by ·Comments Off on Me & Shocktober Shorts 2024

Me (2024, Don Hertzfeldt)

A Don Hertzfeldt dystopian jukebox musical? This made my heartbeat shift in a weird way. I’m going to try to stop thinking about it for the rest of the night, will revisit at a later date.

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GUO4 (2019, Peter Strickland)

Montage of still photographs set to (good) pounding noise music. Nude male locker room wrestling? Filmed after In Fabric, a time when he was clearly going through some things.

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Notes on Monstropedia (2017, Koji Yamamura)

I think it’s Edward Gorey with some Adult Swim thrown in, and inexplicable harpsichord music – either the combo isn’t working or the translation is off or it’s just not clever enough. A lesser work from the Mt. Head / Country Doctor animator.

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The Curse of Dracular (2023, Jack Paterson)

Cute claymation retelling of the British Dracula movies as written by the director’s dad when he was nine. Worth it for the ending, when a five year-old says “don’t like you” and kills Dracular easily.

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The Tell-Tale Heart (2008, Robert Eggers)

Ornate live-action movie with stop-motion tendencies, maybe Quay-inspired, and the rich old man played by a muppet. This movie loves clocks, and it’s right, clocks are cool. Shocking to hear spoken dialogue for the first time three-quarters through the film. The actual heartbeat part is very short, this guy is driven mad pretty easily. What is this “inspired by” credit when it’s a straight adaptation?

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The Events at Mr. Yamamoto’s Alpine Residence (2015, Tilman Singer)

In a similar secluded fancy euro-house to the Cuckoo home, tennis girl opens a package unleashing a self-expanding white balloon that consumes everything. Everything I watch this weekend reminds me of The Prisoner. I don’t know that this was “any good” or “made sense” but it is fun to make and watch movies.

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The House of the Plague (1979, Zlatko Pavlinic)

The plague is personified as a purple-eyed woman in mummy bandages. This is animation in a loose sense, drawings cross-faded. A woman coming home into town gets blackmailed into bringing the plague along. The plague-process images are cool but the movie’s main stylistic triumph is the rhyming (in Croatian) roboticized narrator.

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Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (2023, Tomonari Nishikawa)

I’m glad this rhythmically edited montage of fireworks with a garbage soundtrack brought joy to the avant-garde cinephiles last year. Fireworks are cool, it’s true.

by ·Comments Off on Tomonari Nishikawa, Watching the Detectives, other shorts

Watching the Detectives (2017, Chris Kennedy)

Silent and over a half hour long, so I played Zero Kama’s The Secret Eye of L.A.Y.L.A.H., as the director undoubtedly would’ve intended if he could’ve afforded the rights. The day or so after the Boston Marathon bombing, represented mostly through screenshots from reddit: marked-up surveillance photos and a long-distance attempt at forensic investigation by the chatmob. At least I liked that the text was against a gentle wash of dark static instead of plain digital black. Last ten minutes is just reporting news with no new redditting.

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Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox (2020, Kevin Lee)

Lee’s always in my feed championing essay film, so checking out one of his… it’s short and lo-fi. He parks outside the liquor store that used to be the movie theater where he saw Platoon as a kid, recalling that experience while shooting parking lots and brick walls. The credits shout out the director of The Viewing Booth, which I watched last night.

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Green Ash (2019, Pablo Mazzolo)

A landscape turned into blobby light, like peering through fluttering almost-closed eyelids. Ordinary shot of a bush, but the foreground and background bushes jitter and blur independently. Light starts going crazy across grassy fields, a tricky version of Nishikawa’s Tokyo-Ebisu effect, making it feel like this is lo-fi natural footage, but simultaneously taking place in a glitching holodeck. The lush green Argentinian fields with the hand-drawn map at the end gave me La Flor flashbacks. I played Yazz Ahmed’s “Barbara” since the timing matched, very nice.

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I Am Micro (2010, Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia)

Narration by a film artist who dreamed of being Godard or Pasolini before everything went commercial and became “scattered,” the camera roving the grounds of an abandoned studio.

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Five by Tomonari Nishikawa – all quotes are by the director, from his website.

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Tokyo-Ebisu (2010)

Scenes of a noisy train station, frames within the frames showing different actions, sometimes like a shot has been divided into a semi-grid and each segment is playing a different moment in time. Shot on film, which seems excessively difficult, since he says they’re “in-camera visual effects,” so what, mirrors? Exposing partial sections of the film then running it back?

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45 7 Broadway (2013)

Times Square, and this time it’s the full frame overlapping with a time-shifted version of itself, but each source has been processed as red, green or blue, appearing to be a 3D effect gone horribly wrong, or a broken RGB projector during an earthquake, quite wonderful.

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Manhattan One Two Three Four (2014)

Quick swish pans up, down, and across city buildings, rapidly cut together (“all edited in-camera”), no sound.

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Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars (2015)

Crackling hum, and a very scratched mothlighting blue-dyed image, the sprocket holes often visible. This one is political, the film image resulting from being buried in radioactive soil the government said was safe.

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Amusement Ride (2019)

Tracking across the metal skeleton of a Japanese ferris wheel, never looking out at the typical views, the camera panning up a bit at a time, “which resembles the movement of a film at the gate of a film projector or camera.”