{"id":18936,"date":"2026-08-19T20:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T00:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=18936"},"modified":"2026-08-16T12:29:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T16:29:08","slug":"shorts-month-2026-b-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/18936","title":{"rendered":"Shorts Month 2026: B (I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Box<\/em> (1979, Beth B & Scott B)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kidnapper\/torturer Lydia Lunch wants “to cure you, to free you from error.” Man leaves his hot girl and crappy apartment for a sec, gets kidnapped off the sidewalk. Lydia keeps threatening him with the black box, then throws him inside. It’s a small room where you have to listen to Beth B’s music while someone flicks the lights on and off, so, exactly what the viewer of this film is going through. Just a few shots, real talky, with dialogue that feels improvised except for the Doctor’s and Lydia’s big speeches, not so much an actual movie as Decoder<\/a><\/em> was.<\/p>\n

The last thing you see before going into the black box:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

–
\nI-94<\/em> (1974, Bette Gordon & James Benning)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Flicker film, strobing between a woman walking away from camera and a man walking towards, with a man’s and a woman’s voice talking about the way they’re seen by other people, the tapes running at the same time but each voice distinct so you can focus on one person’s story or the other (but not both). Among the earliest work by either director.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

–
\n69 (1969, Robert Breer)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thin-lined geometric shapes swing through white 3D space, then flicker fill colors are added, until the whole thing goes bonkers in the last minute.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

–
\n70 (1970, Robert Breer)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Escalation of 69, the color-flicker shapes are still swinging through space, with added sprays and blobs, and less chaos.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

–
\nFuji<\/em> (1974, Robert Breer)<\/strong><\/p>\n

My favorite of his, conceptually. A few shots of a train ride past Mt. Fuji have been traced and re-traced, rotoscoped with different treatments, until the mountain becomes a vague spray pattern, a triangle, a line, all rapidly and entertainingly shuffled together.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

–
\nNow You Tell One<\/em> (1926, Charley Bowers)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Very good Bowers stop-motion adventure (he has a magic potion that can make anything grow, such as shoelaces, or a tree full of cats) wrapped in a needless backstory (he tells his tale at the local Liars Club and they give him a medal) with a good punchline (“sir I’m in love with your daughter” \/ “you idiot, that’s my wife”).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

–
\nA Visit from the Incubus<\/em> (2001, Anna Biller)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Great theme song, explaining the Incubus tale. The rest of the songs don’t measure up, but the colors and costumes are top notch, and she gets real mileage out of having modern actors act like they’re in a 1950s technicolor musical western. Her long-awaited follow-up to The Love Witch<\/a><\/em> should be coming any month now.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

–
\nMatin’s Breakfast<\/em> (1974, Patrick Bokanowski)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most interesting bits are when an actor appears to have been graphicized, or he’s running through a composited picturebook scene. But sometimes I wonder if they didn’t film the titular breakfast scene (chaos in a kitchen) and it wasn’t working, so they turned the footage into a slow-mo\/freeze-frame avant-Begotten<\/em> art film.<\/p>\n

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

Black Box (1979, Beth B & Scott B) Kidnapper\/torturer Lydia Lunch wants “to cure you, to free you from error.” Man leaves his hot girl and crappy apartment for a sec, gets kidnapped off the sidewalk. Lydia keeps threatening him with the black box, then throws him inside. It’s a small room where you have […]<\/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":[74,3411,831,1420,1860,1195,2988,2798,840,21,590],"class_list":["post-18936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-avant-garde","tag-bette-gordon","tag-charley-bowers","tag-demons","tag-james-benning","tag-kidnapping","tag-lydia-lunch","tag-patrick-bokanowski","tag-robert-breer","tag-shorts","tag-stop-motion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18936","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=18936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18955,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18936\/revisions\/18955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}