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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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?


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.


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.


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:

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.

Edith+Eddie (2017, Laura Checkoway)

I guess it’s common practice to screw over elders using the legal guardianship system? Imagine being the lawyer responsible for the lonely death of a nice old man in an oscar-nominated documentary seen around the world. This was filmed 11 miles from my grandmother’s house.


Daredevil Droopy (1951, Tex Avery)

Droopy and Spike compete at a circus to be one of The Great Barko’s daredevil dogs. Rapid-fire series of short contests, mostly ending with the larger dog badly injured, but it’s fine because he was trying to cheat. Lots of dynamite in the second half. Best bits: figure skating, human bullet, that strength-tester bell-ringer seesaw hammer game.

Mouseover to send Spike through the hoop of fire:
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Mouseover to give Droopy a better gun:
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Droopy’s Good Deed (1951, Tex Avery)

Spike is a wild-eyed hobo pretending to be a boy scout, another series of short competitions with Spike cheating and losing to the cool and competent Droopy, who gets a ton more dialogue in this one. Slightly racist jokes in this and the previous one, always to the effect of turning Black after a bomb blast, and it’s not terrible – until one time it definitely is, then a weird, fakeout ending at the White House. I assume I downloaded the uncensored versions of these somewhere or other, they sat on my laptop for a year, and tonight I’m in the mood for some violent cartoons.


Watching Oana (2009, Sebastien Laudenbach)

Earlier short by The Girl Without Hands director. A couple: he is a pastry chef, she translates poetry and brochures. Told from his perspective, wanting a baby, not believing in her ambitions, thinking he knows her inside and out but apparently not. Some cringey moments, I hope it’s not based on a true story. Spoken opening credits, then alternates between written segments created with stop-motion pasta, and spoken conversations with close-up animation of something besides the couple’s faces (wine glasses, shadows, legs in the surf), then the pasta turns into words inked onto skin and the music ramps up for the disturbing final section. The voice of Oana is played by Elina Löwensohn, who keeps coming up lately. Played at Annecy with The Secret of Kells and Western Spaghetti.


The Boy Who Chose the Earth (2018, Lav Diaz)

Two minutes for the latest Vienna Film Festival, a boy at home alone receiving a letter, running outside, apparently surprised – then rain and flooded streets. The last Lav Diaz short I watched was also fierce storms and floods, either footage from the same week or else the Philippines get some regularly nasty weather.


The Glass Note (2018, Mary Helena Clark)

Miniature frames of music and water and wind. Extreme bodily close-ups. Mostly seems interested in sound being created and moving through channels, with a sidetrack about tourists touching the breasts of bronze statues.


Story of an Old Lady (1985, Agnes Varda)

Lost, deteriorated Varda mini-doc about the woman she cast to get naked in the feather room in 7 P., cuis., s.de b…. Bit of behind-the-scenes interview, her getting a kick out of playing the employer in Vagabond, bossing around Yolande and Sandrine, when she’d worked as a maid all her life.


Trees Down Here (2018, Ben Rivers)

I wasn’t sure that ending my night with Ben Rivers would work out, since he tends to put me to sleep, but it opens with an owl close-up and I’m hooked. Architectural sketches alternate with architectural photos, but with an owl or snake in the foreground. The final minutes have a tape of John Ashbery reading his poem “Some Trees”. Ben’s most engaging work yet, I suppose if you’re into architecture, poems, owls and snakes.

Still watching the nice HD collection of Looney Tunes


Duck! Rabbit, Duck! (1953, Chuck Jones)

The duck season/rabbit season short in which Daffy gets blown to bits a hundred times and Bugs causes chaos and confusion. Murderous fun. “I hope I didn’t hurt you too much when I killed you.” IMDB calls it the end of a Hunting Trilogy with Rabbit Fire and Rabbit Seasoning.


I Love To Singa (1936, Tex Avery)

“Enough is too much! Out of my house!” Forgot that Owl Jolson’s parents have heavy German accents… also forgot an excellent scene combining telegram lingo with sexual harassment.


A Tale of Two Kitties (1942, Robert Clampett)

Abbot & Costello cats try to steal a pink, featherless, smartass bird from its nest. Very quippy and gaggy, only loosely a story. Explicit Hays Office reference! “Lemme at him Babbit, I’ll moydalize him.” Pre-Tweety premiere of “I tawt I taw a putty tat”?


The Old Grey Hare (1944, Robert Clampett)

God listens to Elmer for some reason, and sends him to the year 2000, which has futuristic weapons and newspapers full of 1940’s references. Then we get a flashback within the flash-forward, so both elderly and baby versions of Elmer & Bugs.


Hare Tonic (1945, Chuck Jones)

In which Bugs convinces Elmer that he’s caught Rabbititis. I thought this was an old-model Elmer, but it’s made a year after the modern-Elmer Old Grey Hare, so what’s going on? The Elmer-torture is prompted not by hunting this time but by Elmer trying to buy fresh rabbit at the meat market, which at least proves that he intends to eat rabbits and isn’t just hunting them for the sport of it.


Fast and Furry-ous (1949, Chuck Jones)

Coyote and Road Runner origin story, setting up the template for many to come – and arguably never surpassed. I like that Road Runner doesn’t just zoom past the traps, but actively fucks with the coyote. I also like that there are complicated cloverleaf interchanges in the middle of the desert. My birds responded to the “meep meep”

My favorite invention, very Silver Surfer:


The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950, Chuck Jones

Daffy begs his movie producer J.L. to give him a dramatic role for once, which is enacted by an all-star cast: Porky, Sylvester, Elmer, Chicken Hawk. Rated R for snuff usage and suicide.


Chow Hound (1951, Chuck Jones)

Red kitty has a whole string of “owners”, who all feed him, but the food is stolen by a bully dog, who finally overeats his way into the hospital.


Bewitched Bunny (1954, Chuck Jones)

Bugs is reading Hansel and Gretel when he runs into the kids themselves, with ridiculous German accents, and ends up being chased by the witch through her hilariously designed house, and nearly saved by Prince Charming, who got the wrong fairy tale. “Thanks large, mac.” Ends with maybe the rudest punchline ever.

Allegretto (1943, Oskar Fischinger)
All colored diamonds and circles, so lovely. In close sync with the music, where in Motion Painting #1 the music seems an afterthought.
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Motion Painting No. 1 (1947, Oskar Fischinger)
Like it says, a motion painting – oil on glass, all small rectangles and big spirals. In The Mystery of Picasso the tension was in figuring how the painting would be finished, where he was heading, but in this the fun is in getting from one intermediate step to another. The process is the destination. There should be more of these!
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Franz Kafka (1992, Piotr Dumala)
Is the movie supposed to be making that sound of a cat in heat beneath the music, or is my laptop freaking out? Dark and scratchy and slow-moving, nothing actually happening. Oh wait, there’s some sex. Fulfills almost all of the Robyn Hitchcock holy keywords: sex, food and insects (what, no death?). I’m sure it’s very technically accomplished but I found it dreary and ponderous. The filmmaker made a plaster-scratch version of Crime and Punishment eight years later (or more likely he worked on it for all eight years).
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Tales from the Far Side (1994, Marv Newland)
Very inessential, slow-paced animated half-hour of Far Side cartoons. Really the most interesting bit is seeing Marv Newland’s name, 25 years after his seminal Bambi Meets Godzilla. Either he’s no longer a master of timing, or there was too much Gary Larson interference… or maybe you just can’t turn a single-panel comic strip into a 30-minute TV special. Doonesbury worked out, but that was talky and story-driven to begin with.
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Mr. Prokouk Shoots a Movie (1948, Karel Zeman)
Czech short, part of a whole series of Mr. Prokouk adventures.
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Prokouk is pointing at us, telling us to get off our asses and join the workforce!
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The Monkey’s Teeth (1960, Rene Laloux)
Intro is a three-minute doc of a group-therapy institution for depressed people, what follows is an animation of the film they wrote together. Sad man has a toothache, goes to a dentist who steals his teeth to sell to rich people (I wouldn’t think the teeth of the poor would be worth much, but maybe in France everyone practices excellent dental care). When the monkey wizard bicycles by, I figured the dentist would be put in his place and the stolen teeth returned, and that’s just what happens but first the sad man gets chased into a high school by some cops who get turned into children. Hmmm.
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Dimensions of Dialogue (1982, Jan Svankmajer)
It’s been too long since I’ve watched my Svankmajer shorts. This is an all-time fave. Faces made of identifiable objects consume each other, becoming smoother until they resemble human heads. Two clay humans make love, create an unwanted clay baby then destroy each other. And so on. Not one for brevity, J.S. takes everything to its conclusion and explores all permutations of his object manipulations – this is what makes his features seem so tedious, but his shorts seem so excellently complicated.
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Flora (1989, Jan Svankmajer)
A clay person tied to a bed and covered in rotting fruit and veg tries to reach a glass of water. Only a few seconds long, made for MTV (that’s czech for WTF).

Food (1992, Jan Svankmajer)
Oooh I love stop-motion using live actors. Guy enters a room facing a paralysed robot guy, reads instructions hanging on his neck (which are actually an MTV entry form: “Entrant must send a VHS or U-Matic, etc.”), manipulates the guy (puts money in his mouth, receives a sausage and mustard from chest, utensils from ears), then the robot guy leaves and the eater takes his place. Two guys sit at a restaurant, can’t get service so they eat their own clothes and the table. Finally, people are made gourmet meals of their own severed body parts. A classic, obviously.
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I Love To Singa (1936, Tex Avery)
“Enough is too much!” An old favorite. Owl Jolson is of course a parody of The Jazz Singer, which I’ve still never seen. Jazz and owls: a combination you don’t see often enough.
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Point Rationing of Foods (1943, Chuck Jones)
An extra tucked away on a Looney Tunes DVD, explaining the wartime canned food rationing system to the public through cheap quickie animation. Helpful to me, since I never bothered to learn how rationing worked before. Also tucked away is the Tashlin-penned The Bear That Wasn’t, probably not because of its unworthiness but because it was made at a different studio.

I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935, Friz Freling)
A variety show of children performers, with hijinks. Porky’s first appearance – the studio intended for a more generic troublemaker character (below, right) to take over, but the public demanded a shy stutterer instead. The title song is catchy, anyway.
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Roof Sex (2003, PES)
Stop-motion of chairs having sex. The cat is blamed.
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Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions (2002)
Ten W&G shorts. I think these were made to promote the full-length film… of course I had the chance to watch them back then and somehow put it off for seven years. Anyway these are cute – faves were The Snoozatron (a machine that dresses G. up as a sheep and flips him on a trampoline so W. can “count” him and fall asleep) and The Turbo Diner (a table-setting device exactly a la Charley Bowers in He Done His Best).


All This And Rabbit Stew (1941, Tex Avery)
Tex’s final Bugs short before moving to MGM. Hooray, now that I’ve watched those John Ford movies I can recognize that the offensive black stereotype hunter is based on Stepin Fetchit. I tried telling myself that if he didn’t look African the character would basically be Elmer Fudd – but then Bugs gets out of being held at gunpoint by shaking some dice and that idea goes out the window. Ouch.
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Vivian (Bruce Conner, 1964)
If you liked a girl in the 1960’s, you made an avant-garde film of her. Harvard Film Archive: “An ecstatic portrait of actress Vivian Kurtz that features footage of a 1964 Conner exhibition and couches a humorous critique of the art market.” Set to a pop song called Mona Lisa, loads of fun and only three minutes long. This would go on my “best of a-g” gift reel if it wasn’t such a problem to make such a thing.
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Journey on the Plain (1995, Bela Tarr)
Poems about friendship loss, life and death, each with a long tracking shot (imagine that), written by famed Hungarian poet Sándor Petöfi and performed by one of my favorite film music composers, Mihály Vig (Irimiás from Sátántangó, in color!). Suddenly in one scene 20 minutes in, he’s on a truck loudly playing a doomed keyboard. An odd movie, peaceful and beautiful. I would gladly watch again, paying more attention to the words of the poems.

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Thriller (1979, Sally Potter)

A narrator goes over the story and characters of an opera, then analyzes it while staring into a mirror, memory and identity swirling about. Very art-film, told in black-and-white stills and scenes, narrator all heavily french-accented. Kind of entrancing, really, with repeated poses and images and phrases, never quite turning into something I can make sense of (though I hear it’s some kind of marxist-feminist critique of Freud and contemplation of human existence, thanks to a useful, knowledgeable and well-considered review on the IMDB – a rare thing indeed).

Sony Pictures: “a critical re-working of Puccini’s opera La Boheme, was a cult hit on the international festival circuit.” Sudden bursts of the shower theme from Psycho. “Yes, it was murder. We never got to know each other. Perhaps we could have loved each other.” I need to see it again, obviously, but I’m not dying to do so anytime soon.

from K. McKim’s great Senses of Cinema article

Potter’s 16 mm black and white cult hit Thriller (1979) overtly equates revision with survival; the film invokes formal conventions to interrogate the narrative necessity of Mimi’s death. Inscribing this inquiry within allusion to female murder victims (Thriller cites Bernard Hermann’s screeching Psycho score), Mimi questions the conventions that locate meaning in the death of a young beautiful woman. Scripted, edited, produced and directed by Potter, Thriller transforms the opera into, as the title suggests, a thriller that uncovers operatic form’s generic and gendered hypocrisy.

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Dottie Gets Spanked (1993, Todd Haynes)
Wow, this was great. Boy with a mommy complex idolizes an I Love Lucy-esque TV show, wins a contest and gets to visit the set. Movie swirls with repression and fantasy and budding sexuality.

The distributor: “anticipates … Far from Heaven with its excavation of placid mid-century surfaces and deeply-buried emotions.” R. Lineberger: “This short film was commissioned by the Independent Television Service as part of a search for short films about American television. The pairing is perfect. Haynes is subversive, but approachable. His film deals with ominous and disturbing themes, but he never comes out and says anything objectionable. For example, Steven’s father is suggested to be violent, or at least sharply critical, but we never actually see any aggressiveness from him. The whispered consequences and punishments exist in glances, or in Steven’s thoughts.”

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13 Screen Tests (1964-66, Andy Warhol)

Rented Warhol’s screen tests sorta against my will (I just wanted to hear the new Dean & Britta songs) then proceeded to half-watch ’em while listening to the music. The films were better than I thought (that Edie Sedgwick has got something, and Lou Reed and Dennis Hopper are funny) and the music was worse (standard instrumentals, a few new songs and some covers). I did try watching a screen test straight through, the way I’m supposed to, to see if I experienced a sudden tingly appreciation for the Cult of Andy, but it didn’t work; maybe I picked the wrong one.

G. Comenas:

Factory visitors who had potential “star” quality would be seated in front of a tripod mounted camera, asked to be as still as possible, and told not to blink while the camera was running. … Some of the earliest Screen Tests were those included in Warhol’s film The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys. … More than 500 Screen Tests were made. In addition to The 13 Most Beautiful Boys, some of the footage was incorporated into other compilation reels such as The 13 Most Beautiful Women (1964) and 50 Fantastics and 50 Personalities (1964).

LA Times:

Each test lasted as long as a single 100-foot roll of film. Each was shot at 24 frames per second and projected at two-thirds of that speed, a trick Warhol often used. Each took a little less than three minutes to film, and takes a little more than four to watch. The slow-motion effect adds a discernible flicker, heightens every movement and contributes to the dreamy, ghostly quality.

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