The Association for the Advancement of Cinematic Creative Maladjustment”:

The Maladjusteds liberate image from narrative. Narrative is the oppressor of the Moving-Image … the Moving-Image can and must do more than slave for narrative. The Moving-Image must rise up and reclaim the power it has for so long surrendered to story.
…
The Maladjusteds project their love of the Spectator onto the screens. The Maladjusteds resist corporate pressure to fuel the desires of the Spectator. Rather they seek to excavate her needs.
…
The Maladjusted Spectator does not expect to be pleased. She expects to be respected … When she watches a Moving-Image, she revels in the freedom of being responsible for her heart and mind, while trusting the filmmaker to expand and enliven both.

by ·Comments Off on Puma shorts watched Sept 2025

Could See a Puma (2011, Eduardo Williams)

Youths live in the ruins, someone falls and gets hurt. Camera likes to rove around, not getting too close to the action. It’s nice to see that the Human Surge guy’s stylistic weirdness was already in place at this point. A few kids go looking for a medicinal herb, do not see a puma but they do slip into another dimension.

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Schody/Stairs (1969, Stefan Schabenbeck)

Clay guy comes across a sea of stairs, wanders through, up and up, until he reaches the summit of a long staircase then lies down and becomes another step in the stairs. Polish, of course. Whatever point they’re making about the futility of life, they sure spent a lot of time on stair fabrication and walking animation to make it.

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The Heart of the World (2000, Guy Maddin)

This should probably play monthly in every movie theater.

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Creature Comforts (1989, Nick Park)

Always assumed I’d seen this before but maybe not. Interviews with zoo patrons restaged as interviews with the clay-mated animals, started a whole trend of these things.

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Inspirace (1949, Karel Zeman)

What madman would make a stop-motion film out of glass? Artist in need of inspirado spaces out on a rainy window, dreams a glass fantasy ice skater and the dandelion clown in her pursuit.

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Man Without a Shadow (2004, Georges Schwizgebel)

Swirling dizzy blobby animation. The man has a shadow from the start, so I wasn’t surprised when he sells it to a devil in exchange for the promise of riches and women. But I was surprised when, after women want nothing to do with a shadowless man, he gets a pair of red boots that enable him to leap across the earth, checks out different gatherings, and settles on a shadow theater where he can manipulate the puppets shadowlessly without using rods or strings.

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Passing Time (2023, Terence Davies)

Terence reads a poem with that voice of his – rougher than it was in Of Time and the City – the music piece swelling in the background – over a nice shot of some trees.

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But Why? (2021, Terence Davies)

I never wrote up this Benediction-era Davies poem, in which two of his stars from that movie swap places/timelines, but I’ve watched it many times and like to quote it when I ascend the stairs, I descend the stairs… but why?

by ·Comments Off on We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (2023, Joshua Gen Solondz)

We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (2023)

Lotta different modes here, gradually cutting or blending between them. I really liked the strobe-trance section where someone is adjusting a white mask over their black stocking mask. Just a note: instead of pulsing harsh noise over this kind of scene, could experimental filmmakers not try repeating a gentle chime or alternating a couple nice chords? At least when movies are silent I can put on a Coil or Matmos album and be the perpetrator of my own punishment. Nice blend of check-the-gate 8mm and extreme digital editing. Love the metal-font intertitles too. Some pretty late voiceover then the sound of a crackling fire. After Ken Jacobsing some guys early on, he Martin Arnolds them later. Katy was reading on the couch, looked up at the halfway point and declared the movie “dumb.”

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

We Don’t Talk is part travelogue and part diary film, a combination of the artist’s bizarre version of domestic bonhomie and his resistance to reducing the larger world to consumptive tourism. Setting these two elements into dialectical action, Solondz produces an aggressive, throbbing film ritual that alludes to common experiences — travel, physical affection, scenes from daily life — but thwarts the tendency to reduce them to mere spectacle … Solondz alternates between different moments of a singular action, with a sharp electronic burble heard in every other image. A figure in a black hood is placing the N95 over their face in one half of the edit, and is removing it in the other. In addition to being a potent image, one that creates a kind of circular pumping action onscreen, it also provides a new twist on Solondz’s fixation on the body in space, as an interior that both threatens and is threatened by the outside … This concern with the body under duress, and the comprehensive breakdown of domesticity and public life, takes on a more direct valence in this film because, in a sense, the air is quite different in the COVID era.

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Tourism Studies (2019)

Opens with whispering about Tupac Shakur(?) before the soundtrack gets typically harsh. Strobe-edits between shots with different aspect ratios, compositions squared-off vs diagonal. Racetrack and test pattern and more homemade costumes. “Psychotronic savagery” per Sicinski.

by ·Comments Off on Pumpkin Movie +2 (Sophy Romvari)

Pumpkin Movie (2017)

Sophy in one city is skyping with a friend in Halifax while they carve jack-o-lanterns and discuss sexist aggressions from the past year.

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Norman Norman (2018)

Repeat appearance by the director’s Macbook as she looks up videos about dog cloning while her own dog (Norman, elderly, in rough shape) lays with her on the bed.

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In Dog Years (2019)

Interviews with owners of messed-up dogs, some near the end of their lives, with all focus on the dogs and their stories, the owners’ faces not shown. “In memory of Norman,” oh no. I was supposed to follow these up with Nine Behind / It’s Him / Grandma’s House, but already shaken by dying dogs I couldn’t take on dying grandmothers.

by ·Comments Off on Cat Soup shorts

Cat Soup (2001, Tatsuo Sato)

I don’t know Sato’s work, but I know animation producer Masaaki Yuasa, and this has got the wavy woozy quality of Yuasa’s features. A cat hits the town with his catatonic sister, whose soul was half-ripped by an evil shaman, and they experience all the major elements (desert, sea, time-freeze, soup) before landing back home. Incredible. One scene is set at the “Big Whale Circus,” making this part of the Werckmeister Harmonies universe. Sato is known for a series called Martian Successor, also did animated sequel series to both Ninja Scroll and Tokyo Tribe. There’s a separate Cat Soup series from the director of a Battle Angel Alita series.

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Little Pancho Vanilla (1938, Frank Tashlin)

Kid claims he’s a bullfighter, gets catapulted into the arena, lands on the bull and is awarded first prize. Not top-tier Tash, it passed the time.

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King-Size Canary (1947, Tex Avery)

Oh yeah, what if the cartoon had actual gags in it, wouldn’t that be better?

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The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011)

After a major storm, books become birdies and Morris becomes a bookseller where reading turns the enchanted town residents from b/w to color. It’s all too precious for me, but wonderfully assembled – no surprise it won the oscar (over the Brave-era short La Luna). The directors are suspiciously named Brandon and William Joyce – also suspicious that each one co-directed a different 2014 11-minute Edgar Allen Poe short.

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Seventh Master of the House (1966, Ivo Caprino)

Traveler asks a guy for a bed for the night, and gets sent to the guy’s father, and so on… then he gets the bed. It’s not much of a story, but it’s always good when our refined puppet animation devolves into increasingly bizarre characters until the final guy is shrunken to a quarter the height of his beard and resting in a horn hung on the wall. Some festival must’ve had a 12-minute minimum length so they added a framing story of a whitebeard man sitting in the snow writing this story (women do not exist in Norway).

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Three Inventors (1980, Michel Ocelot)

2D doily-paper cutout stop-motion, oooh. Family of inventors keep creating wonderful things. The town “notables,” having no vision or creativity themselves, conclude that the inventors must be criminal philistines, and a mob burns their house down, destroying everything that is beautiful.

Mouseover to operate the magic lace pipe-organ sewing-machine:
image

Aftermath tells us it was only a movie:

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George and Rosemary (1987, Snowden & Fine)

Guy is obsessed with gal across the street, when he finally builds up the nerve to march over there he learns she’s been obsessed with him too. Oscar-nominated, but against two of the greats: Your Face and The Man Who Planted Trees.

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There Once Was a Dog (1982, Eduard Nazarov)

Guard dog is old and busted so he gets kicked out of the house, makes a deal with a wolf to get back into the family’s graces then repays the wolf with stolen food. Cute story and animation, and the would-be sentimental ending provided the biggest laugh of the night.

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Glens Falls Sequence (1937, Douglass Crockwell)

The kind of paint-meets-clay blending that I love in The Wolf House. In standard-def I can’t even tell the difference between the 2D and 3D layers sometimes, or maybe it’s all 2D, but it’s wonderful. Feels freeform, making up new patterns according to whim, but returning to some (sexual/creature/religious) themes, like McLaren meets Bickford. I was gonna say the music is sometimes overwhelming, but I got caught up in the visuals and forgot that it’s a silent film and I’d hit play on Matmos A Chance to Cut.

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Simple Destiny Abstractions (1938, Douglass Crockwell)

A later film, but feels like the early demos that became Glens Falls. We’ll call it the bonus tracks. An advertisement painter, Doug made crazy motion experiments at his home in eastern New York state.

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Mind the Steps! (1989, Istvan Orosz)

B/W Escher-sketch of a perspective-defying apartment building, sometimes telling little stories of residents or political oppression and sometimes just transforming things into other things. Scraps of warped sound effects and harmonica made me forget I wasn’t still playing the Matmos.

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Syrinx (1966, Ryan Larkin)

Sexy forest gods keep materializing then dissolving into abstraction. Music video for a flutey Debussy piece.

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America is Waiting (1981, Bruce Conner)

Also a music video, for a good Byrne/Eno song. Not just a montage of fun stock footage, he warps the meaning of some shots by running them in forward and reverse. Lotta fun. I should’ve read that giant Conner book in the Ross library when I had the chance. At least there’s Screen Slate:

The success of [Mongoloid] led to an invitation from Brian Eno and David Byrne to make America is Waiting, a parody of paranoia that remains depressingly relevant. Using sourced material from the 1950s, he criticized reactionary politics, Western individualism, the Reagan administration, and military violence. When MTV rejected the video as part of their early programming that same year, it proved that corporate media always sanitizes rebellion.