{"id":17657,"date":"2025-06-29T22:00:03","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T02:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=17657"},"modified":"2025-06-29T21:52:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T01:52:00","slug":"shorts-watched-may-june-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/17657","title":{"rendered":"Shorts watched May\/June 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naked Blue<\/em> (2022, Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not actually naked, but wearing a blue skeleton suit, a girl is hanging around a studio, then the smoke machine turns on and she dances for a camera, but not ours, which seems more of a low-fi behind-the-scenes angle, giving the sense of a backstage parent filming their kid’s motion capture performance for a video game or music video. No sync sound, big classical music slapped on top of it – oh, now I see the music is the whole point of this, it’s a new piece by Devont\u00e9 Hynes. The dancing girl is the daughter of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Louis Garrel.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

–
\nFive Days Till Tomorrow<\/em> (2022, Lewis Klahr)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Klahr does more of his thing, this time to a minimalist piano piece. There are recurring characters but I couldn’t come up with a story except maybe “Luchador at the World’s Fair is haunted by circular objects.” I like how he uses cut-out characters with missing edges or word-bubble fragments, character art perfection not being the goal, also dig the subliminal flash-frame edits.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\nOm<\/em> (1986, John Smith)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This guy again. Really good gag short, a misty monk turns out to be a barber’s cig-smoking customer, his tape-looped infinite om doubling as the sound of the electric razor.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\nAtman<\/em> (1975, Toshio Matsumoto)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the Funeral Parade of Roses<\/a><\/em> director pulling out some Takashi Ito moves, spinning around a seated demon in a breezy outdoor space, the camera moving and zooming at every speed from freeze-frame to freak-out. Pretty nice weirdo-loop music by Yoko Ono’s first husband.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\nRelation<\/em> (1982, Toshio Matsumoto)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another short from the long gap between Funeral Parade<\/em> and Dogra Magra<\/a><\/em>. Early 80s video art that actually holds up. Starts with an ocean scene split-screen at the horizon line, with the sky in fast-motion over a slow sea, then adds more frame splits and pictures-in-pictures after replacing the clouds with a left-to-right scrolling graphic finger, making the ocean look like a claw-machine of the gods.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\nHow to Conduct a Love Affair<\/em> (2007, David Gatten)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Crossfaded shots of (perhaps) large wrinkly paper sheets with charcoal drawings hanging under a slight breeze. Then bottles and hands, a bit of a nice green color after I’d thought it was a black and white movie. Opens with still text about patience in love affairs, ends with crossfaded sentences on black about colors and waiting, all silent.<\/p>\n

–
\nSwain<\/em> (1950, Gregory Markopoulos)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Young man is freaking out at the zoo so he goes to the sculpture park instead and has a nice wholesome time. He moves on to the botanical garden, but he’s being chased by a bride. Pretty sweet despite the quality of my copy – don’t suppose I’ll ever have the chance to see this properly. The Maya Deren vibes are pretty strong. Silent, so I played the first three tracks of Def Jux Presents volume 1<\/em>, as the director no doubt intended. What ever happened to Cannibal Ox… oh wow, their third album came out this year and nobody liked it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\nBliss<\/em> (1967, Gregory Markopoulos)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vacation slides cut into vertical strips and visually jukeboxed together, flashing and overlaying, then joined by burning icons. I turned off RJD2 because this one has brief barnyard sounds over black halfway through, but then it’s back to silent church strobing for the second half.<\/p>\n

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\nDance Chromatic<\/em> (1959, Ed Emshwiller)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ed edits a dancer in time and space across the screen, turning her into a graphic element, then does motion paintings in response to her moves. Very cool, somebody get Norman McLaren on the phone. Clangy percussion score.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\nThe Bones<\/em> (2021, Coci\u00f1a & Le\u00f3n)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh hell yeah. It’s got the house-destruction and wall-paint-creep from Wolf House<\/a><\/em> and the walking-in-place trick from the PJ Harvey video<\/a>, but the focus this time is stop-motion puppets. A girl unearths a pile of bones, reverse-burns them into a jumble of fleshy body parts, then Mr. Potato-Heads them in various configurations, marries them to each other, and disappears. Presented as if it were a reconstructed film from 1901, but even if so, there was no need to distress the soundtrack (increasingly disturbed piano music) since they didn’t have audiotape in 1901. Also, having just watched Leaves from Satan’s Book<\/a><\/em> (1921), I can vouch that movies back then were not as satanic as this one.<\/p>\n

Zero Kama in the studio:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

–
\nConversations of Donkey and Rabbit<\/em> (2020, Ildik\u00f3 Enyedi)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Are there really 20+ of these? I don’t think so. Long distance conversation: Rabbit has been reading Plato and is excited about birds and flowers, Donkey casually disagrees with her about how trees work. Nicely staged and photographed, very pandemic-feeling.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Naked Blue (2022, Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie) Not actually naked, but wearing a blue skeleton suit, a girl is hanging around a studio, then the smoke machine turns on and she dances for a camera, but not ours, which seems more of a low-fi behind-the-scenes angle, giving the sense of a backstage parent filming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2072,3406,3405,2898,3370,2068,2056,21,590,2274],"class_list":["post-17657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-david-gatten","tag-ed-emshwiller","tag-gregory-markopoulos","tag-ildiko-enyedi","tag-john-smith","tag-lewis-klahr","tag-mati-diop","tag-shorts","tag-stop-motion","tag-toshio-matsumoto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17685,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17657\/revisions\/17685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}