by ·Comments Off on By Brakhage, Volume 2, Program 6 (1995-2003)

I Take These Truths (1995)

It took a frustrating few minutes to figure out how to play albums alongside silent movies on the new TV setup, but it was worth it… Brakhage films are up to 10X more effective at relaxing the mind after a work day than Three Stooges shorts. I Take These Truths is one of the hand-painted films, full of color and texture, and there’s not much else I can say except that I love it very much. Sometimes it feels like you’re seeing a flicker party of unrelated images, every frame a painting, and sometimes you catch a vertical line and feel the film flying through the projector, and if you’re locked in you can fly along with it.

–
The Cat of the Worm’s Green Realm (1997)

These first two were silent so I played the new Prefuse 73 album. It’s a basic groove compared to the wildness of the films and I wondered if I should’ve put on something more crazy or abstract, but maybe it’s good to just have some beats and let the film do the talking. We’re back to photography – both the cat and the worm make appearances, and for a green realm there’s an awful lot of orange and pink and yellow. Seems like the realm might be the backyard, but the camera is so very close to every leaf and blade of grass (worm’s-eye view?) that the yard is reduced to blobs.

–
Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind (1997)

Now I’m picking songs to match the length of the movies, and I do have a 17-minute song, an eerie ambient piece from the new Kevin Drumm record. Instead of a rush of imagery in a particular style, this one edits all the styles together, a rush of rushes of imagery. I keep feeling like there’s a Framptonian pattern to crack in the edits, but maybe he just chopped together some mothlit leader, hand painted pieces, too-close photography, shots of whipping the camera around fast enough to leave trails, and the sun sparkling on turbulent water, at semi-random and appreciated the synchronicity.

–
… Reel Five (1998)

This one has its own music, an avant-piano piece. We spend some minutes adjusting to the music over a blank screen, then the background turns blinding white, with light black and colored patterns flickering across.

–
Persian Series 1-3 (1999)

Persian 1 gives us peak swirling oil painting flicker action, then #2 bends our minds by tracking into and out of the frame, an effect I can feel without being able to tell how they’re doing it without a consistent background to zoom into, and #3 cranks the pace into overdrive and adds a Rorschach mirror effect. Just outstanding. I played an anxious saxey Sons of Kemet song, a good fit.

–
Chinese Series (2003)

Just white scratch-figures on widescreen windowboxed black background for a brief, light ending to the program. I unwisely played a heavy Zappa-quoting Pere Ubu track.

–
For Stan (2009, Marilyn Brakhage)

Marilyn traces the landscape with her own camera and provides valuable footage of Stan filming in a cave wearing a Canyon Cinema shirt – and also walking into a wall because he couldn’t see where he was going. I played the Simon Hanes album – track 2 made the film too cartoony, then track 3 settled in nicely.

–
By now it’s been forever since I watched some of the other shorts on this blu-ray, and instead of pining for the 400-ish Brakhage films that it’s very hard to see, I could watch one from this set daily on a loop, forever. It’s not like I run the risk of memorizing them or tiring them out.

Loved the Brakhage on Brakhage series in the extras, like a scrapbook of choice Stan quotes, speaking clearly and sensibly about his work.

…the scratching of titles directly onto the film surface which had this effect: that from the beginning the viewer was given the rhythm of the very projector that was going to show them the rest of the film. They were given the sense of the film’s surface itself.

There’s crazy footage of him filming in the field. He says he edited a film for Joseph Cornell in Maya Deren’s apartment, talks about learning from Marie Menken, and his thoughts on the labels “experimental” and “avant-garde” and “underground.” Then the Sunday Salon segments are Q&A pieces about one film at a time:

  • Psalm Branch is a Freud film, Stan is a big Freud fan
  • Under Childhood was recognizing the dark side of his children’s existence
  • Murder Psalm was a “trance-state miracle” made in a rage after a nightmare about killing his mother
  • Boulder Blues: “I wanted the film to be composed of things that are mostly in people’s peripheral vision.”
  • Worm’s Green Realm: you can attempt to follow narratively with the “kinds of feelings that are intrinsic to story” but are purely visual

by ·Comments Off on Cartoons watched April 2024

The Emperor’s New Clothes (1953, Ted Parmelee)

Everyone pretends they can see the emp’s “invisible clothes” until a kid gives the game away. The writing and dialogue is odd, Emp’s face-symmetry oval is visible, UPA maybe not firing on all cylinders here.

–
The Unicorn in the Garden (1953, William Hurtz)

A pleasant man finds a unicorn eating his flowers one morning, wakes up his shrew wife to show her. She calls the cops instead to have him committed, but when they arrive he acts cool and she’s hopping around talking unicorns so they nab her instead.

–
Steamboat Willie (1928, Walt Disney)

My favorite out-of-copyright Disney short… but wait, why did I not know that this movie is a cavalcade of animal cruelty? Mickey throws things at a parrot, a cow is force-fed, A goose and a goat and pigs are turned into musical instruments, a cat is swung by its tail, a baby pig is kicked. On top of this the ship captain aggressively chews tobacco and Minnie gets lifted by her undies. On the plus side, Mickey invents the Anvil Orchestra.

–
A Corny Concerto (1943, Robert Clampett)

Two mini-musicals as Elmer conducts Strauss.
McKimson, Tashlin, and Stalling – all the boys turned out for this one.

1. Porky and his dog hunt Bugs in time to the music.

2. A quacking swan rejects the grey duck until he violently rescues her babies from a vulture.

–
Felix in the Ghost Breaker (1923, Otto Mesmer)

Why does the Felix DVD open with a text crawl telling us that after Mickey Mouse stole Felix’s merchandise sales, producer Pat Sullivan’s wife “fell or jumped from a hotel window?” Why not add that Pat had a history of incompetence, was a convicted child rapist, and drank himself to death the following year? Anyway, we’ve all decided to give New Jersey’s own Otto Mesmer the credit for Felix and these films, and Otto continued the Felix legacy for another sixty years.

A ghost is tormenting a farmer and his animals, Felix leads it away with a bottle of rum (which ghosts love) then holds it at gunpoint (future note: Felix is armed) until the farmer arrives for the scooby doo ending. When did ghost breaking become busting… there were Ghost Breaker films through 1940, and Ghost Busters and Chasers in the early 1950s, then busting became the default after the famously unprofitable 1984 film.

In the 1920s Felix looked like a snaggletoothed black cat – I’m more familiar with his 1930s character model.

Useful meme for later this election year:

–
Felix in Hollywood (1923, Otto Mesmer)

That’s more like it – now Felix is pranking people. He makes his wannabe-actor owner rich through shoe sales, then the owner is off to Hollywood to find a job in the movies. Felix does get another gun… his magic bag of tricks wasn’t invented until the 1950s but he disguises himself as a black bag to stow-away to Hollywood, where he meets caricatures of nobody I recognized (reportedly Gloria Swanson, Ben Turpin, Tom Mix, and Cecil De Mille) and poses with Chaplin. These are mildly meta, then, since he’s already in a movie, and in the previous one the ghost came towards camera and threatened the viewers.

–
Face Like a Frog (1988, Sally Cruikshank)

Absolutely wild all-things-possible animation at a frantic pace, like a PG-rated 1980s Superjail. I guess a frog gets seduced into entering a spooky house, then escapes through the basement. I was gonna say this has insane music for a short, turns out it’s by Danny Elfman, same year as Beetlejuice.

–
Quasi at the Quackadero (1976, Sally Cruikshank)

Quasi (pronounced KWAH-zee) lives a decadent life in bed watching TV programs of other people doing work. Anita and Rollo take him to a psychic carnival, plotting to lose him there, and succeed in knocking him down a “time hole” into the dinosaur age. All the best animators come from New Jersey. The score composers wrote a book called “The Couch Potato Guide to Life” which is also about getting warped from watching too much TV.

After Quasi’s disappearance, Chairy found a new home in Pee Wee’s Playhouse:

The roll-back-time mirror also rolls back your clothing:

And with that I’ve seen all of Jerry Beck’s 50 Greatest Cartoons, and written up all but nine in the book – five of those being Tex Avery shorts. Now to rewatch those nine, and find the sixty-ish runners-up. A man’s life work (watching cartoons on the couch) is never finished.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched March 2024

Out West (1918, Roscoe Arbuckle)

Bullets and arrows to the ass and bottles to the head are minor invonceniences, if that. Roscoe is a vagabond thief sharpshooter who takes a job at Buster’s saloon and helps fend off the invincible but highly ticklish Wild Bill Hiccup. A very silly movie.

–
Life is But a Dream (2022, Park Chan-wook)

Pretty good for a phone ad. Coffin maker steals wood from a famous fighter’s coffin to bury another famous fighter, the two ghosts agree to marry and be buried together. Ends on an underworld dance party, all pretty extravagant for a short.

–
Wrecked (2013, Benson & Moorhead)

Shitty pilot crashes/destroys his plane in desert, needs water, makes radio contact with a bizarre unhelpful individual quoting annoying platitudes, who turns out to be a stoned music festival participant. Cute, better than the Park.

–
The Heron and the Crane (1975, Yuri Norshteyn)

Animated birds and live-action fireworks. Crane would like to marry Heron, she refuses, then reconsiders but he refuses, then reconsiders, and so on. I thought there’d be some reconciliation and compromise, but nope, narrator says they go back and forth eternally.

–
Hedgehog in the Fog (1975, Yuri Norshteyn)

Hedgehog gets distracted on his way to bear’s house to count stars, when he sees a white horse in the fog. Wanders in there, gets terrified by all the creatures, but they keep helping him and he makes it out. Beautiful movie, abrupt ending. How’d they do the fog? Characters remind me of the Winnie-the-Pooh Russian shorts (Khitruk was Norshteyn’s mentor).

–
25 October, The First Day (1968, Yuri Norshteyn)

Ah, glorious October 1917, the people marching in one mighty red undistinguished blur while cartoon priests and fatcats run in terror. Lot of text slogans. Not my kind of thing, but neat layered images. Newsreel footage at the end with red flag waving over it, exclaiming that the people now run the country with no exploiters. Did it still feel that way fifty years later?

–
Cowboy Jimmy (1957, Dusan Vukotic)

Wow, exaggerated looney Wild West characters, Jimmy arrives and kills a whole table of card cheats with one shot then throws them his smoke rings as wreaths, chases down the blackhat villain, who trips Cowboy J so he falls out of the movie screen and into the audience in front of a pipsqueak fan. The kid takes J to his wild west playhouse, where the child villain brutalizes the real cowboy until the kids all lose respect for him and carry him to the kino to throw him back through the movie screen.

–
Cow on the Moon (1959, Dusan Vukotic)

Soccer hooligan smashes a girl’s model rocket, so she builds a full-size rocket to get even, knowing he’ll steal it, then she scares the hell out of him by pretending to be a moon person. The tormented cow thinks it was a pretty good joke. An even better frame-breaking gag than Cowboy Jimmy when she zooms out and tilts the movie’s background to get a cart up a steep hill

–
You Ought to be in Pictures (1940, Friz Freleng)

While the animators are at lunch, Daffy talks Porky into telling Leon Schlesinger he wants to quit and go into features. While Porky is getting chased by security and thrown off sets, Daffy is auditioning for Porky’s job in Schlesinger’s office. Terrific live/anim hybrid. Top Looney story writer Michael Maltese played the guard.

–
Happy Go Nutty (1944, Tex Avery)

Armed with a Napoleon hat and giant hammer, Screwy Squirrel breaks out of the nuthouse and gets chased all over by a guard dog. Good meta jokes, only one racist bit.

–
Lambert the Sheepish Lion (1952, Hannah & Geronimi)

Lion is raised with sheep, “he was big but he was yellow.” Rhyming narration by Sterling Holloway. More tame / less fun than the others, but very professional looking, and who doesn’t like Holloway (reprising his stork role from Dumbo).

–
Felix in Exile (1994, William Kentridge)

A person sits in a bare room while a bunch of others bleed to death. Ah, he is a writer, either inventing or recounting the deaths, the animation leaves half-erased trails – a cool effect when you know it’s done on purpose, less so when you’re not sure if you got a dodgy MP4. His walls become covered in paintings of a woman in water, the bleeding bodies transform into landscapes, the woman is connected to telescopes and sextant, and appears as a constellation. It’s all depressive-obsessive. Honestly I messed up watching this after Tex Avery shorts – even though I noted it was from the 1990s I had Felix the Cat in my mind when I hit play.

by ·Comments Off on True/False Impossible Shorts

Ben LaMar Gay opened, solo with recorder, conch, mini gong, rattles and drones. The cornet was by his side but he didn’t feel inspired to pick it up, or miscalculated how much time he’d get. Q&A after, with Lynne Sachs and team giving context on their piece, and the Two Sun director all alone.

Amma ki katha (Nehal Vyas)
Four stories/myths/dreams/histories told by the elephants holding up the world. Mythic and symbolic about India in ways I didn’t usually follow. Some paper animation, a high-school play, some mothlighting. Didn’t see any of this coming after the simple hair-braiding intro.

The Sketch (Tomas Cali)
The speaker is new in Paris, learning to draw. He connects with a trans life model, represented with different drawing styles and also nude/real, the protag visually sketchy until self-realizing at the end. Better than it sounds.

Four Holes (Daniela Muñoz Barroso)
After a half hour of serious metaphor, this one’s comically-presented camera tech issues brought down the house. DIY solo golfer and filmmaker both have hearing issues, hanging out, playing with her sound equipment together.

Two Sun (Blair Barnes)
Dense in language, speech, music, and edit, but light in tone. A poet friend of the filmmaker’s puts on a fashion show for the camera and shares deep thoughts.

Contractions (Lynne Sachs)
Performers with hidden faces in the parking lot outside a former (due to repressive new laws) abortion clinic in Memphis, voiceover of clinic workers’ experiences, fears, and thoughts on the current situation. Artfully done, lovely.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched Feb 2024

The Glass Harmonica (1968, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy)

I’ve seen this style before, some hinged limbs but most “motion” is cuts or fast fades between drawings. The townsfolk are greedy and private, and all beauty is kept away from the people by spooks in black suits. They hear the glory of a glass harmonica, then see the government thugs destroy it, and get back to hoarding wealth, transforming into animals until there’s a wacky war of mixed-up creatures in the town square. From the first half of this you’d never predict it would have such wild character design. Our glass-wielding dude come back a-strummin’ and turns the people from abstract art back to realism – the hoarder becomes generous, everyone so enlightened that they float into the sky, rebuilding the town commons they’d looted earlier, even after the agent of money smashes the instrument again. I don’t think any glass harmonicas are heard in the symphonic score, nor do glass harmonicas look like the portable glass pipe organ the animated musician strums like a guitar. Not only was this banned for screening in soviet territories, the director was ordered into the navy for two years.

–
A Return (2018, James Edmonds)

Houseplants, sheep, and windowlight, superimposed and cut with stuttery editing. The soundtrack is all crashing ocean waves until the last couple minutes when new tones arise, sounding coincidentally like a glass harmonica. A short and pleasant abstract piece.

–
Seven Songs About Thunder (2010, Jennifer Reeder)

Uniformed marching band girl flees through the woods, is later found dead by apparently-pregnant jean-jacket Libby, who narrates about death and reincarnation. After offending her psychiatrist (who later offends her husband), Libby keeps getting calls on the dead girl’s phone with its “Sweet Child o’ Mine” ringtone, finally calls in the dead girl to the cops. Kind of a stagy, unreal short film, low-budget but accomplished. The psych’s husband went on to play Anne Hathaway’s brother in Dark Waters.

–
And I Will Rise If Only to Hold You Down (2012, Jennifer Reeder)

Dancer alone, saying aloud insults and affirmations… another marching band girl running, this time getting home safely. Mostly locked down shots (the last movie kept gliding in straight lines towards then past the characters), dialogue repeating in different contexts.

–
The Three Stooges in Termites of 1938

I’ve got this Stoogeological Studies zine sitting on my desk, but I haven’t seen the Three Stooges in action since I was a kid. Let’s watch some classic shorts and see if they hold up.

Muriel (Bess Flowers, “Queen of the Extras”) wants the escort bureau to get a date to Mabel’s party, but maid Etta “sister of Hattie” McDaniel calls the exterminators instead. Larry/Curly/Moe are in their office attempting to blast the mouse with a cannon, but the mouse blasts them – a real Wile E. Coyote situation – Chekhov’s crate of “gopher bombs” sitting on the floor. At the party they’re alternately trying to mingle and exterminate critters. Since our guys start eating first, the fancy people all take their table manners cues from them – they cause a ruckus and get ejected. Characters are named Clayhammer, Mrs. Batwidget, and Lord Wafflebottom. This was loads better than Ferrari. Stooges also have a short called Ants in the Pantry, and between that title and this one, I’m getting Ants in Your Plants of 1939 vibes.

–
Wee Wee Monsieur (1938)

These Stooges movies are more complicated than their <20 minute runtime would suggest. Multiple locations and a lotta plot here, but it doesn't lose focus from the main attraction: conking people on the head. Our guys are broke Parisian artists, fishing out the window to steal from food carts while completing their masterpieces, then chased off by landlord and cop, and join the foreign legion not realizing it's the army. Put on guard duty by Sgt. Bud Jamison (of the Chaplin Essanays), their charge is immediately kidnapped. Now on a rescue mission, they need a disguise because “no white man has ever entered” the palace of whatever exotic land we’re in – I feared the worst, but they all dressed as Santa Claus, conking suspicious guards and loading ’em into the sack. Masquerading as harem girls they save Captain Gorgonzola from the enemy (recurring antagonist Vernon Dent) and harness the man-eating lion to get home (well, back to base at least).

–
Tassels in the Air (1938)

The previous two were directed by Canadian hero Del Lord, this one is by Charley Chase. Bess Flowers and Bud Jamison are having the house redecorated, come to visit a snooty artiste decorator’s office but our guys have mislabeled the office doors, so they get hired for the decorating job. They start out by painting the antiques, not that anyone notices, but I caught them apologizing a lot in this one, aware of their own incompetence for once. Curly fails to learn pig latin, and has a nervous condition where he goes barking mad when he sees tassels. Lboxd useless as ever, the top three user reviews call it “the worst Three Stooges short,” “one of their best,” and “the median.”

Bud is sent to mix some polka-dotted paint:

by ·Comments Off on Strange Way of Life (2023, Pedro Almodóvar)

On Valentine’s Day I watched the Ethan Hawke gay cowboy movie. He’s a lawman, and says his old flame Pedro Pascal’s no-good son killed someone, so Pedro shoots Ethan so the son can get away. Pretty good sketch of a movie, not as fully-formed as The Human Voice. Cheap digital cinematography, “maybe an ad for something” I wrote, and I think it’s the clothes – costumed and produced 15 years posthumously by Yves S/L, whose Bonello biopic I should watch one of these days.

by ·Comments Off on Rotterdance 2024 shorts

Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma (2021, Topaz Jones & Rubberband)

Alphabet of sketches, like The ABCs of Death, but of Black culture in Montclair NJ. Each letter-sketch is a different approach, from wordless avant one-shots to interviews about reframing slavery, food apartheid, code switching, therapy or owning your own work, with home movies and music videos in between letter segments.

–
The Driver Is Red (2017, Randall Christopher)

Animated thriller about spy stuff in 1960 Argentina, self-drawing sketches upon papery background with unstable color, covered in faux film grain. Our narrator/hero has tracked and identified Adolf Eichmann, then takes the time to explain some details of the holocaust, in case we haven’t heard. Back to 1960, he calls in his mates and they successfully abduct the guy and bring him to trial, back when Isr**l had a sense of proportion.

–
A Short Story (2022, Bi Gan)

This whimsical fantasy AFX-composited sci-fi short incongruously proves that the director of An Elephant Sitting Still had a shot of helming a marvel movie. I guess a cat dresses as a scarecrow and visits three “weirdo” beings who might have some precious thing he can give a girl for her birthday.

–
The Rifleman (2021, Sierra Pettengill)

The guy who shot Ramon Casiano later became head of the NRA, mutating the group’s mission from hobbyist sports towards political lobbying. The Drive-By Truckers song is better than this movie (archival footage with strange music), but both are enlightening.

–
Rubber Coated Steel (2016, Lawrence Abu Hamdan)

An Isr**li bodyguard killed two kids in the W*st B*nk, and a forensic audio analyst (the director himself, if I didn’t misunderstand the credits) explains in court how it was done. Visual is a long take, roving around a shooting range, the mechanical target holders bringing forth pictoral representations of bullet sounds. For a movie about sound, the audio track is pretty useless – words from the trial are subtitled, including lines stricken from the official record, then the end credits are spoken.

–
Goodbye Jerome! (2022, Farr/Selnet/Sillard)

Jerome goes to heaven to find his true love, she breaks up with him, so he suicides and is rebuilt by ants. Really nice animation.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched January 2024

AMC Theaters 1200 AD (2023, Damon Packard)

Heavily AI-assisted parody of the Nicole Kidman AMC ads, a grudgingly multiplex-supporting voiceover with face-melting visuals.

–
The Man Who Couldn’t Miss Screenings (2023, Damon Packard)

Both better and worse than AMC Theaters. It’s mainly a slo-mo “Comfortably Numb” music video, toggling between a laptop dude arguing with his angry wife about the importance of screenings and a a street scene where an electric car has burst into flames, with an Albert Pyun tribute postscript. For me, who has not overdosed on 2023 AI imagery, the mutant characters and text, everything looking like a botched render, it’s all aesthetically interesting.

–
Pool Sharks (1915, Edwin Middleton)

Two absurd men fight at a picnic, Proto-WC-Fields vs Checkered Suit Guy, leading to a game of stop-motion pool. Checkered Suit Guy might’ve been Billy West sideman Bud Ross.

–
The Golf Specialist (1930, Monte Brice)

A house detective’s hotwife flirts with every guy then her husband beats them up. She goes to watch WCF golf – he never hits the ball, being upstaged by his idiot caddy. WCF with his worst mustache yet, thriving from here out in the sound era, drawing laughs by being mean to children and dogs. Hotwife Shirley Grey went on to costar with Lugosi in Hammer’s first horror film, The Mystery of the Mary Celeste.

–
The Barber Shop (1933, Arthur Ripley)

Fields in his element, muttering comic insults at people. He encourages his pun-loving young son, and collects two upright basses as setup for some late prop humor. A wanted bank robber (Cocoanuts flimflam man Cyril Ring) comes in to crank up the drama, not that we needed suspense when we’re getting lines like “I belong to the bare-hand wolf-chokers association.”

–
The Pharmacist (1933, Arthur Ripley)

Sound is awful on this one, and rude things are done to a cockatoo. Another crime story / police chase into the shop, whole place gets shot up. Unsatisfying ending involving the daughter’s boyfriend. Maybe I watched one too many of these in a row. Daughter’s boyfriend Grady Sutton is maybe the only person to appear in both My Man Godfrey and Rock & Roll High School, the daughter would go on to play “Saloon Floozie” in a Marlene Dietrich movie.

Will Sloan in Screen Slate:

As with the Marx Brothers, Fields’s work enjoyed a revival in the ‘60s and ‘70s among college kids who took him as an anti-authoritarian hero. He has been less visible in recent years, but he would have been well known to the writers of shows like Saturday Night Live, SCTV, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Simpsons in their most important years. If his contemporary presence is indirect, it is still prevalent.

–
Also watched in January:

by ·Comments Off on Some More December Shorts

Sexy Laundry (2016, Izabela Plucinska)

Gooey clay people Alice and Henry can’t seem to have sex even in their fancy vacation hotel. They give up and consider divorce then try to spice things up one more time. Based on a stage play, which I wouldn’t want to mess with since the only attraction here is the clay.

–
The Age of Swordfish (1955, Vittorio De Seta)

Restoration paid by George Lucas, so of course the movie opens with a backstory text scroll. The men hunt swordfish while the women do laundry onshore. Paddlers, a spearman in front, and on an elevated pole a lookout guy who yells way too much. Not a mass-scale animal slaughter movie – they catch one fish and come home to sing and dance. This being Italy the sound is out of sync, but the titles tell us the audio was at least recorded on location. Mainly, this thing is shot and edited like absolute mad – it seems De Seta’s other work will be fun to watch.

–
Fishing Boats (1958, Vittorio De Seta)

Fishing with nets further out at sea this time, Leviathan a half-century early. Added drama from a storm, sea birds, a dolphin, a rainbow. No attempt at talking this time.

–
Same Player Shoots Again (1967, Wim Wenders)

Person is filmed from shoulders down, stumbling down a street while holding a rifle, the same shot then repeated with green/orange/red/blue tints. It’s a 12-minute movie but they ran out of music after three.

–
Silver City (1968, Wim Wenders)

Nice opening, fading between a sea of people and the sea. Then long static shots of various traffic intersections (car and train), light flaring at the end of each film roll. There’s a take of a still photograph, one of the Rolling Stones on TV (silent, so Criterion didn’t have to pay for the song). Feels like location scouting for the later road movies combined with a Benning-like duration experiment.