Antoine and Colette

directed by Francois Truffaut
1962
30 minutes

Antoine et Colette is the second of five films Francois Truffaut made about Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical and perpetually hapless character played by Jean Pierre Leaud. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who's seen all five films and wouldn't name The 400 Blows as their favorite by a mile, but Antoine et Colette -- the only short in the bunch -- gets its fair share of love too. As Kylos mentioned, the film was originally included as a part of the 1962 omnibus film Love at Twenty, but Criterion recently extracted Truffaut's segment and released it as a stand-alone piece in their Adventures of Antoine Doinel box set. That's how I first came across it, and I still haven't seen the rest of Love at Twenty. I think this goes to show the peculiar way in which context is at once seen as integral and dispensable with an omnibus film: Love at Twenty as a whole seems to be about the message we get when putting all these separate shorts together, but the segments are each able to have lives of their own outside the film and be perhaps even more popular out of context.

Antoine and Colette gives Truffaut fans the ultimate wish fulfillment -- wouldn't we all love the opportunity to glimpse into the lives of the characters from our favorite films a few years after they are where we've left them when the credits rolled? The short comes three years after the tremendous international success of The 400 Blows, which was Truffaut's debut feature. That film has a huge emotional impact on me whenever I watch it, and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. The ending is iconic for its ambiguity; after the film takes us on such an emotional journey, we don't even get unequivocal proof in the end that Antoine is going to be "OK." The whole purpose of Antoine and Colette (and continuing on the Antoine character in general) seems to be Truffaut's way of telling us (and perhaps himself) that we don't need to worry, Antoine's life will continue on in its same haphazard way, and he will always be able to make it through whatever situation he finds himself in. I'm reminded of a quote from Felini that has always stuck with me, about the titular character in his film Nights of Cabiria, "This film doesn't have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene in which the story reaches a conclusion so definitive that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since." Antoine and Colette seems to be Truffaut's way of telling us not to worry about Antoine.

Of the Antoine Doinel films I've seen, I would rank this one just behind The 400 Blows. What I like about it is that it there is no narrative gimmick of any kind, it's just a slice of Antoine's life at age 17. Truffaut has admitted that the later films were just excuses for him to work with Leaud again and to continue to character on. As a result, some of the features rely on some pretty unnecessary plot contrivances. In Stolen Kisses, Antoine tries his hand at being a detective. In Bed and Board, he works for a Japanese businessman and attempts to woo his daughter. They're good films, though I don't like them as much as Antoine and Colette, and I think their length has something to do with it. I'm not sure that Truffaut would be able to make a feature out of the plot of this short. It's so much a slice of life, a fleeting glimpse into the day-to-day of Antoine as a young adult. Aside from his ill-fated romance with Colette, the film is much more about creating an overall atmosphere than focusing on a gripping plot. Since it's hard to sustain a the slice-of-life atmosphere over a 90 minute feature, the latter three films in the series don't have the same effect as this short. For this reason, perhaps the series as a whole would have been stronger if Truffaut had kept the last four films as shorts rather than features. All we really want is a glimpse into Antoine's life to know that he's staying out of trouble (though that's rarely the case with him), and that is all Antoine and Colette grants us.

SABOTAGE

Sabotage, dir. Spike Jonze, 1994, approx. 3 minutes.









In choosing a short to review as a quintessential, I knew I wanted to return to one of my favorite units of the course: music videos. With the exception of certain TV commercials that could arguably fulfill the criteria of short film (IKEA comes to mind), music videos were my first exposure to shorts. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of watching the video for Nine Inch Nails “The Perfect Drug” and being terrified out of my 8-year-old mind.

My memories of Spike Jonze’s video for “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys are certainly more pleasant, which is why I chose to comment on Liz’s posting. As she describes, the video plays with the 1970s TV cop drama by parodying its moustaches, car chases, and melodrama. In this way, “Sabotage” is a particularly interesting case study: it’s a short film, but it’s a short film about television that also happens to be set to music. Jonze makes an effort to blend these three elements and achieves an equilibrium that makes “Sabotage” both brilliant and hilarious.

Stylistically, it is not immediately obvious that despite its faux-credits, “Sabotage” is not an actual television show a la Starsky and Hutch. As Liz mentions, the shots are typical of the genre, focusing on close-ups of sirens, hubcaps, and aviator glasses, all filmed on a handheld that makes the chase sequences reminiscent of an episode of Cops; the viewer feels like they are struggling to keep up with the band member’s exploits as their trigger-happy cop alter-egos. Thus, can “Sabotage” still be considered a short film if it’s so closely aligned with the conventions of television, and in addition, is produced for TV exhibition?

I would argue yes. One of the major debates of this course was whether or not intent and exhibition can alter the classification of a video as short film, television, or commercial. The Twilight Zone, though at first glance could be described as a series of short films, is still formatted for television; in contrast, most students gave a promotional video for Naomi Klein’s new book the privilege of being considered a short, due in large part to the fact that it was directed by Alfonso Cuaron. I don't think that it's constructive to use directors and style to classify a work, but rather the intent of its producers. So, even though "Sabotage" looks, feels, and behaves like an episode of a 70s cop drama on speed, the intent of both the artists and Spike Jonze was to create a music video that functions in the same manner as his other, equally groundbreaking videos.

All Is Full Of Love

All Is Full Of Love

Directed by Chris Cunningham

USA 1999 (4 minutes)

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjAoBKagWQA

Bjork's visual art has always been just as interesting as her music. Throughout her solo career she has teamed up with some of the more acclaimed music video directors of the time (Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham among others) to deliver arresting short form cinematic expressions like this one. In Jihyun's original posting on this video she stated, "I do not really understand what relationship her music videos have with her song lyrics." I think that's a reasonable reaction, as there often isn't very much explicit thematic or narrative correlation between the two. Instead, I think she's more concerned with creating a mood and visual aesthetic that compliments the music. In such design, she often returns to a common theme regarding the marriage of technology and nature.

In the case of this particular short, Jihyun was apt to discuss the techniques used to create the video as Bjork's visual media work remains some of the most innovative in the industry. It remains difficult to separate the thematic content of the videos from their production. Here, we see Bjork herself being constructed in a sterile industrial facility in the form of an android. The film concerns itself with the sensuality of the human form within the context of a purely mechanical environment. The parallel can be clearly seen in her music as well. Her song writing frequently incorporates Earthy imagery and sexual or anatomical content, while her arrangements and functional music-making have become increasingly digital over the years (with the stark exception of Medulla, a nearly 100% vocal album). Personally, this balance proves refreshing and particularly compelling, in a time where much of the world feels divided between a sort of technological paranoia and environmentally-ignorant industrial mindset.

It stands to be determined exactly how these videos function within the wide realm of short films as a whole. I believe the very basis of this interplay between technology and nature drives the meaning of her videos. They exist as singular non-narrative expressions lauded for their visual inventiveness, supported by her similarly inventive song writing. Given the wide distribution of music videos as a predominantly advertising-focused format, Bjork's shorts probably have the greatest influence as examples of filmmaking innovation. There seem to be two distinct design schools in her work: a hyper-stylized "analog" form, and a sleek sterile digital form. The former, exemplified best by Michel Gondry's work, showcases a nature-rooted in-camera display of visual inventiveness (as seen in "Bachelorette" and "Army of Me"). The latter form often features Bjork herself subject to a variety of cutting-edge digital effects manipulation (such as "Hunter" where she morphs into a polar bear, and "Hidden Place" where a mystical amoebic ooze enters parts of her head).

Even within these two schools of thought that thematic dichotomy remains evident. However, she broke even another barrier recently with her video for "Wanderlust", one of the first internet-based 3D digital stereoscopic film productions. Viewing the movie in its proper 3D required acquisition of anaglyph glasses, or for the viewer to go to a designated music store where viewing stations were set-up upon release of the single. Sure to prove a landmark short once 3D has become a common and familiar format both in movie theaters and in the home, "Wanderlust" signals yet another breakthrough filmmaking experiment and perhaps the perfect amalgamation of modern technology and natural "analog" imagery.

For those interested, I'm going to post links to all the videos I referenced here, because I think they're all worth exploring to really identify this concept I've addressed.

Bachelorette

Army of Me

Hunter

Hidden Place

Wanderlust (just the 2D version, but you can find the 3D take with little effort)

There's Only One Sun

There's Only One Sun | Wong Kar-Wai
by YforYerom
There's Only One Sun

Directed by Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, 2007

Approx. 10 minutes

Source: Dailymotion.com

The most interesting thing about this short is its intent and means of distribution. Last year, the Philips electronics corporation planned to unveil an exciting new product for the home theater market. Called the Aurora, the product was a new high-definition television set with an interesting new feature. Philips' groundbreaking "ambilight" technology would read the colors at the frame's edge of whatever media is currently being played on the screen, and then project a light of matching color from behind the television set onto the walls and room surrounding it. The idea was to create a more immersive viewing experience, by expanding the presence of the material on screen into the greater space of the home. It's pretty cool stuff, and Philips was burdened with the task of adequately translating the appeal of this new feature through marketing.

This is where Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai steps into the picture. At the time, Wong's last film was a dark and beautiful romantic sequel to his critically acclaimed 60s period piece, In The Mood For Love (2001). The new film, entitled 2046, was also predominantly set in 1960s Hong Kong, but a large subplot of the film concerned itself with a strange futuristic fantasy story illustrating the writings of the film's main character.  For those unfamiliar, Wong Kar-Wai (WKW from now on) has a propensity for creating intoxicatingly rich, dreamlike, sensual moving images in his films that compliment his improvisational production techniques as well as his usual themes of unfulfilled love, memory, and chance. So, having just released 2046 to critical acclaim and an admirable commercial success, Philips approached WKW to make an original short film in the style of his last feature to demonstrate the qualities of their new product.

The result is the film you can view above, a fantastically colorful and sexy piece, that virtually oozes WKW's signature dream-like atmosphere. Unfortunately, you can no longer view the film in the entirely unique manner in which Philips originally devised. The picture was released exclusively on the net, on a site devoted specifically to the launch of the new product. What made the project a unique success was a virtual simulation of the Aurora television itself, complete with simulated ambilight technology to demonstrate the practical functionality of the device. There's Only One Sun streamed on the website within its virtual television set, and as the extravagantly colorful scenes unfolded viewers could see the lighting render in real time. How better to demonstrate a new screening feature than to show it to the people? And how better to show it to as many people as possible than through the internet?

What's also fascinating is the lengthy pre-marketing-marketing that gradually build interest and hype for the reveal of the product and WKW's short film itself. Various stages of the website came online in the months leading up to the unveiling, featuring cryptic clues and savvy advertising lingo to get people excited. I believe at one point there was a sort of newsletter/fan-club section where members could access exclusive images from the film and other behind-the-scenes things like that (I can't say for sure what the exact sequence of pre-advertising consisted of since most of the website have long since closed down). On some date closer to the launch of the film, they even released a teaser trailer for the short featuring about 30 seconds of footage. The whole affair played out like a legitimate Hollywood pre-release strategy, though the entire thing unleashed online and for a short film.

lt's worth looking at the film itself a bit more closely as well, considering how it ties directly into the marketing theory of the whole ordeal. WKW has pretty openly embraced advertising within his feature films (His second film, Days of Being Wild, opens with Leslie Cheung buying a Coke, Fallen Angels sets a pivotal scene inside a McDonalds, and WKW even made one of those fun BMW "The Hire" shorts also made for the net) as well as worldly pop music and an ideology fully supportive of a capitalist Hong Kong. As such, it's not surprising that the Aurora television set itself plays a key role in the film it's advertising. The protagonist, having infiltrated the trust of a criminal mastermind in order to kill him, arrives at a strange organic-looking hallway bathed in light, the source of which being the Aurora. She muses on the power of the screen to sustain the life of memories indefinitely while they fade and die outside. WKW imbues the medium and technology itself with a sort of mystical appeal and value, the Philips product being a relevant and associatively forward-thinking construct of that power. The female spy missing "Light", her target and (this being a WKW film after all) love, presses her body up against the screen associating its warmth with that of her lost lover. If that doesn't sell a TV, I don't know what will.

Ultimately, I can't help but admire this short (being a devoted WKW fanatic) and its ingenious marketing plot (being... a savvy consumer?). There's one point where I realize I'm looking at a television set in a film... that's being shown within a virtual simulation of that same television set... that I'm then viewing on my computer monitor... that I sure as hell wish were a Philips Aurora television set, because those things are frickin' sexy!

Alice

Directed by Jan Svankmajer
TRT: 6:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5wHMgTPF-s
Source: YouTube

Winner of the Australian-Asia Literary Award, Svankmayer's Alice is a haunting, surrealist tale of a little girl who loses herself in a fantastic daydream. The short is obviously a creative spin-off of the Alice in Wonderland tale except Svankmajer sets out to have fun with it by playing with stop-motion animation.

The Czech filmmaker has an international reputation for his stop-motion animation shorts, which include among others Jabberwocky, The Male Game, and Down to the Cellar. A common thread through all of these films which is signature for Svankmayer is using stop-motion to create a visceral, unnerving feel for any type of cinematic enviornment.

In Alice viewers may find it shocking at first to see a stuffed rabbit come to life and break free from its model cage. As this is happening, we directly connect with the little girl, Alice, who is frightened and yet interested to see what the rabbit will do next. The story itself of course requires you to suspend disbelief and allow yourelf to become absorbed in the world and imagination of this girl.

One of Svankmajer's most succcessful techniques at achieving this is through the sound design. In a certain sense, the sound design is ironic in nature because it doesn't rely on music or artificial sound. Instead it attempts to be faithful to what's happening on the screen by maintaining a diegetic sound design. The film starts off with Alice throwing rocks into a cup of coffee with the sound of the splash being the only noise in the room. This places us inside the basement with Alice and means we will be hearing and seeing exactly what she is through a subjective lens. We emotionally connect with this girl like we would with Ofelia from Pan's Labyrinth for instance.

The layering of the sound is also consistent with the intended surrealistic goal of the film. Each action of either the rabbit or the character is represented by a sound. The sound drives the narrative in this sense. For example, as the rabbit begins putting on clothes we hear the sound of his mechanical arms clanking and even the subtle friction sound of the clothes rubbing up against its fur.

In Svankmajer's The Male Game we are immersed into a world which the most important thing in the world happens to be what also is on television: a soccer match. With Alice, Svankmayer intends to achieve a similar atmosphere of an enclosed environment by cutting us off from the rest of the world. Whether or not you like Alice, there's no denying the power of its relentless concept of imagination through the imagination of one girl.

Concert of Wishes

Concert of Wishes

Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski 

Poland, 1967  - approx. 16 minutes

Found on "Bleu" DVD (Miramax)

Krzysztof Kieslowski made a name for himself on the international market in 1991 with the release of The Double Life of Veronique, and would mark the end of his career with an emotionally epic trilogy of films themed after the three colors of the French flag (Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge respectively).  Each film was at least marginally focused on exploring the very virtues represented by those three colors; liberty for blue, equality for white, and fraternity for red.  Together, thanks to remarkable artistic work from Kieslowski and his collaborators, these three films capture what might be one of the broadest palates of human qualities and philosophies within a single cinematic project.  Many fans and critics quote the Three Colors trilogy as the pinnacle of the director's career,  thus it's fitting that Miramax chose this collection to offer up a sampling of Kieslowski's earliest work within the medium.  Through these student films one can see the seed of what would come to be, the beginning and the end together in one place.  Kieslowski himself would probably appreciate the metaphysical implications of how that sounds.

Concert of Wishes, made in 1967, is his third or fourth student film.  It follows a young couple who leave a wooded lake area (a popular recreational spot it seems) on a motorcycle.  It's somewhat unclear, but I gathered they were on their way to a concert or festival of some sort, since they spend an amount of time examining a tent and supplies.  The woman also comments on a busload of students resting at the lake, to the point of "Looks like they're going too."  Where are all these people going exactly?  I'm not sure, and I can't say it really matters all that much.  Kieslowski's attitude towards narrative remains anything but conventional.  Disinterested in telling clear-cut stories or developing plots, he choses to focus more on universal ideas via examination of intimate human moments.  Here, the young couple loses their tent along the road, and is found by the older yet decidedly less mature driver of the bus.  The woman makes up an obviously false excuse to go back to find it, and when they return, the driver offers to return the tent if the woman is given to ride along in the bus.  At first she accepts, but her boyfriend reject the offer, gives the driver his tent and leaves with his girlfriend.

Again, there's a question to be answered.  What does it all mean?  To be honest, I really don't know.  There's a clear sexual theme at work for one thing.  In the beginning of the film one of the students shyly watches the couple by the lake, fascinated by woman as she parts her hair. Later this same student mentions the tent immediately upon the couple's return and receives a good bullying for nearly spoiling the prank.  The large group of seemingly more masculine and physically adept students (under the leadership of their not-so-great role model teacher/driver) objectifies this woman in their barter, assigning her a purely sexual worth.  However, we can determine through his actions that this first young man sees her for her deeper value, and is cast as the outsider for it (No surprise that he wears the thickest glasses of the group, eh?)  

There's some  generational/age theme that remains incredibly pervasive, though, and I can't seem to shake it.  First, we have this driver, clearly older than any of his pose and the traveling couple, who comes off less mature than any character in the film.  In fact he freely distributes alcoholic beverages to each of his students, indulging himself even while driving.  Secondly, when the couple first realizes they've lost their tent, they stop among a large group of young children.  At first the man suggests his girlfriend stay there until he returns, but the camera studies the faces of these children with a chilly distain, suggesting something just isn't quite right here.  The man senses this too, and then decides they should go back for the tent together.  What is it with these groups of young people?  Can they never be trusted?  Are the young adult students the same as the pre-teen kids?  Likewise, is the grown man one in the same with the children?  Knowing Kieslowski they very well might all be the same, going back to his affinity for metaphysics.  This is expanded by a short scene where the couple passes an elderly man in a car, the man on the motorcycle making some remark as to how they (meaning the older generation) are inexperienced or immature drivers.  Is that really a cause for concern in 1967?  Didn't think so, but sure enough the camera captures the man swerving dangerously on and off the curb.

As I've said, I won't pretend to understand  this picture.  But it's interesting to note the early footprints here of familiar thematic and cinematic motifs that would survive his 30+ year career in filmmaking.  Perhaps what's most satisfying about this early piece is the already spectacular visual sense at work.  In another fitting correlation with the Three Colors trilogy, (which uses their respective colors quite prominently and deliberately in the art and cinematography of those films, the distinct contrasts between reds and blues and greens an important expressive function) this short demonstrates a keen awareness of the black and white dynamic in frame.  Most strikingly we close with a pair of shots; one of a boy on a bicycle walking a cow, the animal's swaths of pure black and pure white coexisting but never blending, the other shot of the man's helmet divided white on top and black on the bottom.  Is there significance here?  Again, I couldn't say, but the filmmaker's awareness of those sorts of designs is clearly present, and would become increasingly more prevalent in his future.

FOUTAISES

Foutaises (Things I like, Things I Hate)
Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France, 1989, 6:53min.
Source: YouTube

For those of you, who like me, can’t stand yet another rendition of “My Favorite Things” and are already dreading the holiday season because you know soon you’ll be unwillingly humming the song here is Jeunet’s first version of “Things I like, Things I Hate” which doesn’t have the same sugar coated, Splenda excess of the Sound of Music lyrics. I’ll just say that Maria would never sing about peeing in the shower.



The plot is simple, a list of likes and hates; but the opening credits are what set forth the list. They are presented by replacing the prices in a butcher’s window with the titles and names for the production crew. They fade to black and we hear a man (Dominique Pinon) say “I hate butcher’s shop windows!” from there he goes on to list things that to us are insignificancies.

Usually, I try not to pay much attention to how film titles and their dialogue has been translated into English. But, I find it necessary to get into semantics with Foutaises, just because I believe it adds to the film itself. The English title of the short “Things I like, Things I Hate” is just fine; it literally tells us what the film is. But Foutaises can also be translated as rubbish or if you feel like doing the whole French-to-Spanish-to-English you arrive at insignificancies. To me, knowing that the film is about insignificancies adds to the film’s subtext. How else would you classify the fact that Pinon enjoys the words like “trans-europ-express, trans-orient-express, trans-siberian-express,” or how he hates leaving one lonely pea on his plate. They are really insignificant to us, even to him, but pointing them out gives them significance. It helps us come to terms with our own capricious likes and dislikes.

What helps in liking Pinon’s list is the slightly sarcastic tone that Jeunet inscribed to the film that and the thousand ways Pinon can contort his face (you might also remember his face from some film about some Amélie girl). Pinon has a grumpy guy type face which makes him seem sarcastic at time. But it is Jeunet’s visual style that adds those layers of sarcasm that make you chuckle and agree to yourself with some of the things in the film. The best example is when he says he likes the innocence of kids, just to reveal a girl bouncing a ball in wall with the graffiti of a penis but is not until later when Pinon admits to liking street graffiti. The film is also very graphic in very literal way, Jeunet makes a great use of illustration but he also shows literal actions. The literal actions and the editing makes the audience react and almost feel the pain, especially, when he pluck his nose hair on camera.

Jeunet likes fantastic cinema and Foutaises is the first film where he started to play with it. He later used the same technique of close-ups and things your like to introduce the characters in Amélie. But Jeunet’s choice to mix film with animation, illustration, newsreel, and the piano soundtrack add up to an almost palpable experience. I would aregue that his list of the likes and hates feel far more real than “My favorite things”. This is partly because Pinon’s narration is filled with pauses and it feels more like things he thought of over time and were edited later. Jeunet made an excellent mix of the fantastic and the realistic, with just enough not so insignificant lines to leaving thinking about what you watched and makes this quirky little short actually significant.

“I hate to think we sleep a third of our life, but I like to think that after death can't be worse than before birth."

AT LAND

directed by Maya Deren, 1944
approximately 15 minutes



I was happy to see Pamela's post earlier this week on Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon." On a blog about short films, we'd be remiss not to mention Deren. She's an undeniable master of the form, and a filmmaker linked pretty much inextricably with it since she never made a feature in her career. Deren was at home in the short. For her, it was an inherent escape from the feature's expected conventions; it was an avenue for making daring, inexpensive and uncommonly personal works of art.

"At Land" is my favorite of Deren's shorts. The plot is as follows: a woman (Deren, who cast herself in many of her films) seems to have washed up on the beach. She explores her surroundings, climbs up a large rock and finds that it leads to a long dinner table at a stuffy party. She crawls across the table on all fours, finds a chess board at the end and, as one of the white pieces falls down into a pool of water, she begins to follow it. She takes a walk with some men, and one of them leads her to a house where a man is on his deathbed. Then, she walks through a door and finds herself back on the beach, where she spies two women playing chess by the water. She joins them, distracts them by playfully stroking their hair, and then when they're off guard, she grabs a white chess piece from their board. But we soon find that it was not "her," but one version of her; the rest of the Mayas look on as the one with the chess piece gleefully runs towards the horizon.

It's hard to reduce a film like this to its plot when there's so much more to it. Deren was trained as a dancer, and her eye for rhythm certainly plays a part in her unique editing style. There is something hypnotic about movement in her films; it is often exaggerated and strangely graceful, like her climb across the table or her exploration through a maze of door's in the dying man's house. Many consider her shorts a kind of visual poetry, and this unique attention to movement certainly heightens that sense. Her films were often dubbed "trance films," another experimental sub-genre that seems better fit to shorts than features. One can imagine a trance lasting 90 minutes might, in some cases at least, become a bit tedious. I like "At Land" because of the freedom it allows the viewer. Even moreso than "Meshes of the Afternoon," the symbols in the film evade a hard and fast meaning. You are able to read your own ideas into the film without Deren forcing you to echo her ideas completely.

Deren's biography is fascinating: born in the Ukraine, came to America to study, got swept up in socialism, toured the country with the Dunham dance company, met and married photographer Alexander Hammid, made some incredibly influential films, won the first Guggenheim grant for filmmaking, used the money to travel to Haiti, became a high priestess of voodoo, divorced Hammid and married a much younger man, became (allegedly) dependent on amphetamines prescribed by her doctor and was dead of malnutrition at the age of 44. But analyzing Deren's colorful life in this way is about as reductive as analyzing "At Land" simply for its plot. There's a great documentary called In the Mirror of Maya Deren that fills in many of the blanks nicely. A particular high point is a story that Stan Brakhage tells about witnessing Deren, in a supposedly voodoo-induced fit of rage, throw a refrigerator across a room.

The short film's form was a perfect fit for Deren's message. She once said, "I am not greedy; I do not seek to possess the major portion of your days. I am content if, on those rare occasions whose truth can be stated only by poetry, you will, perhaps, recall an image, even only the aura of my films." The bold imagery and uncompromising point of view expressed in Deren's films are impressionable enough that now, almost 60 years after some of them were made, they remain almost impossible to forget.

Ballerina

"Ballerina"

Directed by David Lynch, USA, 2006

Approximately 13 minutes

Source: Inland Empire DVD (2007)

David Lynch has always flirted with the experimental approach to filmmaking in his features; his student films outright exemplify it. In the first half of this decade after completing his masterpiece Mulholland Drive, he finally freed himself from all Hollywood expectations, conventions, values and methodologies when he set out to independently create his 3+ hour surrealist epic (and ode to digital cinematography) Indland Empire. The project began when Lynch started toying around with digital video cameras, having shot a 12 minute monologue by the film's eventual star Laura Dern. Lynch, intoxicated by the (paraphrasing) "beautiful ugliness" inherent in DV, decided he would henceforth film all his future features in digital video. The idea for Inland Empire spun out from that lengthy test monologue, resulting in a heavily improvisational surrealist exploration of the horrors of the human psyche and the trapping of the Hollywood production machine. The movie is a completely experimental picture in the academic term, rejecting narrative coherence completely and blissfully, constructing meaning out of sound and the unique visual palate offered by DV, propelled by Lynch's personal nightmarish thematic montage. The closest the director has come to pure cinema to date.

So, you're probably asking, "What the hell is Ballerina and why are you talking about a 179 minute experimental feature film on our short films blog?" Well, Ballerina, featured on the supplemental material for the film (along with over 100 minutes of additional footage cut from the final picture), would seem to be one of the numerous vignettes, or test concepts Lynch created when shooting what would become Inland Empire. In fact, a 3 or 4 second snippet from Ballerina is cut into a sequence during the climax of the feature, though the meaning of its placement or duration there is up for anyone's interpretation and I wouldn't dare attempt to begin to analyze any part of I.E. in this venue. Ballerina itself, standing at a surprisingly endurable 12 minutes, neither embraces narrative nor rejects it in the same way as its parent film. It merely exists.

This short is little more than a series or seemingly continuous shots of a girl dancing on a dark stage, subject to varying lighting and camera setups. The film begins with its subject entirely out of focus, its shape and performance still intelligible, though the entire film is masked by a morphing grey haze composited with the imagery of the dancer. The shots themselves move from long shots to medium shots at the most intimate, and the subject shifts in and out of focus with little sign of suggestion. The subject is soundless, scored by an haunting yet beautiful string orchestration that becomes increasingly eerie and nightmarish as the film endures. Interestingly, and contributing to the unease of the piece, the music is clearly unrelated to whatever composition the ballerina is dancing to, resulting in a frightening disconnect.

All these techniques existing outside of explicit story or plot serve to create a tangible mood, one that Lynch explores to unfathomable depths in I.E. Here though, as the stimulus of the simple visual and aural collage is given time to take hold, one begins to wonder about the subject anyway, and what the film implies about her. The duration in which the girl is spent out of focus, in silhouette, or completely masked by the ominous grey fog suggest her physical space does not exist in our natural world. She may exist in memory, clouded by time, seeming to move in slow motion as ones dream often do. Perhaps her stage is on a supernatural plane, in the afterlife, as the mood and music might suggest she exists as a spirit. The unchanging content of the film implies the performance was going before we arrived and will surely continue after we leave, suggesting this girl may well be damned to repeat this performance for an eternity, her eyes and complexion faded like that of a corpse. Or most likely, as Lynch is known to explore, this exists is a dream (or equally probable as a nightmare) blurring the lines of what we perceive as real and as imagined.

David Lynch has made a career of examining that line through the cinematic form, and he would appear to have found his preferred medium for doing so. Ballerina and Inland Empire may well be experiments firstmost in the capabilities and qualities of digital video, but he is concurrently breaking new ground in the possibilities of the narrative form and pure cinema. I'd strongly suggest keeping an eye out for his next project, because I feel this work is just a warm-up for a whole new period of Lynchian surrealism.

Meshes of the Afternoon

MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
Dir. Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid, Unites States, 1943, appr. 14min
Source: Maya Deren Experimental Film, DVD 630
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdtpxGzq-Z0&feature=related *

A hand delicately places a flower in the middle of a road; a woman’s shadow walks down and picks up the flower. She continues, catches a glimpse of a man turning further down on the road. The woman walks up some steps, enters a house, a loaf of bread on a table with a knife inserted in it, an unhooked phone on the stairway to the second floor. She walks up the stairs into a room and then down to another where she sits down for nap. The same sequence repeats, but in the following sequences we see: first, the woman (Deren) again but this time we can see her face, second Deren after a black hooded figure, third and fourth a man. At the end the man stands in front of Deren sitting on the chair surrounded by pieces of a broken mirror.

Maya Deren made it clear that her film was not surrealist; she preferred to see her work as a classicist. Others see her work as trance films or poetry films, but regardless of the label her films received she is considered by many the mother of the American Avant Gard cinema. No one, however, will debate the experimental and incongruous nature of Meshes of the Afternoon (MoA). As any other experimental film, MoA has been interpreted in many ways, but many seem to agree that the short introduces us to a woman (Deren) who falls as sleep. What differences MoA from the surrealists is that we see the person having the dream, where in the surrealist films we “are” in the dream. The idea is that we enter the trance-like state with the character and though we don’t have the character’s background, we can recognize the place even as it becomes more and more inconsistent.

In MoA, such inconsistency meshes the viewer in poetic psychodrama in which the heroine goes through a personal quest, which as Deren said is not an event that could be witnessed by other persons. It is here where, arguably, she only uses the process of surrealism and Freudian theory as vehicles to demonstrate ambivalence between actuality and the subconscious. By the end of MoA, we realize that there is a sort of narrative underlying it, that we witnessed a fatal nightmare unravel before us. Arguably, what Deren was trying to convey was the same way that our minds build upon simple events and subconsciously blew them out of proportion.

Deren’s film relays on repetition more so than other experimental films, since its duplication filled with inconsistencies are used to unnerved the audience and achieve the same state as the film’s heroine. For example, after the black hooded figure enters the house and Deren follows her, Deren begins to climb up a wall from which she looks down at herself sleeping on the chair, to then hang down from a window, and back to overlooking her self. Everything leading up to the window sequence is repeated, but once Deren reaches the top, the previously established spatial relation of the room is literally thrown out the window. This also leads to another difference between Deren’s work and the surrealists, and is that the repetitions in the surrealism were meant as metaphors and for Deren it is just a build up. The knife, the key, and the rose just accumulate their venom in each repetition.


*Note: The version in YouTube has been dubbed to “Butterfly Trilogy”, I recommend you turn off the sound when watching it. The original MoA was silent, the score by Ito was added in 1959.

BMW: The Ultimate Campaign Machine

BMW Series: Star
Directed by Guy Richie, USA , 2002, 9 minutes

Star is one of the eight short films that composed the ad campaign called The Hire by BMW (USA) in 2002 (more about this later). The film tells the story of a manager who has decided to get revenge on his employer, the Superstar (played by Madonna), for treating him badly. The manager has hired a driver (played by Clive Owen) for the Superstar to be driven to the venue that she has scheduled for that particular day. Star does fall for the trap that the manager has placed; Madonna (thinking that Clive Owen is one of her many drivers) asks the driver to lose the car carrying her manager and body guards. To this order, Clive Owen shows off all the features and capabilities of the M5 (the BMW model used in this particular film) The result of his driving skills allows for them to not only loose the car carrying the body guards, to get to the venue on time, but also to carry out the manager’s revenge plan due to the fact that Star has pissed herself during Clive Owen’s driving. In the end the paparazzi have a field day.
Star appears in the first season of BMW short film series called the Hire. The collection of eight shorts was distributed via internet only (on the BMW website) starting with John Frankenheimer's Ambush and continued with the rest of the series including Star in 2001-2002. These “commercial vignettes” were so highly praised by Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, the New York Times and especially the viewers, that the films ended up in a DVD distributed at only certain dealerships. Unfortunately, BWM had to pull the plug on the DVD since the actor Forrest Whitaker disputed that the films had been made for internet view only as stated in his contract. However, the demand for the films was so great that BMW decided to release another DVD which gave viewers the links to go see the films online and even released a second season. (If you would like to read more about this campaign please visit these websites http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Uniquely/TVAndNewMedia/BMWFilms.aspx
& http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_films)
The Hire is a campaign with a groundbreaking style of advertising: the creation of short films that does not mention the brand name. In the case of Star, the car stands out by itself in the parking, and the car becomes the catalyst for the plot, but bold letters indicating BMW: the Ultimate Driving Machine never show up on the screen. The same can be said of Madonna. The film doesn’t introduce her in the credits in the same way that Clive Owen is introduced. The point that I’m getting at is that this particular campaign (and especially this short) plays around with the idea of star driven power. What makes a star a star? Is it performance? Is it quality? All these questions can be answered for both the car and Madonna. And as a result of this play on perceptions/ meaning of words such as star, I believe that this short fits this category of short with stars very well.
The ironic factor of the film being directed by Madonna’s husband Guy Ritchie is one of the reasons why I like this short a lot. The other reasons are Clive Owen and the punchy story line. The main punch is delivered at the end when the audience’s curiosity is answered as to how the manager got his revenge. However, there are other miny punches throughout the whole film that make it highly entertaining; the music adds to the viewer enjoying the ride, Owen’s changes in tone of voice and facial expression allow for the flow of the narrative to continue and finally the way that Madonna ends up being a pinball in the car enhance this simple story of revenge.
Finally, the film allows through its punchy story to not only have the manager get his revenge but it also brings a reality check for the star. It is as if she crash landed (literally) back into being a human. This is because the technique, in which star is portrayed, of having the narrator saying something like “her million dollar voice” and having the star cough, would not have been as effective in a short story for example. The film in this way makes what the narrator is saying of the star having blue eyes and strong hands and not being able to see them makes star as if she were something that humans (as the viewers) are not able to see. That is, not until she lands abruptly at the venue. Once she has been put in a position where star shows that she is human, then the ride is over.
I have seen most of the short films in the BMW series and personally believe that I enjoy this one the most because as a viewer you can take the ride over and over and it will always be really good. It’s like a Pixar short film but just with a really nice car and a really hot driver.

Antoine et Colette

ANTOINE ET COLETTE
Dir: François Truffaut
30 minutes, 1962

Source: The Adventures of Antoine Doinel (Criterion Box Set)
Original Source: L'amour a vingt ans

This sequel to Truffaut's classic 400 Blows originally appeared in an anthology of shorts titled Love at Twenty, which also included works by Shintao Ishihara, Marcel Ophuls, Renzo Rossellini, and Andrzej Wajda.

In this 30 minute examination of young, awkward, unrequited love, we catch up with Antoine Doinel 3 years after The 400 Blows. He is now 17 and completely separated from his parents. He lives alone in an apt in Paris and works at a record production factory. Nothing glamorous, Antoine lives a simple yet oddly romantic life. He's still only 17 though, and playing adult isn't as easy as he might want it to be.

The opening suckers me in, regardless of my affection for Tuffaut's work. If I could be anywhere it'd likely be Paris and if I could be anywhen, I'd probably pick Paris in the 60s. It's the morning and Antoine rolls out of bed and in true French New Wave fashion fishes a half smoked cigarette out of an ashtray and stands on his balcony overlooking a busy Parisian street. Bring on the romantic troubles of our 1960s anti-hero.

He falls for a girl he sees at a concert and immediately begins trying to run into her constantly. They become friends. Her parents like Antoine. She treats him like a friend. Antoine grows a little impulsive brought on by her 'mixed signals' and even takes up residence in the hotel across the street from her family's residence. While at first this seems a little much, it occurs to me that with enough freedom, my 17 yr old crushes could have taken me to such levels. Awkward homeroom exchanges and half assed phone calls made under the auspices of missing homework assignments come from the same place that Antoine's decisions come from.
I'll leave you with these essential pieces of the plot and not ruin the end. Though I'm sure you can infer whether or not boy gets girl.

From a filmmaking point of view, Truffaut constructed this film in his usual Nouvelle Vague fashion... fast and loose and vibrant and full of affection for the characters and the medium.
The editing is logical, but sometimes rough around the edges, the sound goes away and allows the soundtrack to let us get the 'feel' of a conversation. We really don't need to hear what is being said, we get the point without words. A song at a concert informs the editing of Antoine and Colette stealing glances at each other. A newsreel of a downhill skiier taking a header while racing is juxtaposed against Antoine's sexual advances.

My favorite filmmaking choice is during scenes with the couple in concerts - the frame shrinks to isolate them. Almost like irising in, but not quite. The frame itself reduces and encompasses Antoine and Colette. There is no practical reason for this, as closer shots are in the same sequence. Seems to this viewer that it's to make us aware of the large negative space around them. They are alone in a crowd, they are the most important people in their little world, in our little world, in the 30 minutes of excitement, frustration and disappointment we live through with Antoine.

Sometimes I miss being a teenager. Thanks to Antoine, this week I don't.

Though this was originally intended to be my Classic post, i'd argue that Jean Pierre Leaud is a star, portraying Antoine in 4 features and this short (talk about sequels and franchises), not to mention appearing in about 30 films with directors such as Godard, Bertolucci, Breillat, and Assayas.

Hotel Chevalier

Hotel Chevalier
2007
Dir. Wes Anderson
13 minutes

Hotel Chevalier is a 13 minute "prologue" to the 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited. First I should probably point out that I haven't actually seen the longer film. Chevalier was released as a free download on iTunes before Darjeeling was released in theaters, presumably to drum up interest in the film as a whole, but since I find Wes Anderson to be kind of hit-or-miss I never got motivated enough to want to see it. So basically, this is my evaluation of the short film as a standalone short film, although you could probably argue that the short is really meant to be viewed in the context of the entire longer film. (Although in that case, is it really a "short film" unto itself?)

Anyway: Hotel Chevalier features Jason Schwartzman as an American living in a hotel in France. He's laying around watching television when he receives a phone call from a woman (Natalie Portman) announcing her arrival at the hotel. She shows up and starts to look around the room. It becomes evident that the couple hasn't spoken in months, and that things did not end well between them. They begin to have sex, but then walk out onto the room's balcony for a moment instead, and the film ends.

Hotel Chevalier works as a star-driven short on two levels. The first is the director, Wes Anderson. Anderson's films are very stylized and immediately recognizable, usually taking place in settings that are hard to characterize as belonging to a certain era. Chevalier is no different. The feel of the French hotel is timeless, and the only clue to the film's setting in terms of time is the presence of an iPod, which nonetheless feels somewhat anachronistic compared to the rest of the set.

The color palette in Hotel Chevalier is totally centered around yellow, which gives the film an interesting look. When Schwartzman changes from his yellow bathrobe into a dark suit, the effect is jarring. He looks out of place and uncomfortable in the room, reflecting the awkwardness in the encounter between he and Portman. The concentration on yellow also creates a nice contrast at the end, when the characters step outside onto their balcony to see the city evening - everything now is dark blue, including Schwartzman's suit, with the only splashes of yellow being lights on distant buildings and Portman's bathrobe.

Obviously, Hotel Chevalier is also star-driven because it features movie stars. Jason Schwartzman is a reasonably well-known actor, and Natalie Portman is an extremely well-known one. The short generated additional interest when it was released because Portman does her first nude scene in it, which she had previously stated she would not do, and of course everyone wants to see a famous person naked. (But sorry boys, you don't actually see anything too risqué.)

Overall I don't know if I'd say Hotel Chevalier really "works" as a standalone. There is no self-contained storyline: both the past and present of the film are left totally open to interpretation. In that sense it is kind of disappointing because there's no emotional payoff for anything that happens. However, I like it because it gives me a chance to enjoy Wes Anderson's unique aesthetic in 13 minutes, rather than sitting through 2 awful hours of The Life Aquatic.

(I couldn't find the entire film online, but about 8 minutes of it can be viewed here.)

Day of the Fight

Day of the Fight
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Released: April 26, 1951
Running Time: 16 minutes.
RKO-Pathe Pictures.


I love Stanley Kubrick. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Full Metal Jacket to Dr. Strangelove, I admire his work as a future filmmaker and screenwriter. (Yes, I even stomached Eyes Wide Shut, which I do not like whatsoever.) His emphasis on the theme of the duality of man and his strong, dark comedic dialogue strikes a chord in me and draws me to his style, his way of working the camera in his favor.

So it's because of my undying admiration and love for Kubrick that I chose a short film of his to analyze. With this week's theme of "star-driven" short films, either in front of or behind the camera, I figured Kubrick would be an entertaining, intriguing choice. But this film is not Kubrick-styled. For those who are fans of Kubrick or die-hard followers of him, this short will frankly be a disappointment, if you tried to be like me and find his trademark shots, dialogue, wit and style.

Day of the Fight was a short documentary Kubrick made in 1951. It tells the story about a boxer's life getting ready for his fight in the evening. Kubrick follows this man named Walter Cartier throughout the day as he prepares for the bout. He goes to Mass with him, his meals, and his grooming.

Kubrick had done a photo feature of Walter earlier for Look Magazine in 1949, and he asked the boxer if he could document his life. Financing it himself, Kubrick learned how to operate the camera by the man who was loaning the cameras to him. He eventually sold the film to RKO Pictures, and it was released in theaters in the "This is America" series (you can see the RKO slide right in the beginning of the short). CBS Anchor Douglas Edwards provides the news-like narration used throughout the movie.

What's interesting about this short film is that it's not particularly "star-driven." This was made when Kubrick was not a household name. Before the major malfunctions and war rooms, before the drill sergeants and the space odysseys, Kubrick was a man trying to make his first film ever. It's a movie documenting a man's life. The only reason this short is "star-driven" is because of the work Kubrick did after this film. It's because of his name now that people go back to see how he was then, when he was first starting out. It's why I chose this film in the first place. (Consequently, his film Killer's Kiss, which came out four years later, references this film.)

But what is interesting is watching this film and seeing the potential Kubrick had when he was first starting out. The familiar theme of the duality of man is seen here in this short, quite obviously too. The five minute introduction to the history of boxing, how some men make a good living and some men don't ("one out of ten men" as the narrator grimly puts it) provides a dark, grim outlook onto the boxing world -- that those who are good enough succeed. This segues into our introduction of Walter. Through Kubrick's lens we watch Walter's actions through the day -- going to Mass, playing with his dog, hanging out with his twin brother. He shows Walter as a decent, loving human being that has compassion. But in a dramatic turn, through the usage of the narrator, Kubrick demonstrates this duality of man, how Walter, the compassionate person, will turn into a killing machine, "slowly becoming another man." A man "who cannot lose, who must not lose."

Transformation of man and the duality of man, how he can be so loving and so destructive, trickles down through Kubrick's films for the rest of his career. In addition we can see through the shots of the bout itself Kubrick's beginnings as a director. There are dramatic shots done at a low straight-on angle of the boxers coming together, medium shots of the men punching each other straight in the face. These are shots that Kubrick will favor later on down the line when he creates war-films like Full Metal Jacket.

Day of the Fight still isn't the classic Kubrick film that fans like myself would go crazy over. But it is still fascinating to watch this short and see where Kubrick was when he was just starting out, and how his style transformed from that to what we see in Path of Glory, or Dr. Strangelove, or Full Metal Jacket.

BULLY FOR BUGS

BULLY FOR BUGS
Directed by Chuck Jones, United States, 1952, running time 7:12
Warner Brothers


This short happens to be one of my favorites. Looney Tunes strikes again with this Bugs Bunny classic. In this installment Bugs is trying to get to a big carrot festival but got lost and accidentally surfaces in a bull fight ring. As the matador exits the ring, the bull charges Bugs from behind and launches him out of the stadium. We get the now famous, “Of course you realize, this means war.” Bugs reenters the ring and uses several tactics in attempt to beat the bull. Some go well, some bad, but in the end Bugs out smarts the bull with an elaborate setup that uses axel grease, glue, sandpaper a match and TNT to ultimately blow the bull up.

This is a prime example of why Looney Tunes has stood the test of time. It is remarkably written, really funny, and universally appealing. This came out in 1952 and still feels remarkably current. Any number of Warner Brothers’ cartoons could have been posted but this one stood out from the rest of my cartoon watching as a kid. These tunes were edgy, innovative, and way ahead of their time. There isn’t much more to say except ENJOY!!

Sherlock, Jr.

SHERLOCK, JR.
Directed by Buster Keaton, United States, 1924, approx. 44 minutes
Our Hospitality and Sherlock, Jr. - Kino Video, 1999

The comedic film has hardly been more fun and funny than in the hands on the great “stone face”, Buster Keaton. His 1924 four reel short Sherlock, Jr. is a surreal, special effects laden gemstone that conjures up the magic of the movies and draws guffaws and dropped jaws. Keaton’s short comments on the ethereal, shadow world of the silver screen through gorgeous and ghostly effects and registers richters in laughter.

Keaton plays a bumbling movie theatre projectionist, caught up in a dream of becoming a detective just like Sherlock Holmes. He daydreams and wishes, simpering in the booth. But ‘detectivity’ isn’t the only thing Keaton pines for: he is also quite madly in love with The Girl (no, but really, that’s the character’s name). She’s capitalized: The Girl. The One. Unfortunately for our hero, The Girl is also the object of The Sheik’s (a bad guy) affection. After an unfortunate mystery develops leaving Keaton all but hopeless, he falls asleep and transcends into the world of the motion picture, becoming a real life detective.

Sherlock, Jr. is entirely tongue in cheek; at a pivotal moment Keaton literally leaves his body and jumps right into a motion picture, leaving our real life audience watching a movie audience watching a movie (and to add to the fun, when this was filmed, the movie audience was really watching live actors in a carefully designed set made to look just like a screen). The escapist qualities of the cinema become absolute for Keaton, and his other worldly self becomes caught up in the projected movie. This is when the literal film transitions from being a movie about a movie to being the movie. Keaton frames the real point of the movie with the real world, but the reason Sherlock, Jr. exists is the story of the detective. The Projectionist is not the projectionist, he is Sherlock, Jr.

The trick photography in Sherlock, Jr. is still pretty mind blowing in contemporary context. The moments after Keaton enters the on-screen movie are particularly exciting. Keaton is thrown into a variety of situations: stuck on a cliff, in the middle of a bust intersection, through a series of cuts. The reality of the scene is never questioned though, as each segment is shot so precisely and proportionally well. Keaton reportedly shot this footage with the aid of surveyor's equipment. His ingenuity worked.

This series of misadventures is not unlike Duck Amuck, which Prof. Middents posted earlier. The notion of the screen is questioned, as well as the idea of who is making the movie. The scenes which Keaton is tossed around in are entirely disparate and random, and have nothing to do with the the movie that follows. Keaton is being toyed with, much like Daffy by his animator - but who is playing with Keaton? The Projectionist Keaton? The inside-movie-filmmakers their selves? The audience? The perception of the spectacle of the cinema is what is questioned here, but it’s done so in a laugh-a-minute riot house.

I think this is an essential question for any examination of cinema, regardless of length, and it’s one that we come back to often in class, as it is more visible through the short lens. What makes a movie? Is it literally the material matter, the film or video, that constitutes the motion picture? Is it less than that, just a series of photos, the motion that makes the movie? This of course, does not allow for a film like La Jetée to be considered a motion picture -- so is it the audience that believes in the idea that it is a movie that makes it a movie? Any audience member seeing a feature in a theatre today will agree it is a movie, and most audience members watching short films in a theatre or at a festival will argue for the validity of the presentations as movies. As a class I believe we agree that La Jetée was a movie; would another audience consider it one, though?

Keaton is arguing through stone-faced comedy in Sherlock, Jr. The duality of The Projectionist’s realities calls into question the legitimacy of our reality. Do we perceive things to be real, therefore making them real? Or are we all just part of a bigger picture, a bigger movie; are we all just sleeping projectionists in some cinema somewhere?

Un Chien Andalou

Part 1
Part 2


UN CHIEN ANDALOU
Directed by Luis Buñuel. Written by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. France, 1928, 16min.
Source: Avant garde and experimental films – VHS 5278 and YouTube.com

Trying to find rational meaning in a short film that was not supposed to have any is a ludicrous idea, but, so is to dismiss it because it “doesn’t have any” or because we can’t understand it. Whether we understand it or not, like it or hate it, Un Chien Andalou is, for various reasons, one of those must- see classic shorts. It has its place in film history as one of the first movies without a coherent narrative, hence, the perceived lack of “meaning¨. It was also one of the first non-studio shorts to (unintentionally) make money, using shock value as means to make the audience not only uncomfortable but also unhappy with the film itself.

One of the “explanations” of the film goes as follows: the two unnamed characters are lovers who are discovered by her husband and her dad and then face the consequences. Sounds simple, but now, imagine the following series of dream-like events, so things don’t really make sense. They’ll be out order, you’ll leave a room just to enter the same room again, ants will come out people hands, a severed hand will lay on the side walk, an androgynous boy will get run over which in turn will cause the male lover to be aroused, he will be turned down by his lover and will then pull on two pianos with two priests, the 10 commandments and two dead donkeys; books turn into pistols and the male lover shoots his lover’s father; to then “in (the) spring” on a beach where the lover and her husband are buried up to their chest dead. But before it all began, you read a title card that said “once upon a time” and then saw the woman’s eye slid with a razor.

Dali and Buñuel wanted to shock their audience so they opened their film with the razor/eye-slid sequence. They expected the 1928 Parisian audience to be shocked, to start riots, but, to Buñuel’s disappointment, they didn’t. The surrealist movement was in its beginning and this short granted the entrance into it. Today’s audience would probably have a different opinion; one can just look at the boards in IMDB to get an idea. Perhaps, the 1920s audience was more familiar with Freud and more willing to accept dreams for what they were.

But, the lessons of the film go beyond the unexpected reaction of the audience; its 8-month run enabled the duo to pay Buñuel’s mom back. We can be melodramatic and say that dreams can take you as far a you want, aka two young men literally sharing a dream and two weeks of filming turned into a classic. But, there is more. Aesthetically, Un Chien editing work is great not just visually but also musically. In the scene were the androgynous boy gets run over, we anticipate it happening but the music and the intercutting to the lovers watching from the window keeps the tension. The famous thin cloud covering the full moon for a few second then cut to the woman’s eye being slid makes the audiences gasp every time and no matter how many times you watch it there will always be a chill going down your spine.

At the end, that chill is left unresolved. After the bizarre sequences, our minds could try to extract some structured narrative from the title cards “once upon a time”, “eight years later”, “about three in the morning” and “sixteen years before”. But, as in dreams, the timeline does not make sense, and perhaps some things are better taken as what they are, dreams.

Vincent By Tim Burton and Rick Heinrichs 5:53

Narrated by Vincent Price

“Vincent” is about a seven-year-old boy, Vincent Malloy who wants to be Vincent Price. Throughout the film, Vincent leads a sort of double life. One where he is a normal little boy, and a second one (in his imagination) where he is Vincent Price.

Vincent turns into a very macabre version of the little boy between versions of his imagined life and his real life. He imagines this fantastical world and is constantly interrupted by his mother or his aunt. This makes for a funny story because the little boy wants to be dark and scary and the mother is always encouraging him “to go out and play because it is a beautiful day.” At one point, Vincent has sentenced himself to a lifetime of imprisonment in the tower of doom, a.k.a. his room. While serving this sentence, his mother comes in and says, “If you want to, you can go out and play. It is sunny outside and a beautiful day.”

One of his fantasies includes dipping his aunt in wax for his wax museum. Another fantasy is turning his dog into a type of Frankenstein so they can lurk through the London streets at night searching for victims in inclement weather. The short film ends by him quoting “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe while dying on the floor (he doesn’t really die).

The rhyme and meter of the narration counteracts the dark material of the short film by adding a children’s book quality to it. Also the fact that it is an animated short makes the subject material a little more PG.

I really enjoyed the simulacrum in the film because Vincent Price narrated the short film and the little boy wants to be Vincent Price.

Tim Burton always freaked me out when I was a child, but now that I am older his films don’t scare me (as much) any more. "Vincent" is one of Tim Burton's earlier works. It was completed in 1982. The "Tim Burton" style is throughout this entire short which you may know from some of his other works such as "Edward Scissorhands," "Sleepy Hollow," "Beetle Juice," "The Corpse Bride," and most recently "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." All of these films sincerely freaked me out (that isn't to say that I didn't enjoy them, they are just creepy). Even though "Vincent" is done in the same style it is just more playful. Overall I enjoyed the film because of the humorous writing and rhyme scheme and the playful subject material.

La Lettre

La Lettre (The Letter)
Directed by Michel Gondry, France, 1998. 10:19 minutes.


La Lettre, which marked Gondry's first attempt at dialogue, was commissioned by Canal +, a French television program, as a part of short film series broadly titled "En attendant l'an 2000" (Waiting for the Year 2000).

The film is, for the most part, very simple. Two brothers have a conversation in hushed voices, during which they discuss the imminent New Year, photography, and the younger brother’s love for his classmate, Aurélie. The dynamic between the brothers is typically...well...brotherly. The older brother (who I thought was strikingly reminiscent of Buzz McAllister in Home Alone) is gangly and appears to have just begun to develop a smear of a mustache. He makes Stéphane feel insecure for not yet having kissed a girl, pressuring him to make his move on Aurélie before the year 2000 and dramatically making out with the air to demonstrate the proper kissing technique.

The interesting part of the film (which is also where Gondry’s style really peeks through) begins when Stéphane’s brother goes to bed, and Stéphane, waiting for his photo to finish developing, begins to drift off. He then has a vivid surrealist dream in which he is at a New Year’s party and everyone is chanting for him to kiss Aurélie. But a giant camera is where his head should be, and as the two get closer to each other, he bumps heads (cameras?) with her and knocks her to the ground. To add insult to injury, then the Eiffel Tower falls on him. It’s every kid’s biggest fear, a fear so consuming that even viewers well beyond pre-adolescence cringe with embarrassment of the I’m-so-glad-that-wasn’t-me variety. And as for the symbolism, it’s obvious: Stéphane has been distancing himself from social situations by passively taking pictures of people and events (e.g. Aurélie) instead of actively participating (e.g. kissing her).

The next day, Stéphane races over to Aurélie’s house to pick up a letter she’s written for him, certain that in it she’s confessed her mutual love for him. Tragically, however, Aurélie has written that it’s Stéphane’s brother she “fancies,” and the film ends with Stéphane sadly removing the pictures of her from his wall.

This film piqued my interest partly because of the dream sequence, but also because of the photography theme—specifically, the use of negatives. Aurélie’s image projected on the wall of Stéphane’s hallway is obviously a negative, but she appears to him in his dream as a negative image—the only negative image in the entire dream--as well. And finally, at the end as Aurélie’s voice reads the letter addressed to Stéphane, there is a sweeping view of houses, which appear as negatives until just before the last line of the letter, “Enjoy your vacation.” I’m coming at this as a Lit major, so I can only come up with a nauseatingly corny interpretation: that Stéphane’s image of and love for Aurélie is, visually and literally, undeveloped. But what do you all think it means? Does it mean anything or is the use of negative images a purely aesthetic addition to the film? Or better yet, does it have to mean anything?

The Girl and Her Trust

THE GIRL AND HER TRUST

Directed by D.W. Griffith, United States, 1912, approx. 15 minutes.

Source: The Movies Begin - A Treasury of Early Cinema 1894-1913

There really isn’t anywhere to begin but the beginning, so when examining any sort of film, short or otherwise, it’s probably a good idea to step back to one reelers, player pianos, and other silent shorts of the sort.  D.W. Griffith is always a name to look to, and his The Girl and Her Trust is quite unrelenting and narrative and temporal editing, creating a dazzling first-generation thriller.

Trust’s narrative is quite simple: $2000 is being transported on the No. 7 Train, and tramps are out to get it by any means, including assaulting Grace, the young telegraphist girl on duty at the local train station.  Clocking in right near 15 minutes, Trust even manages to garner the audience and love subplot, involving Grace and her beau.

As film is markedly concerned with time, being a medium where life is animated though reality suspended, it is impervious that shorts manage time with an absolute certainty, as an entire narrative must fit into the arc of only a few minutes.  Griffith manages to make Trust really spectacular in this case, giving us multiple plot points (Grace’s draw on the men around her, the infatuation her coworker has for her, the danger of railway work, the tramp business, etc) to mull around.  Griffith’s use of editing, particularly in the fireworks parade that is the train chase finale,  lend to the suspense.  The cuts are fast and move in and around the action, bringing the viewer from spectator to actor.  Close ups of Grace hammering bullets through the key-hole in the door and the terrified look in her bewildered eyes allow the audience to particpate in the action more directly, suspending the time and reality of the film.  

I think it would be safe to say that a good film is one that disregards reality yet initiates audiences in buying it.  Steven Spielberg is rumored to have said on the set of Jaws, during an argument with author Peter Benchley about the explosive ending of the film, “If I’ve held their attention for two hours, they’ll believe anything I tell them now.” (which, of course, is true.  Sharks don’t explode, but wow, what an ending!)  This is even more important when dealing with short films; viewers shouldn’t realize they are watching only a fifteen minute sprint, but the whole marathon from beginning to end should bleed reality.  

Griffith’s The Girl and Her Trust does this, for me at least.  I am drawn in from the first frame until the last.  Griffith’s use of a simple story (a ploy great directors like Hitchcock would use years later: Man thinks he sees murder.  Man investigates.  Man becomes entangled in a web of intrigue.  The catch?  He’s got a broken leg.  Or, men murder friend.  Men hold dinner party with the victims friends and family - and the body is in attendance as well!), along with his flair for editing action, immerse viewers into the stark black and white reality of the cinema, length remitted.  Griffith achieves the goal of narrative cinema, to tell a story wisely and well, and achieves a key goal in short cinema, to never let the audience realize they aren't watching a "movie".