by ·Comments Off on Some Shorts With No Dialogue

Thought I’d watch some shorts tonight, starting with the Guy Maddin shorts listed in the previous post. Unintentional theme: none of them had any spoken dialogue!

Film (Emend) by Deco Dawson
Crazily-edited scratched, grainy black-and-white silent footage of hands? If I hadn’t already known that Dawson was involved with Guy Maddin (as editor and camera op on Dracula and Heart of the World), I easily would’ve been able to tell.

Film (Luster) by Deco Dawson
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Same thing, except now it’s a boy shining shoes instead of a woman sewing. Some peephole photography and scary closeups of the bootblack-mascaraed boy. As far as falsely-aged avant-garde films go, this is thankfully closer to Maddin than Merhige, although it’s less captivating than it means to be. Good music.

Din of Celestial Birds by E. Elias Merhige
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Some Begotten image manipulation meets the time tunnel from 2001: A Space Odyssey accompanied by minimalist music and too much MPEG artifacting. Merhige fans may ask “HOW does he do it?” but I’d like to know “WHY does he do it?” Did jobs dry up after Suspect Zero? Some cool time-lapse of plant life for a second there. Made in collaboration with Haskell Wexler’s grandson. There was a “visual philosopher” involved, ha! The actor who played “son of earth” in Begotten (the dude who gets dragged around by druids through the second half) played “son of light” in this (seen above).

Begone Dull Care by Norman McLaren
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Handpainted film cut to jazz music, excellent in every way. I could watch this all day. First half is full explosive color, multiple layers, second half starts out all slow white scratch lines and finally gets crazy after a couple minutes.

Bread and Alley by Abbas Kiarostami (his first short)
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Opens with a prolonged shot of a boy kicking a can down an alley to the Beatles “ob-la-di, ob-la-da”. Boy can’t figure out how to get down the alley without being chased by a dog. Puzzles it out for a long while, follows an old man but he only goes halfway. Finally braves it by himself and accidentally makes friends with the dog by feeding it. No dialogue. A very happy little movie.

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film by Richard Lester & Peter Sellers
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A jolly bit of madness out in a field. Not the funniest ten minutes of cinema I’ve ever seen, but worth watching. Some of these guys had a radio program called The Goon Show, which I’ve heard somehow led to this film which somehow led to Petulia and Strangelove and Steve Martin’s Pink Panther remake.

EDIT 2021: Watched The Running Jumping Etc. again in slightly improved picture quality, which didn’t elevate the comedy any – nothing new to report.

by ·Comments Off on Le Franc (1994, Djibril Diop Mambety)

Congoma-player Marigo hasn’t paid the rent in a few months, so his landlady (the griot from Touki Bouki) has confiscated his instrument until he pays up.
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With no way to earn a living, Marigo buys a lotto ticket from an optimistic dwarf acquaintance.
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Marigo has got the winning number… but he pasted the ticket to his front door behind a poster of Yadikoon (“an African robin hood”), so he has to take the whole door to the lottery office.
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…along the way, dreaming of the rich life…
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…only to be told that the ticket needs to be detached from the door to be authorized.
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So Marigo makes a run for the beach and uses the pounding surf to remove the ticket, dancing and dreaming on the rocks, losing his poster but getting the ticket off successfully, screaming ecstatic laughter.
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I pretty much loved it.

Culturebase.net:
“We have sold our souls cheaply!“, Mambety concludes, though he never described himself as a political director. Yet his films always refer to the economic reality of his country, which is entirely dependent on the World Bank, monetary funds and French economic policy. This is true for his last two films. They were part of a trilogy on “The story of small people.” “Le Franc” and “La petite vendeuse de soleil” are from parables on the lives of people who must ask themselves the same question every morning, namely how to gather the most fundamentally necessary means to survive. The small people in this trilogy are the counterparts to the greed of the hyenas in his longer feature films.”

Filmref.com:
“Mambéty introduces the trenchant idea that the power of the imagination to raise post-colonial African consciousness does not exist in fanciful, but ultimately empty, idle dreams or wistfully dwelling over a lost – and stolen – noble past (a theme that is also articulated in Jean-Marie Téno’s films, as well as Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret), but in a certain wide-eyed innocence and naïve determination that recovery and advancement are still possible with dedicated effort.”

California Newsreel:
“In both films there are conspicuous references to Yadikoon, a semi-legendary figure who in popular memory became a kind of Senegalese Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. In Le Franc, the main character, Marigo has a poster of Yadikoon in his room. Mambety himself named a foundation he established for Dakar’s street children after Yadikoon.”

The only hits I get from “Yadikoon” on google are from articles on these films, so either he’s a Mambety-created character or we are all spelling his name wrong.

Also watched “Echek” again, fun little flick by Adan Jodorowsky:
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by ·Comments Off on White Mane / The Red Balloon (1953/56, Albert Lamorisse)

The Landmark theater of course played these Academy-ratio films in widescreen, ho-hum.

WHITE MANE, b/w, boy who lives on the marshes in southern France with his father and little brother (played by director’s son / star of Red Balloon) loves a wild horse, wants to capture it. Nearby ranchers also want to capture it. After a chase, boy rides the horse into the river and floats away, swept out to sea.

RED BALLOON, bright color, boy finds balloon which magically follows him around the city. Adults conspire to keep him away from his balloon, and other kids want to steal and destroy it. When the kids are successful, balloons from all over the city fly over and lift the kid up over Paris.

Jimmy says both movies are about the perils of acquisition. Both have somewhat the same ending… the kid getting (more or less) what he’d desired, a sense of freedom and imminent danger.

The two won a bunch of awards at Cannes, and Red Balloon got an original screenplay Oscar beating out The Ladykillers and La Strada. Remarkable for a movie with almost no dialogue. The two share excellent camerawork and primitive post-synched sound. I haven’t heard of anything else by photographer Edmond Séchan. Lamorisse made some other lesser-known children’s movies, including the earlier “Bim” and a widescreen Red Balloon sequel “Stowaway in the Sky”. The documentary he was filming over Iran when he died in an accident got an Oscar nomination after its completion. Best of all, he invented the board game RISK in ’57.

by ·Comments Off on Early Films (1898-1910)

More shorts from “The Movies Begin” disc 1.

President McKinley at Home (1897): the first president on film plays with his hat and looks uncomfortable.
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Pack Train at Chilkoot Pass (1898), reportedly recreated at the start of chaplin’s gold rush but I couldn’t say for sure.
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Sky Scrapers of New York City from North River (1903)
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Georgetown Loop, Colorado (1903) – those are passengers waving their hankies out the window to be on camera.
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San Francisco: Aftermath of Earthquake (1906) – awesome film, I had no idea.
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The Dog and His Various Merits (1908)
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Moscow Clad In Snow (1908) – just what it says
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Aeroplane Flight and Wreck (1910)
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by ·Comments Off on Guernica (1950, Alain Resnais)

“Innocence will overcome destruction.”

More poetry (written and filmed) on death and war. Narration is about the town of Guernica destroyed by German (film says Nazi?) bombings in ’37 during the Spanish Civil War, while the visuals are of Picasso paintings, then a sculpture at the end. Mournful in tone, dark, with crossfades between paintings and segments, a few lighting and editing tricks to tell the story. Most of the screen time is not the Guernica painting – that’s just one of the ones they use. The writing by Paul Éluard is good but didn’t strike me as great as the Night and Fog narration. I enjoyed the score by Guy Bernard (Statues Also Die). The visuals are more of a Picasso showcase than a filmmaker showoff, though it’s all cut together very effectively.

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Co-directed by Robert Hessens, Resnais’s Oscar-winning accomplice on the Van Gogh short.

Paul Éluard was a poet who associated with Dali, appeared in L’Age d’or, was quoted in Alphaville, and died shortly after this film was released. Same photographer as on Gauguin and Van Gogh. Resnais credited as editing himself. Narration by the princess from Cocteau’s Orpheus.

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by ·Comments Off on Edison films (1894-97)

The Kiss – The raciest, most controversial film of its time.
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Serpentine Dances
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Sandow
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Comic Boxing
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Cock Fight – some early animal cruelty from our man Edison, who would later outdo himself with the classic “Electrocuting an Elephant”.
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The Barber Shop – Can’t imagine the appeal here, watching someone get a shave. One of the earliest films ever made and the “latest wonder” is a cheap/quick shave, not the motion picture itself?
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Feeding the Doves
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Seminary Girls
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by ·Comments Off on Lumiere films (1895-96)

Swimming in the Sea
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Children Digging For Clams – the best short for watching children dressed in silly period garb
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Loading a Boiler, or, “the one where nothing happens”.
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Dragoons Crossing the Sâone – dragoon: noun, cavalryman, a member of a European military unit formerly composed of heavily armed mounted troops.
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Promenade of Ostriches – actually only one ostrich, also a camel and some elephants
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Childish Quarrel
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Lion, London Zoological Garden – more animals getting taunted for the camera
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Photograph
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Transformation by Hats
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Carmaux: Drawing Out The Coke – coke: noun, the residue of coal left after destructive distillation and used as fuel.
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Poultry-Yard – an inferior remake of Edison’s “Feeding the Doves”
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Arab Cortege, Geneva – first appearance of a black person in the cinema?
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New York: Brooklyn Bridge
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New York: Broadway and Union Square
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Policeman’s Parade, Chicago
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by ·Comments Off on Shorts round-up

Hellraiser Prophecy
Holy crap this was bad. I’ve avoided fan films for this long, so why did I watch this one? Oh yeah – I’ll watch anything in the Hellraiser series. I’m sure this guy was proud of his fan script, trying to tie the Leviathan thing from Hellraiser 2 together with the lead character who I don’t remember from Hellraiser 4 and introducing Lucifer himself into the Hellraiser world for a collision of different hells. That’s all fine and good – the mistake was to actually shoot the thing, with dismal actors who stumble over their lines and no sense of skill or vision behind the camera, just some series-aping tribute bits with the chains and some good makeup and costumes on the cenobites. Guess I’m not sorry I watched it (only 20 minutes long) but I won’t be checking out the hour of DVD bonus features.

Flowers and Trees
First technicolor cartoon AND first oscar-winner for best animated short (probably no coincidence) is a disney “silly symphonies” musical. Two trees (a nasty gnarled one and a strong young one) compete for a beautiful girl tree, and there’s a forest fire and singing and stuff. Like a popeye episode, but with plants.

Super Mario Movie
Clever: guy hacks a super mario bros. cartridge and turns it into a “movie” installation piece. It’s over-long at 15 minutes, but cute. The “plot” is that Mario is trapped inside an old game cart in a closet somewhere while the code is starting to break down. Like Rejected, but in 8-bit.

Hyas and Stenorhynchus & Love Life of the Octopus by Jean Painlevé
These are a lot cooler looking than I thought they’d be. The Yo La Tengo music works fine – I was going to try synching up the live versions, but I don’t suppose exact timing matters much in this case. Katy is grossed out by the idea of octopus sex.