The Venice Film Festival posted 70-ish short films online to commemorate their 70th anniversary. I watched them gradually over the past year. Already rounded up my favorites and least favorites – this is the rest.
Krzysztof Zanussi
Kids haul a film can containing Zanussi’s Venice prize-winning A Year of the Quiet Sun from a trash can.
Sono Sion
“Cinema’s Future is My Future” title cards. An excited man films things in a neon room. A crowd chants “seventy!”
Antonio Capuano
Green-haired teen zombies carry video cubes on subway station escalators.
Tariq Teguia
“Still, tomorrow’s cinema will be saying: someone is here.”
He has a Film Socialisme poster. Show-off.
James Franco – The Future of Cinema
FF Coppola says he hopes filmmaking professionalism will be destroyed and regular people will be able to make them. Then some vandals trash a house and it looks like we’re watching the framing story of V/H/S. Then all goes berzerk, and Franco appears, laughing amidst the chaos.
Pablo Larraín
Camera perched atop one of those sail-surfboards looking down, piano playing a riff on “My Blue Heaven”.
Nicolás Pereda
Single shot of couple in bed playing on their phones, unseriously discussing getting married.
Wang Bing
A guy works the land, comes home to his horrible, fly-infested cave.
Kim Ki-duk – My Mother
Kim films his own mother going to the store (slowly and painfully), buying cabbage and prepping dinner for his visit.
Edgar Reitz
Franz Kafka is moved by a film, walks outside into the present-day world of everpresent video screens and advertising. Searching for the source of his quote (“Went to the movies. Wept.”) led to an interesting-looking book called Kafka Goes to the Movies.
Pablo Trapero – Cinema Is All Around
iPhone videos of tourists taking photos at a waterfall while Doris Day sings Que Sera Sera.
Jia Zhang-ke
People watch old movies on new screens.
Unusually commercial-looking style for Jia.
João Pedro Rodrigues – Allegoria Della Prudenza
Grave sites (there are multiple) for Kenji Mizoguchi in the whispering wind. Cameo appearance by the grave of Portuguese director Paulo Rocha.
Peter Ho-Sun Chan – The Future Was In Their Eyes
Photo montage of the eyes of many dead filmmakers.
Isabel Coixet
A square little film sketch with bouncy music.
Haile Gerima
He’s in an edit suite reviewing Harvest: 3000 Years. “I am incarcerated in the historical circumstances of Africa. Our cinema is a hostaged cinema.”
Atom Egoyan – Butterfly
He lets us see video of an Anton Corbijn gallery exhibit before deleting it from his phone. “Frankly I can’t be bothered to store more useless memories that I’ll never look at again, so I have to make some choices of what to lose.”
Hong Sang-soo – 50:50
Guy smokes with a stranger, tells her that his wife, sitting on a nearby bench, is terribly ill.
Celina Murga
Theater full of kids watch a movie.
Hala Alabdalla
Driving through Syria shooting through a window with a beard-n-sunglasses silhouette stuck on. Then: close-ups of eyeballs.
Pietro Marcello
Silent stock footage and clips of film equipment at work, then a Guy Debord quote.
Jan Cvitkovic – I Was a Child
Nice moving camera while narrator tells of when she first realized that everything is god.
Jazmín López
Camera follows a trail of discarded objects to two identically-dressed girls making out.
Amir Naderi – Don’t Give Up
Aged film of dust storm on a dead sea cut with some present-day film storage room.
Alexey German Jr. – 5000 Days Ahead
Single travelling shot, people on a beach discussing movies of the future, personal experiences using neural transmitters, “like dreams with subtitles.”
Benoît Jacquot
Single take of a girl looking into camera.
John Akomfrah
B/W travel footage rapidly edited, closing with titles about the Boston Marathon bombing.
Shekhar Kapur
Bunch of short fragments using the white balance and focus in nonstandard ways.
Davide Ferrario – Lighthouse
Open-air cinema is playing Buster Keaton, shown with nice helicopter(?) shot.
Ermanno Olmi – La Moviola
So that’s what a moviola looks like. Hands and a sort of stop-motion/time-lapse ghost set it up and start it rolling.
Giuseppe Piccioni
We’re at a party, dude goes to get a drink for the girl in center of shot, and she slowly glides with the camera into the other room, audio from a climactic scene from Double Indemnity in her head, then back again.
Brillante Mendoza – The Camera
A movie is being filmed, shots of people across town already enjoying it on TV, but back on set someone has run off with the camera.
Monte Hellman
Slate, couple at a cafe, he pays and leaves while she silently cries, the traffic noise dialing down, slow pull in, then “cut”.
Teresa Villaverde – Amapola
Poem recital like a horror-movie bible reading, “jackals that the jackals would despise,” blurry TV sets with close-ups of faces upon them.
Guido Lombardi – Sensa Fine
Last shot of a film, the lead actors kiss, then won’t stop kissing.
Shirin Neshat
Scenes from October and Potemkin played with a stop-motion-looking low frame-rate.
