Short Cuts

Animation: An Optical Poem (1937, Oskar Fischinger)

2009-12-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

An Optical Poem (1937)

USA, 6 min
Directed by: Oskar Fischinger

The tagline for Disney's Fantasia (1940) read: "Hear the pictures! See the music!" This is, in effect, what Oskar Fischinger was doing with his animation – communicating music to the deaf, giving visual life to music using colours and geometric patterns. His approach, though later imitated by Walt Disney, was largely appreciated outside the mainstream. However, Allegretto (1936) and An Optical Poem (1937) were both commissioned by big studios – Paramount and MGM, respectively {however, the former film was inconceivably stifled into a black-and-white release}. It was a little novel, I'll admit, to see such an abstract cartoon presented under the MGM banner, and, indeed, it seems that the studio was understandably cautious; they bizarrely introduce An Optical Poem as a "scientific" experiment.

Fischinger's film uses patterns of oscillating circles, paper cutouts dangling from invisible wires, synchronised to Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2." The animation itself resembles a journey through outer space. The orbiting circles are akin to moons orbiting planets, planets orbiting the sun, and there's an unmistakable image of a comet hurtling across the night sky. The overall effect of the space-themed visuals and accompanying classical musical is not all that dissimilar to Kubrick's use of the "Blue Danube" waltz during 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Fischinger seems to be suggesting that to fully articulate such magnificent music is beyond the grasp of our earthly minds – to do so, we must utilise objects far beyond our mortal scope. Most incredibly of all, Fischinger reconstructed these great objects using little more than coloured paper and wire.

7/10

Comedy: Tomatos Another Day (1930, James Sibley Watson & Alec Wilder)

2009-11-17T19:58:00.000-08:00

Tomatos Another Day (1930)

USA, 7 min

Directed by: James Sibley Watson, Alec Wilder

Tomatos Another Day (1930) (directed by James Sibley Watson and Alec Wilder) made one appearance at a Boston theatre in the early 1930s, but received such a weak audience response that the creators dismissed it as an outright failure. One can understand the audience reaction: the film itself is so incredibly stilted and awkward (albeit deliberately so) that if you approach it in the wrong mind-set – expecting a traditional melodrama – you're likely to be dismayed at its incompetency. Sibley's son, J.S. Watson Jr., remarked that the film might have proved successful had a popular comedian been involved: "Harold Lloyd, directed by (Mack) Sennet, might have brought it off." Indeed, the film did remind me of W.C. Fields' The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), in which the actors were encouraged to emulate the melodramatic acting style to the nth degree. Watson uses the same deadpan brand of satire, though his actors, rather than hamming it up, adopt a mechanical, minimalistic delivery that makes them sound monumentally uninterested in their roles.

J.S. Watson had previously co-directed, with Melville Webber, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), a wonderful Poe adaptation strongly indebted to Robert Wiene and German Expressionism. To a director with such a prominent visual style, the arrival of "talkies" must have been disillusioning – all of a sudden, popular films had lost the artistic flair of Murnau and Borzage, and had become utterly mundane. Tomatos Another Day was produced to "show the absurdity of talkies that recorded action in pictures with unnecessary explanations of the action recorded in sound." The film opens with a clock on the cusp of two o'clock. Soon after, the minute hand ticks over, the clock chimes twice, and a character unnecessarily remarks "it is two o'clock." Watson's satire is spot-on: I can recall many early talkies that treated their audience in such a manner, inserting such mundane dialogue as "I am alone" merely because the sound technology was available to them. I just wish that all gentlemen's hats sounded so crunchy.

6/10

Fantasy: La fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936, Dimitri Kirsanoff)

2009-10-16T22:42:00.000-07:00

La fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936)
France, 8 min

Directed by: Dimitri Kirsanoff

Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) wrote his three Mity (Myths) classical pieces in 1915, in a collaboration with violinist Pawel Kochañski, for whom the pieces were originally conceived. I don't know anything about classical music, but apparently this work was revolutionary, described as "impressionistic" and "a new style, a new mode of expression for the violin." The three pieces were "La Fontaine d'Aréthuse," "Narcisse" and "Dryades et Pan," of which the first is the most well-known. To my knowledge, there's no specific story that is supposed to go with La Fontaine d'Aréthuse," but here Dimitri Kirsanoff has apparently attempted to devise his own. Fitting the images to the music, but also striving to tell a story, La Fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936) follows his similarly music-orientated short film of the previous year, the wonderful Les Berceaux / The Cradles. Like the latter, it was also photographed by Boris Kaufman, who would later achieve success in Hollywood as a cinematographer.

La Fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936) opens with credits over shimmering images of water, somewhat reminiscent of Ralph Steiner's H2O (1929). After this, the music takes prominence, and we see a pianist and violinist beginning the classical piece. That Kirsanoff even bothered to show the musicians emphasises the importance he placed on the music itself, re-enforcing that this piece wasn't merely chosen at random to suit the images. "La Fontaine d'Aréthuse" opens with what has been described as a "shimmering wash of sound in the piano, octave leaps in the left hand passing above and below repeated chords in the right," a tune which apparently suggests the splashing waters of a fountain. The story "told" by the music involves a naked water goddess on the river shore (no Production Code being enforced in France!), who is pursued by a Tarzan-like hunter, before disappearing into thin air to join her water once again. Pleasant, and recommended, viewing.
7/10

Animation: Kiwi! (2006, Dony Permedi)

2009-10-15T14:58:00.000-07:00

Kiwi! (2006)

USA, 3 min

Directed by: Dony Permedi

When you've only got three minutes to tell a story, you'd better make it count. Pixar Studios has always excelled at such an efficient brand of storytelling: Geri's Game (1997) is a masterpiece in four minutes, and For the Birds (2000) and Lifted (2006) have always been crowd- pleasing favourites. Kiwi! (2006) is a student film by Dony Permedi, and it was produced in much the same mould. The short certainly looks like a student film, the CG animation terribly crude by modern standards (though, admittedly, it's unfair to compare any animated film to the standards of Pixar). However, the technical detail doesn't necessarily matter, as long as it succeeds in telling an emotionally-absorbing story. This it does pretty well. An ambitious little kiwi, long confined to the earth by his measly ratite wings, fulfills his lifelong ambition to fly – or, at least, to approximate the sensation of flight. The moment of success is oddly touching, and the single tear that slips from beneath his eyelid would be familiar to anybody who's ever achieved his lifelong dream. Still, I didn't find Kiwi! quite as life-affirming as many viewers seem to have – for me, it was an amusing little aside, and certainly not a bad way to spend three minutes of my time.

6/10

Comedy: The Gibson Goddess (1909, D.W. Griffith)

2009-09-14T01:01:00.000-07:00

The Gibson Goddess (1909)

USA, 6 min

Directed by: D.W. Griffith

Written by: D.W. Griffith

Starring: Marion Leonard, Kate Bruce, Frank Evans, Arthur V. Johnson, James Kirkwood, George Nichols, Mary Pickford

D.W. Griffith is certainly not a name associated with comedy, but he did direct a few of them early in his career {including his debut, Those Awful Hats (1909)}, before briefly returning to the genre with The Battle of the Sexes (1928). This comedy short from 1909 – The Gibson Goddess – might also be considered a "battle of the sexes." On a trip to the sea-shore to enjoy some peaceful reading time, a beautiful woman (Marion Leonard) is harassed by group of male admirers, who follow her along the beach like a pack of hungry hounds. After several unsuccessful attempts to evade her followers, the woman strikes upon the perfect solution to dispel their interest in her: she gets changed into a leg-revealing beach costume. I'd have thought that revealing her body would only fuel the men's lust, but apparently not – each man apologetically excuses himself from her company, some unable to disguise their revulsion.

Most of the comedy shorts I've seen from the early 1900s have based their humour around special effects – Blackton's The Thieving Hand (1908) and Melies' "magic acts" are the first that come to mind. The Gibson Goddess is more of a "sophisticated" comedy, if you will, concerned primarily with human behaviour and social stereotypes. Leonard's "Gibson Goddess" is a perfectly respectable and innocent woman, but also resourceful when required to be. Her male admirers are shamelessly superficial, abandoning one woman to bestow their affection upon a prettier other, and they bicker pettily among themselves as to who shall have claim over each lady. If the film wasn't so lighthearted, the men's "stalker" antics might have seemed rather disturbing, though the actors dilute any worries by behaving, for the most part, as flamboyantly as possible. The jokes are predictable, but I did get a few laughs out of this. Look out for Mary Pickford in a bit role.

6/10

Early Superimpositions (1900, Frederick S. Armitage)

2009-09-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

The following is a collection of three early shorts by American director Frederick S. Armitage, who here experiments with superimposition as a form of visual effect. All three are available on the "Unseen Cinema" box-set, in the volume "Viva La Dance: The Beginnings of Cine-Dance." Please note that, since I penned each of these reviews separately, there is some overlap of information. Davey Jones' Locker (1900)
USA, 1 min

Around the time that Georges Méliès was experimenting with superimposition and other optical effects to enhance his on-screen "stage acts," American director Frederick S. Armitage was testing similar techniques for manipulating cinematic reality. Davey Jones' Locker (1900) was produced for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and was created by double-printing two sets of images, originally filmed between 1896 and 1899, over each other. The result is that the two images – one a character (a dancing skeleton) and the other an environment (a shipwrecked boat in the waves) – appear to coexist with each other, the skeleton given the translucent weightlessness of a ghost or spirit. The film is an amusing curiosity, but lacks the complexity of contemporary Méliès efforts like The Four Troublesome Heads (1898) or The One-Man Band (1900).
5/10
Neptune's Daughters (1900)
USA, 1 min

Neptune's Daughters (1900) was produced by prolific early American director Frederick S. Armitage for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. The short film is notable for its early use of superimposition, double-printing images from Ballet of the Ghosts (1899) over an ocean landscape from Sad Sea Waves (1897). The result is that the four woman, draped in white, appear to emerge from the ocean like ghosts, before breaking into dance on top of the water surface. Armitage made a few of these short films and this is probably the least visually impressive of the three I've seen, though all are worthwhile for anybody interested in the early development of cinema's visual effects.
5/10
A Nymph of the Waves (1900)
USA, 1 min

Of the three ocean-themed cine-dance superimpositions directed by Frederick S. Armitage for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, A Nymph of the Waves (1900) was the most impressive. The scenario is reasonably straightforward. Armitage superimposed existing footage of dancer Catarina Bartho (from the film M'lle. Cathrina Bartho (1899)) over the image of water from Upper Rapids, from Bridge (1896). The result is that the dancer appears to be performing a burlesque dance routine on the surface of the water, twirling and kicking as the waves appear to lap about her ankles. The effect is actually quite convincing, and the water flowing steadily from left to right creates the pleasant illusion of camera movement in the opposite direction.
5.5/10

Avant-Garde: Junkopia (1981, Chris Marker, John Chapman, Frank Simeone)

2009-09-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

Junkopia (1981)
France, 6 min

Directed by: Chris Marker, John Chapman, Frank Simeone

Written by: Chris Marker

Starring: Arielle Dombasle (voice)

Junkopia (1981) is only my second film from Chris Marker – after the breathtaking, poetic La Jetée (1962) – but the two works are not all that dissimilar. Indeed, out of a purely documentary framework, Marker (with co-directors John Chapman and Frank Simeone) seems to have constructed a work of science-fiction. Like his previous masterwork, Junkopia exists without dialogue (and, in this case, characters) and also eschews movement (though not as dramatically as the other film's still images), both by the camera and its subjects. There is one marked exception to this rule. Just as La Jetée climaxed in an unforgettable shot of a woman's eyes fluttering open, Marker ends this film by swiftly and unexpectedly zooming out from a model ship floating in the ocean, startlingly reinforcing the vast, alienating landscape that is his subject. In fact, "alien" is an ideal adjective to describe the film. Michel Krasna's electronic score wails insistently on the soundtrack, as eerily disconcerting as Kubrick's use of Ligeti's "Atmospheres" in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Junkopia opens into a landscape that, peculiarly, struck me as otherwordly. Man-made sculptures – first an aeroplane, then a montage of figures assembled from junk – roost in the depths of the ocean, anchored in a body of water that seems infinitely vast and deep. The soundtrack blends synthesised music with atmospheric sound effects; a radio transmission appears to source from a sculpture of a lunar module, emphasising the directors' focus on what seems a genuinely alien environment. Birds flutter occasionally across the frame, but life otherwise seems muted: aside from his leftover junk, humans seemingly have no part in this unfamiliar specter of reality. But then the film pulls its most intriguing twist. Alternate angles of the sculptures reveal their close proximity to civilisation – beside bustling roadways, nestled before the looming skyline of a metropolis. We are in San Francisco. The surreal landscape was that of our own making, the detritus of human existence hugging the fringes of nature. For five minutes, we were looking at the human world through someone else's eyes.

7/10

Avant-Garde: Thanatopsis (1962, Ed Emshwiller)

2009-09-03T20:07:00.000-07:00

Thanatopsis (1962)
USA, 5 min

Directed by: Ed Emshwiller

Starring: Becky Arnold, Mac Emshwiller

Particularly after the dull George Dumpson's Place (1964), Ed Emshwiller's Thanatopsis (1962) took me completely by surprise. An intense soundtrack of industrial machinery and heartbeat – a chilling construction of sound editing that predates Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) – highlights Emshwiller's exploration of a brooding man's psychosis. The director himself described the film as follows: "The confrontation of a man and his torment. Juxtaposed against his external composure are images of a woman and lights in distortion, with tension heightened by the sounds of power saws and a heartbeat." More specifically, I was left with the impression that Emshwiller was drawing the portrait of a serial killer's mind (the title itself, derived from Greek, literally means "meditation on death"). The man (Mac Emshwiller) sits alone in a dark room, rational reality fluctuating around him. A mysterious woman (Becky Arnold), gleaming in white, dances around the room, but so hideously distorted is her form that she more closely resembles a demon, twisting and writhing in apparent agony, her pain placing evil thoughts in the man's mind. Sex and violence merge into a singularly disturbing image of obsession and inner torment. The film ends with the indistinct silhouette of the man walking through a city, the distorted neon lights representing his warped and fractured view of reality – a chilling reminder that men like this are stalking our streets all the time.

7/10

Cartoon: The Hare-Brained Hypnotist (1942, Friz Freleng)

2009-08-20T05:56:00.000-07:00

The Hare-Brained Hypnotist (1942)

USA, 7 min

Directed by: Friz Freleng

Written by: Michael Maltese (story)

Starring: Mel Blanc (voice), Arthur Q. Bryan (voice)

When dim-witted Elmer Fudd gets his hands on a book about hypnotism, we just know that it won't take long for his plan to backfire… what we didn't anticipate, however, is that it would subsequently backfire again in his favour. The Hare-Brained Hypnotist (1942) was directed by Friz Freleng, and was released October 31, 1942. The cartoon is notable in that the animators have reverted back to the Elmer Fudd we're all accustomed to, after retiring the experimental rotund version that was last featured in Fresh Hare (1942). It is also interesting in that, unlike the majority of Bugs' encounters with Fudd, the humiliation isn't all one-way traffic, and the pair actually find their traditional comedic roles to have been reversed due to the influence of the powerful hypnotism. The film ends with arrogant Bugs as the fall-guy, having been duped into the belief that he is a Douglas XB-19 experimental bomber aircraft ("I'm the B-19!"), promptly due at the airport to make his flight.

The characteristically-dim Fudd opens the cartoon on his usual hunting trip through the forest, though he's also found it necessary to read a new book at the same time. When he happens upon the secret to hypnotism, Fudd tests the technique on a ferocious bear, which is soon fluttering in the stratosphere with the presupposition of being a canary. Here, he decides, is his real opportunity to bamboozle the "pesky wabbit" once and for all. But, of course, Bugs proves himself to be more troublesome than his opponent had anticipated, and it isn't long before Fudd finds himself at the receiving end of a hypnotist's powerful glare. This is when director Friz Freleng turns the tables: after Fudd is ordered to act like a rabbit, he immediately hijacks Bugs' usual comedic niche, and the hapless rabbit, despite thinking himself the winner in this particular spate, is consistently out-witted by the stealthy wabbit known as Elmer Fudd. The cleverest Merrie Melodies are those that recognise the series' clichés and actively subvert them – The Hare-Brained Hypnotist does this very well.

7/10

Drama: For His Son (1912, D.W. Griffith)

2009-08-20T05:43:00.000-07:00

For His Son (1912)

USA, 15 min

Directed by: D.W. Griffith

Written by: Emmett C. Hall

Starring: Charles Hill Mailes, Charles West, Blanche Sweet, William Bechtel, Dorothy Bernard, Christy Cabanne

For His Son (1912) is one of D.W. Griffith's most unusual Biograph shorts. At first, I thought that he was aiming to produce an ironic farce: a distinguished physician (Charles Hill Mailes), in order to satisfy his leeching son's (Charles West) demands for cash, invents a carbonated drink laced with cocaine, and he calls it "Dopokoke." Well, I certainly laughed. But Griffith carries forth with a solemn face, ultimately punishing the "criminal selfishness" of the devoted father with extreme prejudice. Oddly enough, the story isn't even far-fetched: I was startled to learn that the original Coca-Cola formulation (for that is undoubtedly the beverage under trial here) did, in fact, contain substantial amounts of cocaine, but that was before the drug's health risks became widely known, and certainly before its sale was prohibited in the United States in 1914. Griffith's main motivation behind this film appears to be one of public service, in the same manner with which he condemned corporate greed in A Corner in Wheat (1909) and inadequate policies for the elderly in What Shall We Do with Our Old? (1911).

The one thing I found most interesting about For His Son is how ruthlessly Griffith condemns the physician. Financially crippled by his son's constant demands for money, the loyal father only then turns to commercial enterprise to provide for his family. But then, I suppose, vanity and selfishness soon intrude upon his fatherly devotion. The physician is later introduced by the banner "Blind to the effects of his greed," and is shown mugging directly into the camera, fists clenched and cigar in mouth: a classic Griffith image of corporate gluttony. Until this moment, I had fully expected the son to be branded the selfish villain, but instead he is portrayed as a victim, controlled and later destroyed by his cocaine addiction. Despite approaching the subject matter with a straight-faced obstinacy that simply demands ridicule, Griffith shows a strong command of the developing cinematic language. Particularly impressive is a series of cross-cuts designed, not to provoke suspense as in The Lonedale Operator (1911), but to emphasise the widespread scourge of the Copokoke beverage, as both main characters and nameless extras fall victim to its evils.

6/10

Comedy: Mabel's Strange Predicament (1914, Henry Lehrman & Mack Sennett)

2009-08-08T05:57:00.000-07:00

Mabel's Strange Predicament (1914)
USA, 17 min
Directed by: Henry Lehrman, Mack Sennett
Written by: Henry Lehrman
Starring: Charles Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Chester Conklin, Alice Davenport, Harry McCoy, Hank Mann, Al St. John

Walt Disney stated that his prime inspiration for creating Mickey Mouse was Chaplin's Tramp character. However, the Mickey seen in Plane Crazy (1928) and Steamboat Willie (1928) bears little resemblance to the gallant hopeless-romantic whom Chaplin made famous in The Kid (1921) and other classic features. Instead, the early "evil" Mickey Mouse probably took a few leaves from the book of Chaplin's early "evil" tramp, who is here portrayed as a drunken scumbag who tries to take advantage of a pajama-clad Mabel Normand. Mabel's Strange Predicament (1914) was, in fact, the birth of Chaplin's Little Tramp character, though Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) was released two days earlier. As the title suggests, the star of the film is actually Normand, who was a leading comedienne in her day, and this was the first film in a series of collaborations for the pair.

In a hotel lobby, an intoxicated tramp sloppily flirts with Mabel, somehow deciding that yanking on her dog's tail is a surefire way of attracting the girl's attention. Mabel huffily storms off to her room, but later runs into Chaplin in the hallway, after having locked herself out of her room wearing only pajamas. What follows is an amusing farce that resembles something the Marx Brothers would have cooked up, as Mabel evades the Tramp by taking cover under the bed of another man, whose wife arrives home and comes to the natural conclusion. This isn't high-class comedy, but Chaplin is clearly the shining light of the film: he staggers drunkenly from room to room, with an exasperated sneer beneath his moustache, and every time he falls down it is actually uproariously funny. Don't ask me how he did it, but nobody (except maybe Buster Keaton) could ever take a tumble like Chaplin could.
6/10

Avant-Garde: Night Music (1986, Stan Brakhage)

2009-08-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

Night Music (1986)
USA, 30 sec

Directed by: Stan Brakhage

One can't critique a Stan Brakhage work the way one does an ordinary film. I'm not entirely convinced that the director had anything specific in mind when he created Night Music (1986), but, whatever he was going for, it was something subliminal. Though running for a mere thirty seconds (making this, I believe, the shortest film I've ever seen), the eye is greeted with dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of individual hand-painted images, each shimmering from the frame like searing patches of napalm. What Brakhage is showing us is unclear, but probably irrelevant – more important is what we actually see. Me? I saw the vastness of outer space, glittering with blazing nebulae of dust and flame. I saw a frantic oceanic battle, with ships floundering in the waves. I saw a village disappear in an explosion of fire. Then I watched Night Music again, and again, and saw something different every time. The human brain is a brilliant if peculiar interpretor of visual information, and Brakhage taps into the mind's inherent subjectivity. With this goal in mind, he produced a series of silent hand-painted short films, the most impressive of which is The Dante Quartet (1987), a six-minute adaptation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy."

6/10

Comedy: Cops (1922, Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton)

2009-07-21T21:09:00.000-07:00

Cops (1922)
USA, 18 min
Directed by: Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton
Written by: Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton
Starring: Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts, Virginia Fox, Edward F. Cline

Lying in bed with a sore throat, I needed some cheering up. Buster Keaton didn't let me down. Cops (1922) is generally typical of the comedian's two-reelers of the early 1920s, though with a lesser emphasis on the ingenious gadgets exhibited in One Week (1920) and The High Sign (1921). The film opens with Keaton apparently looking through prison bars at his sweetheart, until a clarifying shot reveals that it is merely the girl's front gate {Harold Lloyd seized this visual gag for the opening of Safety Last! (1923), but he had a right to it – one scene in Keaton's film, whether unintentionally or not, resembles the manner in which a prop explosion decapitated Lloyd's hand in 1919}. After convincing himself to become a businessman, Keaton's Young Man goes on to show that he has the worst luck in the world. First, he is bamboozled into purchasing another family's furniture (by Steve Murphy, the pickpocket in Chaplin's The Circus (1928)), and then gets caught up in a police parade, where, ever a victim of circumstance, he is wrongly accused of performing an act of terrorism.

Keaton loved ending his film's with an overblown chase sequence, whether it be the stampeding cattle in Go West (1925) or the stampeding women in Seven Chances (1925). In Cops, our hero is pursued by hundreds of uniformed policemen, swinging batons and tripping over themselves. Here, Keaton really earns his title as the "Great Stone Face." The chaos and confusion of the pursuit is amusing enough, but even more so is Keaton's extraordinary lack of facial expression – he just runs, staring blankly ahead, like a man who expects his problems to dissipate as soon as he wakes up. Also incredible is the performer's physical dexterity, as he flips back and forth over a tall ladder balanced precariously on either side of a fence. Also watch out for Keaton regular Joe Roberts as the Police Chief, and recurring co-star Virginia Fox in a disappointingly brief role as our hero's love interest. Even an aching throat can't dampen the chuckles in this excellent comedy short. If laughter is, indeed, the best medicine, then I should be better by the morning.
8/10

Avant-Garde: L'Arrivee (1998, Peter Tscherkassky)

2009-07-11T17:30:00.001-07:00

L'Arrivee (1998)
Austria, 2 min
Directed by: Peter Tscherkassky
Written by: Peter Tscherkassky
Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Omar Sharif (archive footage)

For some reason, you've got to admire any filmmaker who dedicates his entire career to re-editing other peoples' films. Peter Tscherkassky has done just that, and L'arrivée (1998) is my first taste of his work. Manipulating "found footage" from Terence Young's Mayerling (1968), this two-minute short is an overt homage to the Lumière brothers, visually suggesting Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896). I've never really been taken by the notion of Deconstructionist cinema – that which explores the inherent artificiality of the film medium – but I found some interest in this particular piece. The picture seemingly opens without any film in the projector, showing only a white background with the far edge of the image creeping ever-so-sightly into frame. Owen Land's Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering,… etc (1966) was excruciating because nothing happened, but Tscherkassky gives us the semblance of a narrative, something to anticipate: we urge forward the creeping film image as we might urge Jimmy Stewart up the stairs in Vertigo (1958).

Tscherkassky is remarking upon cinema's use of visual narrative, a well-worn formula that takes us back to Auguste and Louis Lumière. Anticipation, Crisis, Resolution: the camera awaits the arrival of a train, identically to how we, the audience, await the arrival of the film image into frame. Once the picture has settled into its correct groove, the train collides with its mirror-image, and the film negative almost destroys itself in a gut-wrenching tangle of film reels. Out of this chaos emerges actress Catherine Deneuve, who alights from the train, apparently unharmed by this temporal disruption of her own existence, and falls into the arms of her lover, Omar Sharif. Against all logic, out of this violence has materialised a happy ending, a final kiss offering resolution where there had been no hope of any. Critic Stefan Grissemann describes L'arrivée as "a film in the process of approaching." That sounds about right; it's a film whose very existence provides its own narrative.
5/10

Soviet: Story of One Crime (1962, Fyodor Khitruk)

2009-07-07T01:43:00.000-07:00

Story of One Crime (1962)

Soviet Union, 20 min

Directed by: Fyodor Khitruk

Written by: Mikhail Volpin (screenplay)

Starring: Zinoviy Gerd (voice)

Fyodor Khitruk is best-known for directing the Soviet Vinni-Pukh ("Winnie the Pooh") films, but his debut Story of One Crime (1962) presents a far less utopian world than that created by A.A. Milne. When Vasily Vasilievitch Mamim, a mild-mannered accountant, attacks two women with a frying pan one morning, he is surrounded by a mob of angry onlookers, and a policeman arriving on the scene decides to set the clock back twenty-four hours to see what could possibly have turned this previously-contented man into a dangerous lunatic. The culprit is revealed to be a single sleepless night, thrust upon poor Vasily by a succession of inconsiderate neighbours in his high-rise apartment building: one man plays his stereo at full-blast, another holds a boisterous party at some ridiculous time of night, two love-struck lovers communicate loudly through the pipes at 3 o'clock in the morning.

In a nutshell, Story of One Crime is about the selfishness of modern society. Despite treating everybody else he meets with complete consideration – offering his train seat to an older gentleman, for example – Vasily is continually inconvenienced by neighbours who are too thoughtlessly insensitive to care about his own needs. The animation style is simple but effective. Khitruk uses split-screens like the panels in a picture-book, in a manner similar to that employed by Norshteyn in The Fox and the Hare (1973). The characters are all drawn as basic caricatures, who bark like jazz instruments when they argue with each other. Khitruck continued this theme of society's selfishness, more successfully in my view, in his film Island (1973), in which the main character is stranded on a tiny island and consistently ignored by every passing vessel. A simple message, but an entertaining film.

7/10

Avant-garde: Footnote to Fact (1933, Lewis Jacobs)

2009-07-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

Footnote to Fact (1933)

USA, 8 min

Directed by: Lewis Jacobs
Footnote to Fact (1933) was originally intended by director Lewis Jacobs to be the first film in a four-part documentation of the Great Depression, collectively titled "As I Walk." The remaining three installments were never completed, and this film was thought lost until the 1990s, when the original negative was rediscovered by the Anthology Film Archives. As an avant-garde blending of documentary and fiction, the film works. It is similar in style to the many "city symphonies" that were popular in the 1920s, utilising the Soviet montage editing of Dziga Vertov and Hans Richter. In contrast, however, Jacobs centres the film's emotional base around a single character, an old woman sitting alone in her apartment, rocking back and forth. The film uses the woman's rocking motion as a kind of visual motif, juxtaposing it with similar movements in the hustle-and-bustle of the city: a shopper loads fruit into a paper bag, a shoe-polisher goes about his trade, hanging clothing sways back and forth in the breeze.

The film's opening half illustrates the life and vitality of the city, which is contrasted with the lethargy of the rocking woman. Later, Jacobs slows down his editing pace slightly, photographs sparser crowds of people, and portrays the otherwise unseen effects of the Depression: an antique shop goes out of business; homeless men lay asleep on doorsteps, ignored by passers-by. Powerfully, and perhaps a little harshly, Jacobs compares these sleeping men to slaughtered swine carcasses. Footnote to Fact is a good effort at montage, but the old woman in the rocking chair really got on my nerves. For one, she was clearly a young woman dressed up to look old, and her ridiculous appearance – dreary eyes, mouth gaping wide – broke the film's spell every time she appeared on screen. Of course, Jacobs eventually offers us a reason (and a perfectly good one) for why this should be so, but by then the damage was already done. This film can be found in the "Unseen Cinema" box-set, under the volume entitled "Picturing a Metropolis."

6/10

Cartoon: The Old Mill (1937, Wilfred Jackson)

2009-06-30T21:12:00.000-07:00

The Old Mill (1937)

USA, 9 min

Directed by: Wilfred Jackson

Written by: Dick Rickard (uncredited)

Walt Disney's series of "Silly Symphonies," which ran between 1929 and 1939, was originally envisioned as a testing-ground for many of the elaborate animation techniques that would eventually be utilised so effectively in the studio's feature-length films. The cartoons, running less than ten minutes, began as brief vignettes of dancing animals and plants (and even human skeletons) set to classical music, such as The Skeleton Dance (1929) and Flowers and Trees (1932), but eventually expanded towards adapting classic fairy-tales, as seen in Three Little Pigs (1933) and both versions of The Ugly Duckling (1931 and 1939). Thus, throughout the ten years that Silly Symphonies were produced, the emphasis was always on visual innovation, and dialogue was always kept to a minimum. Wilfred Jackson's The Old Mill (1937) is perhaps Disney's all-time greatest achievement, and certainly my favourite to date, and was originally conceived for artists to experiment with the animation of animals, rain, wind, lightning, ripples, splashes and reflection, and was the debut of Disney's revolutionary multiplane camera.

Interestingly, that The Old Mill was essentially a trial-run for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) probably contributed to its greatness. Unburdened by any notion of a solid narrative, the film allows the viewer to simply sit back and lose themselves in the atmosphere of the nature scene. The loose plot concerns the wildlife inhabitants of an old mill situated in an isolated swamp, and whose quiet night is suddenly violently interrupted by a terrifying and immensely-powerful storm that threatens to tear their home apart. The cartoon's attention-to-detail is simply staggering, every character lovingly drawn, their every movement and gesture almost poetic in its execution. Disney's radical and expensive multiplane camera, used here for the first time, allowed the artists to communicate animated depth like never before, and the richness of their creation feels so genuine that you could almost step into the cartoon and explore for yourself. The storm effects had come a very long way from those seen in Springtime (1929), and the lightning streaks across the sky with frightening authenticity.

Though Yuriy Norshteyn's Tale of Tales (1979) holds the official title as my favourite work of animation, Jackson's The Old Mill certainly comes a close second. The meticulousness of the animation work is such that I can almost feel the wind and rain beating across my face, and the miniature dramas of the rainstorm – the bird protecting its eggs from the spoke of the wheel, the owl shielding itself from the elements, the mill pitching over in the gale – always keep me gripping my seat in anticipation. The choice of music, too, plays a pivotal role in developing the required atmosphere. The musical tone early in the film is lighthearted and bouncy, with the chorus of croaking frogs forming a melody that sounds a bit like "The Sorceror's Apprentice." I'm unsure of the piece that plays during the storm's onset, but it is wonderful, bringing a frighteningly ethereal tone that suggests something epic and supernatural about this force of nature. A "silly" Symphony this is not; The Old Mill remains one of the most majestic and heartwarming cartoons ever made.

10/10

Soviet: Time Out (1984, Priit Pärn)

2009-06-18T22:31:00.000-07:00

Time Out (1984)

Soviet Union (Estonia), 9 min

Directed by: Priit Pärn

Written by: Priit Pärn

Priit Pärn's Time Out (1984) is as nonsensical as a Terry Gilliam cartoon, but with even more randomness to spare. The story, such as it is, concerns an overworked cat who wakes up and is immediately engaged in a flurry of stressful morning activities, eventually working himself into a nervous breakdown. At this point, the cat enters an imaginary inner world that temporarily removes him from the chaos of his daily routine, similar to the reveries of Jonathan Pryce's character in Gilliam's Brazil (1985). At this point, any semblance of narrative is thrown out the window. What I found most interesting amid all this craziness was how Pärn accentuated the surrealism of the cat's fantasies by toying with visual perception, a bit like M.C. Escher's tessellations – an apparent river is revealed to be a dwarf's blue hat; a bird rotates its beak to become a wizard's hat; a crow tries to take off, only to find that its tail is a turn-off in the road.

Eventually, the cat reawakens from his daydream and falls back into the chaotic routine to which he's become accustomed. His "escape" into fantasy, oddly enough, was no less hectic than his usual schedule, though he does admittedly have a greater control over the elements of his environment. Priit Pärn's visual style is a departure from the traditional Soviet animation of earlier decades, decidedly less graceful and with a slap-dash quality that suggests the animator was basically making it up as he went {visually, one might venture that the film is closest to the "Nu, pogodi!" series (1969-1993)}. There's even an appearance from a giant stamping foot, probably indicating that Pärn was, indeed, influenced by Gilliam's work on "Monty Python's Flying Circus." I usually enjoy Soviet animation for its gorgeous visuals, so I'm not sure that Time Out was necessarily my sort of film – but, even so, that was a wild ten minutes. I'm sure I'll be revisiting Pärn's other work at some later date.

6/10

Avant-Garde: Puce Moment (1949, Kenneth Anger)

2009-06-15T18:10:00.000-07:00

Puce Moment (1949)
USA, 6 min
Directed by: Kenneth Anger
Written by: Kenneth Anger
Starring: Yvonne Marquis
Puce Moment (1949) is, oddly enough, my first film from director Kenneth Anger. As soon as it began, I realised I'd discovered a filmmaker who stood well ahead of his time. Is that folk rock playing on the soundtrack? Surely, I told myself, such a song has no place in a 1949 film – but the technique has since become commonplace in movies and music videos. The film's vibrant colour photography clashes uncertainly with the shaky hand-held filming style, suggesting the rising experimental movement of the 1960s. It's peculiar that Anger wasn't even attempting to be "trendy" or "modern" with his film-making style. Puce Moment, originally intended as a feature, was supposed to be emulating the opulent Hollywood lifestyles of the silent era. The film opens with a 1920s movie star (Yvonne Marquis) lavishly searching for a suitable dress from her extensive wardrobe of flapper gowns, before applying perfume, languishing lazily on a chair, and then taking her four dogs for a walk. Strangely, it all barely feels like the 1920s. Does this mean that the film failed in what it was attempting? Maybe, but it's a glorious failure. Anger's condemnation of the movie star's decadent daily routine preempts Billy Wilder's critique in Sunset Blvd. (1950), and his film-making style clearly influenced the experimental cinema of the coming decades. This was my first film from Kenneth Anger, but it certainly won't be my last.
6/10

Cartoon: Frolicking Fish (1930, Burt Gillett)

2009-06-11T18:41:00.000-07:00

Frolicking Fish (1930)

USA, 6 min

Directed by: Burt Gillett

Frolicking Fish (1930) certainly isn't Finding Nemo (2003), but it's likely that Pixar received at least some inspiration from this early Silly Symphony. When it came to Disney's basic musical cartoons, which sacrificed story for anthropomorphised movement, few directors were more adept than director Burt Gillett, whose finest effort is Flowers and Trees (1932). Here, he takes us beneath the ocean, where life is great. Fish and crustaceans coexist harmoniously, dancing and playing musical instruments; that is, until the evil black octopus arrives to spoil everybody's fun – never trust a mollusc! The Disney animators were fond, where exotic creatures were concerned, of zooming in on their gaping mouths, perhaps to create the sensation that the cinema audience is being swallowed up by those massive jaws. Here, it happens with a fish; in Hell's Bells (1929) it was a demon of some sort, and a lion in Cannibal Capers (1930). This was Disney exploring the unique artistic possibilities afforded by the animation medium, since such shots would have been virtually impossible to replicate in live-action. The cartoon finds some semblance of narrative in its final minute, when the octopus tries to hunt down and eat a terrified fish, which wriggles out from between the octopus' big white teeth (no horny beak on this one) and drops a hefty-looking ship anchor onto his attacker. It's a bloody – or that should be inky – end to one of the most sinister Silly Symphony villains.

6/10

Soviet: Conflict (1983, Garri Bardin)

2009-06-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

Konflikt / Conflict (1983)
Soviet Union, 7 min
Directed by: Garri Bardin

Written by: Garri Bardin

Having seen all sorts of anti-Cold War films from the United States, it was refreshing to watch a film from the other side in the conflict. At the very least, it's reassuring to know that both sides were equally terrified at the prospect of nuclear war. Garri Bardin's Conflict (1983) is similar in principle to Norman McLaren's Neighbours (1952). However, instead of animating real-life people for an anti-war protest, Bardin uses matchsticks – an appropriate metaphor given that even the slightest spark of conflict could very well have ended in the destruction of our entire race {take the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, for example}. In the film, two groups of matches are separated by an arbitrary boundary line – obviously representing the Berlin Wall – which is guarded vigilantly by armed soldiers on either side. When, by no fault of anyone, the boundary shifts slightly, a minor territory dispute escalates into a globe-shattering altercation.

Conflict has a simple point to make, and it makes it well. The matchsticks from both territories initially emerge from the same matchbox, suggesting that they're merely fighting with themselves over arbitrary distinctions. McLaren's Neighbours had a peculiar quirkiness that, I thought, was counter-productive to the serious message that was trying to be made, but here Bardin makes it work with something similar. But the little visual gags – the cavalry, weapons and vehicles, all made from matchsticks – give way to horror in the final minutes, when the conflict climaxes in a nuclear strike, which leaves armies of matchsticks flailing in the flames. The final shots are not unlike the post-apocalyptic sequences in the Terminator films. Charred matchsticks stand lonely against a barren backdrop, an environment utterly devoid of life. For a long time, that's where we were headed. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

7/10

Avant-Garde: 21-87 (1964, Arthur Lipsett)

2009-06-06T18:03:00.000-07:00

21-87 (1964)
Canada, 10 min

Directed by: Arthur Lipsett

If you've ever thought that the human race was a great thing, then you need to be taken down a peg or two. Why not try some Arthur Lipsett? 21-87 (1964) might just be the bleakest, most pessimistic snapshot of society that I've ever seen, presenting the director's dissatisfaction with and even disdain for contemporary 1960s culture. A seemingly-random collage of urban footage, both scrapped from the archives of the National Film Board of Canada and photographed by Lipsett himself in Montreal and New York City, is mixed with an unrelated soundtrack that muses on the "importance" of religion in everyday life. The end result is to emphasise the emptiness, dehumanisation and alienation of modern man. Footage of a street performer imitating robot movement is followed by a robotic factory arm performing human chores; fashion models mechanically strut the catwalk with blank, impassive faces; middle-aged women browse shop windows, coveting superficial fashions forced upon them by greater society, rather than by their own independent minds.

Lipsett captures ugly, anonymous faces in the street. Each person seems to be lost in the chaos of living, disconnected from his fellow man, staring off into space at something that we do not see. Several spectators spot the camera filming them and gaze uncertainly at it; one man, coming up an escalator, raises a newspaper to obscure his face. These instances of self-awareness could easily have been edited out, but are instead given prominence. Lipsett's camera – and, thus, his film – is showing these people the mechanical emptiness of their everyday lives, but they're in denial, unwilling to exhibit their depravity for the impartial eye of the camera lens. One sequence perfectly encapsulates this distorted self-perception, as men and women playfully grin at warped reflections of themselves in a carnival mirror (one little girl apparently isn't fooled, and recoils tearfully from the grotesque image of herself). Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930) contends that only through the personal suffering of the artist can a beautiful work of art be created. If so, 21-87 is the suffering of its creator.

7/10

Comedy: The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933, Clyde Bruckman)

2009-06-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933)

USA, 21 min

Directed by: Clyde Bruckman

Written by: W.C. Fields

Starring: W.C. Fields, Rosemary Theby, George Chandler, Richard Cramer

They say that W.C. Fields was unique among comedians, and I'm not going to argue. The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), generally ranked among his best efforts, wasn't as consistently hilarious as I'd been hoping, but one does certainly recognise that Fields had a style that was all his own. The film opens in the frozen Yukon goldfields, where a prospector sits huddled in the primitive shelter of a wooden hut – I immediately thought of Chaplin in The Gold Rush (1925), but then the characters started speaking and the spell was broken. The loose plot concerns a simpleton prospector whose son travelled to the city and was consumed by the bottle, eventually winding up in prison for three years. It all unfolds in mock seriousness, with every character shamelessly hamming their lines to the camera in broad, ridiculous accents. From Fields' apparent contempt for his own storyline, I'd say he was satirising a type of film that was relatively common in the early sound era, the sort of sombre morality tale about the corruption of the Big City on impressionable rural minds.

Perhaps Fields' type of comedy takes some getting used to, and his absurdist style of wit might easily be misconstrued as sloppy or stilted. Are those rear projections supposed to look so ridiculously fake? I'd like to think so, but, then again, I've seen many movies where obviously-bogus backgrounds have been used with a completely straight face. A lot of the time, Fields' lack of subtlety works perfectly. There's absolutely no reason why getting hit in the face with snow after saying "and it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast" should be funny the sixth time around, but I laughed every time it happened. There's also a droll self-referential moment when Fields chokes on the artificial snow and declares, "tastes more like cornflakes." Even so, while good for the occasional chuckle, The Fatal Glass of Beer feels oddly sparse in terms of laugh-out-loud jokes, and I certainly wasn't rolling in the aisles. Straight afterwards, I watched Buster Keaton's Cops (1922), and that actually did have me laughing my head off – but that'd be opening a whole new can of worms, wouldn't it?

6/10

Soviet: Welcome! (1986, Alexei Karaev)

2009-06-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

Welcome! (1986)
Soviet Union, 10 min
Directed by: Alexei Karaev
Written by: Dr. Seuss (book), Yuriy Koval (writer)
Starring: Anatoli Barantsev, Aleksei Borzunov, Lyudmila Gnilova, Evgeni Leonov, Klara Rumyanova (voice)

Dobro pozhalovat / Welcome! (1986) is an (unauthorised) adaptation of Dr. Seuss' 1948 story "Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose." This ten-minute animated short film features stunning paint-on-glass animation, and, not surprisingly, involved the talents of the two Soviet animators best known for the technique – Alexei Karaev {The Lodgers of an Old House (1987)} as director, and future Oscar-winner Aleksandr Petrov {The Old Man and the Sea (1999)} as art director. The latter would make his co- directing debut two years later with the Mickey Mouse tribute Marafon (1988), and his solo debut the following year with the Oscar-nominated Korova (1989). The paint-on-glass films with which Petrov made his name utilised an animation style that might be described as romantic realism. Welcome! takes inspiration from its source material, developing the inherent zaniness of Dr. Seuss' tale to produce character animation that is slightly goofy; the moose, for example, has a long, thin legs and a head slightly too big for his body, with large, sad eyes that accentuate his emotions.

In the film, a kind-hearted moose on the prowl for vegetation is talked into allowing an insect to hitchhike on his antlers. The bug invites a spider to share the ride with him. A wood-pecker soon joins them. Having already opened up his antlers to one free-loader, the poor moose can't bring himself to refuse any additional requests, and soon he's carting about an menagerie. When, in his search for more food, the moose decides to cross a lake, his passengers choose to exercise their democratic rights, claiming that they should have a say as to the movements of their new "home." Thus, the moose loses his autonomy. I don't want to overstate the political undertones of a children's work, but Theodor Seuss Geisel (penname "Dr. Seuss") was, in his early cartoon career, a passionate opponent of Hitler's fascist regime, and this story suggests to me how dictatorship can arise through seemingly democratic means, and without citizens realising until it's too late. Perhaps Alexei Karaev was consciously reapplying these themes to the history of the Soviet Union.
7/10

Avant-Garde: Mechanical Principles (1930, Ralph Steiner)

2009-05-21T23:54:00.000-07:00

Mechanical Principles (1930)
USA, 10 min
Directed by: Ralph Steiner One might consider Mechnical Principles (1930) to be the converse of Ralph Steiner's most well-known work, H2O (1929). The latter film was a close-up examination of water, focusing intensely on the reflection and refraction of light by the liquid surface, an entirely natural substance that mesmerises through the sheer poetic randomness of its movements. There's nothing random about the mechanical movements of the former film. Cogs turn, pistons pump – repetitively and relentlessly, Mankind's constructions continue to carve perfect geometric circles. It's a bit like watching mathematics in motion. The transition between each shot is wonderfully smooth, the film constructed as a sort of mechanical waltz.

Around this time, Hollywood directors like Busby Berkeley were engineering extravagant musical numbers in which dancers were utilised as mere cogs in a machine, each movement dependent upon the ability of the individual dancers to perform their role without error. In Mechanical Principles, this perfection is assured, for Man has never been able to replicate the precision of his machines. I've always found it fascinating how two men can view the same thing through very different eyes. There's something almost affectionate about how Steiner frames the perfectly-weighted movement of the factory machinery, and yet this is the same sort of industrial monotony against which Charles Chaplin campaigned in Modern Times (1936). Maybe both artists are right. Mechanical Principles is surely a mesmerising ten minutes, but, had it gone on for much longer, I might have ended up as hopelessly deranged as Chaplin's Little Tramp.
7/10

Horror: Vincent (1982, Tim Burton)

2009-05-16T00:20:00.001-07:00

Vincent (1982)
USA, 6 min
Directed by: Tim Burton
Written by: Tim Burton
Starring: Vincent Price (voice)

Vincent (1982) isn't the sort of film that you'd expect to come out of Walt Disney Productions, but it's exactly what you'd expect from Tim Burton. The director's first success, this six-minute animated short is both an affectionate tribute to the acting career of Vincent Price, and a vehicle for Burton's perverse sense of black humour. Vincent Malloy is a seven-year-old boy with an unhealthy obsession with the actor who shares his name, such that he actively wishes to become Vincent Price – or, more accurately, the range of characters that Price so memorably brought to the silver screen. Via increasingly-ghoulish flights of imagination, young Vincent envisages mutating his dog into a zombie henchman, dipping his auntie into hot wax, and attempting to dig up the totting corpse of his dead wife. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with Price's body of work to spot all the references, but I'm fairly certain that among the movies Burton had in mind were House of Wax (1953), House of Usher (1960), The Last Man on Earth (1964) and, of course, The Raven (1963).

The film is animated in a style reminiscent of 1920s German Expressionism, with the continually-shifting walls and furniture serving to convey Vincent's escalating madness. A definite stylistic inspiration would also have been Ted Parmelee's The Tell-Tale Heart (1953), an excellent animated short film (based on Edgar Allen Poe's short story) that utilised Expressionism to emphasise the insanity of its narrator, voiced by James Mason. But Tim Burton goes one better than James Mason, employing the services of Vincent Price himself, who considered the film one of the most memorable tributes he'd ever received. Price narrates the story as a poem, in a manner than suggests the work of Dr. Seuss, but was probably aiming more to emulate Poe's "The Raven," the final lines of which is used to close the story. Like Poe's protagonists in both "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," young Vincent is left at the whim of his insanity, offered little opportunity for redemption or resolution. If you can handle Burton's macabre sense of humour, then this is a gem.
7/10

Avant-Garde: The Soul of the Cypress (1921, Dudley Murphy)

2009-05-12T04:40:00.000-07:00

The Soul of the Cypress (1921)

USA, 7 min

Directed by: Dudley Murphy

Written by: Dudley Murphy

Starring: Chase Harringdine

The Soul of the Cypress (1921) reminds me of two Dimitri Kirsanoff short films from the mid-1930s. Les Berceaux (1935) was an ode to the men who spend their lives at sea, depicting the vast ocean as something magnificent, majestic, and almost immortal. La Fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936) was a mythical fairy-tale, in which a bare-chested hunter pursues a naked water goddess through the forest. Both films placed considerable emphasis on music, and, indeed, the latter was adapted from a classical piece by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. Dudley Murphy's The Soul of the Cypress predates both of these films, but shares the same spirit. The timelessness of the ocean had been celebrated before, as in Griffith's The Unchanging Sea (1910), but here it is reinforced through Murphy's use of mythological fantasy. Just as Kirsanoff's water goddess rises from nature to tempt a humble man, in Murphy's film the Californian coastline – amid the wind-swept cypress trees – yields a beautiful dryad, whose dancing form is framed against the crashing ocean waves.

The dryad (played by the director's wife, Chase Harringdine) is enchanted by the music of a young musician playing on the cliff-side, and she is released from her captivity within a cypress tree by his "Song of the Sea." With her clothing fluttering in the breeze, the dryad dances to the musician's side, who is equally entranced by her beauty and pursues the nymph when she takes flight. The dryad takes sanctuary inside a tree on the cliff-side, and whispers to the captivated musician that she can only be with him if he immortalises himself through death. In Murphy's treatment of the ocean, there's a certain sexual allegory at play: the trees among which the dryad dances bear the phallic connotations implied by the work of early twentieth- century photographer Anne Brigman, who often framed naked women in a primordial environment among trees and boulders, there's a kind of naturalistic eroticism. Contrary to the film's intertitle, it's not love, but a more primal sexual attraction, that leads the young musician to throw himself from the cliff.

A little research uncovered some intriguing details about The Soul of the Cypress. The version featured in the "Unseen Cinema" DVD box-set didn't particularly strike me as "avant-garde," at least not to the extent of its contemporary contributions {Richter's Rhythmus 21 (1921) or Ray's The Return to Reason (1923), for example}. However, critic David E. James (writing for "Film Quarterly" – 2003, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 25-31) notes that the Library of Congress' surviving print of the film includes a seemingly out-of-place epilogue that is basically pornographic in nature, featuring a naked woman and her lover (different actors to those playing the dryad and the musician) engaging in an explicit sexual act. This extra footage, which I haven't seen, appears to have been shot in conjunction with the main body, but obviously wasn't screened for general audiences. James contends that the sequence ties in with the film's sexual allegory, and that the musician's failure to physically explore his passion for the nymph specifically references the director's failure to consummate his marriage to Harringdine.

6/10

Animation: Moonbird (1959, John Hubley)

2009-05-07T19:01:00.000-07:00

Moonbird (1959)
USA, 10 min
Directed by: John Hubley
Starring: Mark Hubley (voice), Ray Hubley (as Hampy Hubley) (voice)

The animated short films of John and Faith Hubley (here credited as Faith Elliott) have an air of improvisation about them. While some, like The Hole (1962) and Voyage to Next (1974), were nonetheless structured around a central theme, the husband-and-wife pair were not averse to simply recording the conversations of their own children and animating whatever flights of fantasy happened to transpire. Of this type of film, Windy Day (1968), in which the Hubleys' daughters make surprisingly profound observations on the nature of love and death, is the most impressive I've seen. Moonbird (1959) won John Hubley the first of his three Oscars (also the first of seven nominations), a victory that signalled the wider acceptance of a more experimental, minimalist style of animated film, as opposed to the vibrant cartoons of Walt Disney and Warner Brothers. With Moonbird, the Hubleys animate the improvised late-night adventure of their two sons, Mark and Ray, in which the pair exchange ideas for capturing a giant "moonbird" in their backyard.

The film has a rough, somewhat scrappy, animation style that isn't necessarily aesthetically attractive, but nonetheless complements the nature of the story – which is that of a hastily-scrawled flight of imagination, a spontaneous improvisation of fantasy. The two main characters appear transparent, as though having been artificially transplanted into their dreamworld. This idea sits at the film's heart. Above all else, Moonbird stands as a tribute to the power of imagination, which is most extraordinarily powerful in one's younger, impressionable years; when Santa Claus was an annual visitor, and one's toys each had a distinct personality. The film does perhaps run a few minutes overlong. The Hubley sons say less of interest than their female siblings a decade later, and, rather than wondering aloud about their emotions and ambitions, instead engage in a charming kind of power-play in which the older son issues orders to his rebellious younger brother. All in all, this is a delightful animated short, and a good introduction to the work of the Hubleys.
6.5/10

Cartoon: Cannibal Capers (1930, Burt Gillett)

2009-05-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

Cannibal Capers (1930)

USA, 6 min

Directed by: Burt Gillett

Here's a little treasure that's rarely been allowed outside the Disney Vault. When watching Cannibal Capers (1930), one is faced with two options: you can be angered by the cartoonish racial stereotypes, or you can simply laugh, as I did, at the silliness of it all. Nowadays, most viewers are willing to dismiss perceived racism as "a sign of the times," but I think, particularly in this case, to do so is to do both Walt Disney and 1930s audiences a disservice. The caricatures of African tribesmen in Cannibal Capers are so outlandishly exaggerated that they could only have been intended as a spoof, perhaps satirising the xenophobic generalisations that were admittedly prevalent in the popular culture of the time (and they're still around today, so don't feel too vindicated). This cartoon, in line with many of the earliest Silly Symphonies, simply chooses a setting and devotes its inhabitants to a few minutes of dancing: The Skeleton Dance (1929) had skeletons, Hell's Bells (1929) had scary imps, Flowers and Trees (1932) had plants… and so Cannibal Capers has cannibals.

A major theme of the cartoon seems to be the perceived "primitiveness" of the cannibals, as they are frequently mistaken – both by the viewer and other characters – for lower forms of nature. Or perhaps, less cynically, it's more a commentary on how harmoniously the cannibals exist in their environment. For example, we first glimpse the dancers by their stick-thin legs, which are initially mistaken for trees swaying in the breeze. Later, a cannibal attempting to imitate a turtle is mistaken for one by his own villagers, and is promptly tossed into the boiling pot. But this gag can run both ways. An angry lion (introduced with a stunning zoom into his gaping jaws) loses his crown as King of the Jungle, humiliated so decisively by a cannibal that he winds up more closely resembling a (white) man in a lion suit, fleeing on his hind-limbs. Is this British Colonialism getting nipped in the bud by the locals? Also note how closely the cannibals resemble the title character in The Ugly Duckling (1931), reinforcing that cartoon's status as a racial allegory.

5.5/10

Avant-Garde: Allegretto (1936, Oskar Fischinger)

2009-05-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

Allegretto (1936)
USA, 3 min
Directed by: Oskar Fischinger

My first film from director Oskar Fischinger {though he did work on Lang's Frau im Mond (1929)} is, I hear, characteristic of his career in film: abstract animation synchronised to a musical rhythm. Allegretto (1936), his first project following his arrival in Hollywood, was originally commissioned as a segment of Paramount's The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936), but the production was later changed from Technicolor to black-and-white, and only a butchered version of Fischinger's film found its way into the final release. In any case, to deprive the animation of its colours is to remove most of its charm, something akin to watching Fantasia (1940) in greyscale. Fischinger uses the movement of geometric shapes to visually represent music melodies, in this case Ralph Rainger's "Radio Dynamics," but it's the breathtakingly vivid colours that most strongly capture the pulsating energy of the jazz tune.

Something about Fischinger's animation struck me as naggingly-familiar, but I can't quite put my finger on it. The entire film somehow resembles the sort of euphoria that a film character experiences when they step into a mighty Las Vegas casino, entering a world where suddenly everything seems possible {I'm not exactly sure why I specifically envisioned a casino – maybe it was the vibrant choice of colours, the floating diamond shapes, or the fact that I watched The Shanghai Gesture (1941) just last night}. The pulsating geometry also reminded me of the animation sequence in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Afterall, I suppose that making random subjective associations is exactly what abstract cinema is all about. Allegretto also has the benefit of a swinging jazz track that is massively enjoyable even on its own, but Fischinger adds colour, movement, and brings the music to life.

7/10

Horror: Road to Glennascaul (1951, Hilton Edwards)

2009-04-24T20:44:00.000-07:00

Road to Glennascaul (1951)
Ireland, 23 min
Directed by: Hilton Edwards
Written by: Hilton Edwards
Starring: Orson Welles, Michael Laurence, Shelah Richards, Helena Hughes, John Dunne, Isobel Couser, Ann Clery

During a break in the filming of The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (1952), Orson Welles takes the time to recount a creepy "tall tale" allegedly told to him by a broken-down motorist to whom he offered a ride. Welles plays himself in the film, acting not only as the narrator, but more involvedly as the resident storyteller. One can imagine that it was this role, in addition to his obvious talents on the radio, that inspired The Fountain of Youth (1958) – a wonderful half-hour television pilot for "The Orson Welles Show," which boasted a concept not dissimilar to "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," but with Welles taking a more active presence in each episode's production (inconceivably, the show was immediately rejected). One also suspects the film's influence on the BBC's brilliant "Ghost Story for Christmas" series, the most impressive of examples of which are A Warning to the Curious (1972) and The Signalman (1976) {adapted from stories by M.R. James and Charles Dickens, respectively}.

The best kind of ghost stories, I think, that those told through an intermediary – it keeps them grounded in reality, which paradoxically makes them all the more creepy. The viewer's natural inclination is to trust the narrator's word, but in this case the narrator must rely on the word of the motorist, Sean Merriman (Michael Laurence), who could be making the whole story up… or, he could be completely sincere. It's that uncertainty that makes Return to Glennascaul (1951) a perfectly chilling ghost tale, and a fine companion for a cold, lonely winter's night. We must not, of course, underestimate the emotional resonance of Welles' narrating voice, which contributes just as much atmosphere as Georg Fleischmann's hazy photography. The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1954, but lost out to Bear Country (1953), one of Wal Disney's two-reeler nature documentaries. In any case, think about Return to Glennascaul next time you decide to pick up two female hitch-hikers – I, for one, will be following Orson's example!
8/10

Drama: What Shall We Do with Our Old? (1911, D.W. Griffith)

2009-04-23T00:35:00.000-07:00

What Shall We Do with Our Old? (1911)
USA, 17 min
Directed by: D.W. Griffith
Starring: W. Chrystie Miller, Claire McDowell, Adolph Lestina, George Nichols, Elmer Booth, Donald Crisp, William J. Butler

D.W. Griffith's first film, Those Awful Hats (1909), was designed as a comical public service announcement of sorts. A few years later, the director continued to perform public services, but the complexity of his work had evolved exponentially. Much like A Corner in Wheat (1909), he is here using cinema to make a profound social statement, this particular issue highlighted in the film's title: What Shall We Do With Our Old? After an aging carpenter (W. Chrystie Miller) is fired from his job to make room for young workers, he is unable to find another job, leaving him, penniless, to care for his ailing wife (Claire McDowell). In order to survive, the carpenter reluctantly turns to crime, but is arrested and brought before a kindly, sympathetic judge (George Nichols). Despite the judge's understanding, it is too late for this elderly couple to be rescued from abject poverty: the wife succumbs to her illness, and the carpenter is left grieve his losses and ponder his lonely predicament.

A Corner in Wheat ends with an image of hope. What Shall We Do With Our Old? concludes with an image of despair, a pertinent social problem without any known solution. Griffith doesn't even attempt to propose any sort of resolution, which does admittedly come off as rather hypocritical – it is, after all, one thing to merely acknowledge a problem, and another to try and fix it. But the film is given emotional depth through an opening title that informs us that the story was "founded upon an actual occurrence in New York City," assuring Griffith's undeniable social relevance. Miller is very good in the main role, showing strong emotions in response to his character's hardship. Nichols, as the judge, also does well, playing the sort of sympathetic authority-figure role that Frank Capra might later have set aside for Harry Carey or Harry Davenport. McDowell, as the carpenter's sick wife, is adequate, but quite obviously far younger – 34 years old – than she was supposed to appear.
7/10

Cartoon: Red Hot Riding Hood (1943, Tex Avery)

2009-04-16T19:48:00.000-07:00

Red Hot Riding Hood (1943)
USA, 7 min
Directed by: Tex Avery
Starring: Daws Butler, June Foray, Frank Graham (voices) (uncredited)

If you thought that Little Red Riding Rabbit (1944) was an offbeat adaptation of the fairy-tale, then you haven't seen nothing yet. Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood (1943) opens in the usual fashion, but, after that, any resemblance to any known fairy-tale character, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The Wolf baulks at having to play the one-dimensional bad guy for the hundredth time, and threatens to quit if the animators can't come up with anything original. So Avery throws together Red Hot Riding Hood, an adult cartoon set in the big city – the Wolf is a sex-crazed womaniser, Red a knockout nightclub dancer, and Grandma a libidinous old lady with her own high-rise penthouse. Yes, I warned you this one was different! Somebody must have forgotten to inform Avery that he was producing cartoons for children, since there's actually little to laugh at for anybody who isn't yet acquainted with the birds and the bees.

However, for those of us who have surpassed that particular checkpoint, Red Hot Riding Hood is very funny. The sheer audacity of a children's cartoon about sex – particularly given the typically innocent and wholesome image of Little Red Riding Hood – is something to be applauded. When Red first appears on stage, tossing aside her outfit to reveal a decidedly immodest red costume, I was genuinely taken aback, and then felt somewhat ashamed of myself. No doubt the animators in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) used Red as a template for the similarly alluring Jessica Rabbit. Also worth noting is that The Mask (1994) directly referenced Red Hot Riding Hood in the scene where Jim Carrey wolf-whistles (in the full sense of the word) Cameron Diaz during her nightclub performance – I'd never realised this. The interaction between Wolf and Grandma is more conventional than the rest of the film, but still enjoyable. For fans of Tex Avery and MGM cartoons, this one is essential viewing.
7/10

Avant-Garde: Cat's Cradle (1959, Stan Brakhage)

2009-04-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

Cat's Cradle (1959)
USA, 6 min
Directed by: Stan Brakhage
Starring: Stan Brakhage, Jane Brakhage, James Tenney, Carolee Schneemann

Though as thematically incomprehensible as much of the director's work, in terms of the mood that Brakhage is able to cultivate, Cat's Cradle (1959) is an excellent short film. The home in which the film is set is perpetually bathed in a warm, glowing ambiance, a combination of red and orange hues that suggests comfort, intimacy, love and lust. Brakhage sits against a wall, puffing contemplatively on a cigarette. Wife Jane Brakhage poses uncertainly for the camera – even in such brief flashes, she has a smile that lights up the screen. Though you wouldn't notice it on first viewing, also present are family friends James Tenney and Carolee Schneemann. But most prominent among the film's characters is a domestic cat, coloured black but always bathed in that ghostly reddish light. Rather than being an omen of bad luck, the feline instead serves as the entity that draws together the disparate elements – characters who are rarely seen sharing the same frame – into a cohesive household.

It's probably never a good idea to blend unrelated works of art, but I must admit that the Beatles' "Revolution 9" harmonised perfectly with the film's images, and even to a certain extent enhanced them. Brakhage's films often capture instants in time – prolonging, accelerating, and repeating these moments – and so creating a rhythm of disjointed time that is beautifully complemented by the nonsensical, psychedelic sound collage of John Lennon's avant-garde oddity, which makes frequent use of tape loops and backmasking. Brakhage's montage is unrelenting, each shot disappearing from the screen as often as it came, but, perhaps because he recycles certain frames on numerous occasions, the end result is neither jarring nor disorientating – that Brakhage had no intentions of telling a conventional narrative was, given his stylistic choices, certainly beneficial. The sensuality of the colour palette left me feeling rather flushed, as though I'd been sitting with an intense fluorescent light beaming against the back of my neck.
7/10

Cartoon: Blitz Wolf (1942, Tex Avery)

2009-04-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

Blitz Wolf (1942)
USA, 10 min
Directed by: Tex Avery
Written by: Rich Hogan
Starring: Pinto Colvig (voice), Frank Graham (voice), Bill Thompson (voice)

We all love to make fun of Adolf Hitler. He's the sort of political figure who's tailor-made for caricature, as Charles Chaplin discovered with The Great Dictator (1940). But it also happens that he was a monster, one whose success spawned the most devastating conflict the human race has ever known. So it's with some uncertainty that comedy and propaganda combine in Tex Avery's Blitz Wolf (1942). That same year, Jack Kinney's Der Fuehrer's Face (1942) won an Oscar for showing Donald Duck's miserable life in "Nutzi" land, where he is continually battered into submission by the machinery of fascism, but Avery's cartoon is rather more open about its hatred towards Germany's leader. An opening title mocks convention by declaring that "the wolf in this photoplay is NOT fictitious. Any similarity between this Wolf and that (*!!*!) jerk Hitler is purely intentional!" Thus, the knives are sharpened, and Adolf Hitler's animated counterpart is about to receive his due.

Blitz Wolf is styled around the tale of the Three Little Pigs (particularly the 1933 Disney Silly Symphony) – certainly the most offbeat version of the story you'll ever see – with the Big Bad Wolf having attained a characteristic moustache and a distinctive German accent. The first two pigs, having misguidedly entered into a peace treaty with the Wolf, are surprised to have their homes destroyed by his armies (this Wolf is too weak and cowardly to blow down houses himself, and instead uses mechanical beasts to do his dirty work). The third pig, his home a veritable steel fortress (a sign announcing "No dogs/Japs allowed!"), urges his brothers to help fight their collective enemy, both in combat and by purchasing war bonds. Not surprisingly, the remainder of the film consists of the Hitler-Wolf being continually shot and blasted from all angles, until he eventually wakes to find himself in the fiery dungeons of Hell. It gets a little bit repetitive, but, of course, Hitler deserves to be exploded as many times as possible.

Whereas I found Der Fuehrer's Face to be a highly rewatchable cartoon, even nearly seventy years later, Avery's take on Nazism isn't quite so fresh. There are some excellent word gags, such as a title on the Wolf's tank reading "Der Fewer (Der Better)," but there are also some self-referential signs that may elicit a disbelieving groan: "Gone with the Wind" when the first pig's house is blown away (despite the animators' acknowledgement of its corniness) and "Long darn thing, isn't it?" when we can clearly already see that the pigs' weaponry is rather lengthy. For the adults, there's also plenty of mischievous sexual innuendo at play, particularly in the comparisons made between the length of each army's cannons. One gag, with a suddenly-limp American cannon being rejuvenated by a dosage of Vitamin B1, was certainly more forward than I'm used to from 1940s children's cartoons. Overall, Blitz Wolf is not the most intelligent of animated shorts, but it's an interesting historical document, and a bit of fun, too.
6/10

Animation: The Hole (1962, John Hubley)

2009-04-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

The Hole (1962)
USA, 15 min
Directed by: John Hubley
Written by: John Hubley, Faith Hubley
Starring: Dizzy Gillespie (voice), George Mathews (voice)

I've really grown to like the films of John and Faith Hubley, and something about their style always struck me as familiar, but I could never quite put my finger on it. Then I saw the introductory title "an observation by John and Faith Hubley," and it came to me – this film is a precursor to "Seinfeld!" Don't lambast me just yet, I'll explain. Anybody who has seen the series' DVD releases would undoubtedly be familiar with the bonus Seinimations, directed by Eric Yahnker, which presented crude animations that synchronised with the many bizarre conversations of Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. These snippets are worthwhile, not for their visuals, but for the vocal interplay between the contributing characters, and the essence of this idea was already entrenched in the films of the Hubleys, who typically constructed visuals around a spontaneous, free-flowing conversation between two people. The Hole (1962), John Hubley's second Oscar-winning short, tackles, among other things, the nature of accidents, and whether the notion applies to nuclear war.

Two construction workers (voiced by Dizzy Gillepsie and George Matthews) are engaged in conversation as they work. The pair's interaction, as was the Hubleys' style, doesn't feel scripted in the least, following a natural pathway that begins with discussion of everyday issues and ends with the reality of nuclear war. Citizens in the early 1960s were, of course, faced with the height of the Cold War, and this is very much reflected in the cinema of the day. The characters in The Hole reflect upon the possibility of nuclear war being caused by a technical glitch – a scenario terrifyingly brought to life in Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe (1964) – but one contends that even this can't be considered a passive, blameless "accident," as it is we who knowingly possess such a dangerous weapon with willingness to use it. Though the film's animation is not particularly handsome, lacking the bright, fresh colours of Windy Day (1968), the conversation is most definitely worth hearing, and the ideas raised deserve more than a few seconds' contemplation.
8/10

Cartoon: The Band Concert (1935, Wilfred Jackson)

2009-04-03T01:10:00.000-07:00

The Band Concert (1935)

USA, 9 min

Directed by: Wilfred Jackson

Starring: Clarence Nash (voice)

Mickey Mouse's first official outing in Technicolor {after Parade of the Award Nominees (1932), which wasn't intended for public release} was The Band Concert (1935), directed by the ever-reliable Wilfred Jackson. Like many of Mickey's cartoons, this one is basically a Silly Symphony featuring Disney's most popular character, with relative newcomer Donald Duck (voiced by Clarence Nash) having a few lines of dialogue. Being a cartoon built around an already-existing piece of classical music – Gioachino Rossini's "William Tell" overture, in this case – The Band Concert might be viewed as another important step towards the achievements of Fantasia (1940). Mickey plays the irritable conductor of a country band, who is determined to finish his song against all odds. His dedicated band of performers (including Goofy, Clarabelle Cow, Horace Horsecollar and Peter Pig) continue playing despite the disruptions of Donald – who briefly confuses them into performing "Turkey in the Straw" – a mischievous bee, and a particularly violent tornado.

Donald is amusing, and the bee gags feel a little tired, but The Band Concert reaches full stride in its final act, when a performance of "Storm" from the overture seemingly conjures a real-life tornado. Building upon his work in the Silly Symphony The Ugly Duckling (1931), Jackson somehow turns this meteorological event into something operatic and almost apocalyptic. From the moment Mickey and his band commence this section of the overture, the mood of the cartoon subtly begins to change. Leaves begin to the whirl behind the musicians; the colours are slowly drained from the screen. With Mickey continuing feverishly to conduct the band, even with all this chaos being orchestrated around him, it almost seems as though he's also conducting the weather, suggesting the seeds of the "Sorceror's Apprentice" segment in Fantasia. In 1994, The Band Concert was rated the #3 American cartoon of all time, the highest-rated Disney release. For me, it doesn't beat The Old Mill (1937), but is still a very worthy effort.

8/10

Western: In the Border States (1910, D.W. Griffith)

2009-03-21T17:14:00.000-07:00

In the Border States (1910)
USA, 17 min
Directed by: D.W. Griffith
Written by: Stanner E.V. Taylor
Starring: Charles West, Charles Arling, William J. Butler, Verner Clarges, Edward Dillon, John T. Dillon, Gladys Egan

In 1910, America was preparing to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the Civil War, and the gradual development of cinema made it possible to convincingly recreate the events of decades past. While many of these Civil War films were dispensable and quickly forgotten, at least one director knew exactly what he was doing with the camera. D.W. Griffith became such a successful filmmaker because he could really connect with the human side of his characters. War films can very easily become a one-sided affair, showing sympathy and compassion for only one of the feuding powers, while the other one is designated to the role of the faceless enemy. Not so for Griffith, at least not in this case. In the Border States (1910) humanises both sides of the American Civil War, suggesting that there was little difference between the soldiers who fought for either the Union or the Confederacy (a sobering realisation that usually only comes years after the bloodshed of combat).

The film opens with a young father (Charles West) joining the Union army and marching off to war, leaving behind an anxious family. His daughter (Gladys Egan), collecting water at the well one day, is surprised by a Confederate soldier, who is dying of thirst and being pursued by the enemy. Despite her prejudices, the girl decides to help the poor man, a simple act of kindness that will later reward her in kind. In the Border States really captures the turmoil and confusion of the Civil War, with soldiers fighting fellow Americans at their own doorstep, and being unable to understand why they are in conflict with men who are so similar to themselves. The young girl's benevolence shows that, while loyalty to one's army is noble, this comes second to one's obligation towards his fellow man – regardless of nationality or beliefs. Griffith's action-packed Biograph short, without needing to hammer its message home, is a stirring anti-war testament; it's too bad that, within a few years, the world would be making the same mistakes all over again.
7/10

Soviet: Singing Teacher (1968, Anatoly Petrov)

2009-03-17T02:24:00.000-07:00

Singing Teacher (1968)

Soviet Union, 3 min

Directed by: Anatoliy Petrov

Written by: Roza Khusnutdinova

Singing Teacher (1968) {which also goes by the name of Kaleidoscope '68. The Hippopotamus} is a funny, ineffectual little comedy short from Soviet director Anatoly Petrov. The off-beat storyline, written by Roza Khusnutdinova, has a bulging hippopotamus reporting for singing lessons with an impatient music professor, but the hefty animal simply cannot carry a tune. After trying to teach his student how to sing with a soft melodious voice like himself, the teacher becomes angry and frustrated, so frustrated, in fact, that he inadvertently falls into the hippo's mouth and is promptly swallowed. The hippo now finds that, when he opens his mouth, the beautiful voice of his former teacher escapes his lips, and so lumbers off contentedly. This is a one-joke cartoon, certainly, but it has its charms. After all, how many films do you see that feature a hippo trying to perform music?

The animation style is quite interesting. Mostly black-and-white, the animation resembles the detailed sketch-drawings you might come across in a newspaper, fairly realistic but with slightly straighter lines and more jagged corners than is usual. The hippopotamus has an ungodly honk that clashes horribly with the beautiful music supplied by the old singing teacher, though the teacher himself is so snobbish and uptight that seeing him gobbled up is actually quite gratifying. Singing Teacher was Petrov's first film as director, though he had worked as an animator since at least 1958. I'm not completely certain, but I assume that this film was one entry in a series or collection of animated shorts, perhaps compiled together as one longer film; the Russian Animation Database also lists Kaleidoscope'68. The Cyclist and Kaleidoscope'68. The Fence, both directed by Lev Atamanov.

6/10

Comedy: The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928, Thomas Chalmers)

2009-03-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928)
USA, 11 min
Directed by: Thomas Chalmers
Written by: Robert Benchley (writer)
Starring: Robert Benchley
Robert Benchley was an American humourist whose work extended across various mediums, though he is most remembered today for his short-subject comedic shorts, particularly the "How To..." series that he produced with MGM between 1935 and 1939. He has a understated, droll style of comedy – few of his jokes actually aim to get big laughs, and most of the humour is to be found in words rather than in physical slapstick routines. In 1927, Hollywood embraced the arrival of synchronised sound, a technical innovation that proved perfect for Benchley's kind of entertainment. His first appearance on film was in The Treasurer's Report (1928). The same year, The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928) was released, a subtle and likable little comedy with an eye-catching title. As in many of his short films, Benchley plays a smug lecturer who spouts rather ridiculous nonsense to a rapt audience, in this case a ladies' club, whose members giggle nervously whenever Benchley's analogies become a little too obvious for comfort.

I only laughed aloud one or two times watching The Sex Life of the Polyp, but I had a smile on my face the whole time. The utter confidence with which Benchley recites gibberish is constantly amusing, and the actor responds well to the unfamiliar medium of sound-synchronised film (despite the poor audio quality of the print, which often made the dialogue difficult to discern). To explain the sex life of polyps, Benchley introduces a female test subject he dubs Mary, represented on the projector screen as a shivering and hairy mass. He then adds the male, who responds excitedly to the female presence, but doesn't notice when Mary is replaced by a button, and then a crumb of corn-bread. Finally, frustrated at the inactivity of his partner, the male polyp gives up and transforms into a female. Benchley then asserts that his research interests have now turned towards "some animal which takes its sex life a little more seriously." I think I can guess which animal he has in mind.
6/10

Avant-Garde: The Return to Reason (1923)

2009-03-12T19:18:00.000-07:00

Le Retour à la raison / The Return to Reason (1923)
France, 3 min
Directed by: Man Ray
Starring: Kiki of Montparnasse

I always get a headache trying to work out what avant-garde cinema is all about – allegedly, cinema brawls have been started for this very reason. So I've decided to appreciate The Return to Reason (1923) for its aesthetic qualities only, and there are plenty. The beginning of the film is a hectic collage of white specks and rotating silhouettes, some footage created without the use of a camera, similar to the later work of Stan Brakhage. Ticking clocks, nail outlines, bright lights, spinning egg crates – what it all means, I don't know, but the brisk editing pace maintains a strong momentum that easily carries through the two-minute running time. Ray's montage flows smoothly for the most part, but occasionally jars like a jump-cut as he switches from one photographic technique to another; for example, from moving to static images, or between visuals produced with and without a camera. In this sense, the film doesn't stream as pleasantly as similar avant-garde works like Richter's Ghosts after Breakfast (1928) and Vávra's The Light Pentrates the Dark (1931).

This was my first film from Man Ray, one of the leading figures in the Dadaist film movement of the 1920s. Dada (or Dadaism) is characterised by the rejection of logic and rationality in artistic expression, and so the embracing of chaos. The title The Return to Reason seems to be intentionally contradictory, at odds with a film in which very little reason is to be found. Perhaps the randomness is all for the director's own amusement – Man Ray was notorious for his wry sense of humour, and he reportedly "talked so you could never tell when he was kidding." He once stated that "To create is divine, to reproduce is human," suggesting an overlying theme of sex in his work. Indeed, the finale of this film involves the naked torso of a woman – perhaps this "return to reason" is the realisation, after two minutes of frenzied, random soul-searching, of what matters most to a man. I can sympathise.
6/10

Cartoon: Der Fuehrer's Face (1942, Jack Kinney)

2009-03-07T17:15:00.000-08:00

Der Fuehrer's Face (1942)

USA, 8 min

Directed by: Jack Kinney

Written by: Joe Grant, Dick Huemer

Starring: Clarence Nash (voice)

WWII-era filmmakers used two broad approaches when attempting to discredit Adolf Hitler and Germany in general. The first, and least interesting in my view, was to treat them with the utmost seriousness, painting the Nazis are perverted, sadistic and evil baby-killers (and the like). Secondly, there was the comedic approach, by which Hitler was belittled through having entire audiences laughing in his face. The Great Dictator (1940) and To Be or Not to Be (1942) accomplish this hilariously well, but what about the younger demographics? To help communicate the evils of Nazism to children, the Walt Disney cartoon Der Fuhrer's Face (1942) tosses Donald Duck (voiced by Clarence Nash) amid Hitler's militaristic regime, where he slaves away for "48 hours a day" in a munitions factory, continually bombarded with the swastika symbol and the phrase "heil Hitler!" At the end of the cartoon, after a surreal montage of Nazi (or "Nutzi," as the film says) oppression, Donald wakes up in America, thankfully sighing "am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America."

Despite winning an Oscar in 1943 for Best Short Subject Cartoon, Der Fuehrer's Face was rarely seen following the end of the war. As the atrocities of Hitler's "Final Solution" came to light, the Nazi badge quickly became something, not to be merely ridiculed, but to be loathed. Nevertheless, the sheer audacity of Jack Kinney's cartoon has to be seen to be believed. There's hardly a frame in which the swastika is not visible in one form or another, and Donald is ludicrously forced to bark "Heil Hitler" whenever he comes across a photograph of the Fuehrer. The cartoon's climax is a dizzyingly-surreal montage in which anthropomorphised Nazi machinery relentlessly beats Donald into submission. It's all a little disconcerting, as was its intention, but it's also a lot of fun. Also featured is Oliver Wallace's song "Der Fuehrer's Face," which was covered by Spike Jones and His City Slickers with great success. Indeed, the name of this cartoon was changed from "Donald Duck in Nutzi Land" to capitalise on the song's popularity.

7.5/10

Claymation: Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (1993, Nick Park)

2009-02-26T21:20:00.000-08:00

Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (1993)
UK, 30 min
Directed by: Nick Park
Written by: Nick Park (writer), Bob Baker (writer), Brian Sibley (additional screenplay)
Starring: Peter Sallis
There's no use prevaricating about the bush, Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (1993) is a whole heap of fun! Having not seen the film in years, I'd almost forgotten that it was so uproariously entertaining. It was Creature Comforts (1989) that took home the Oscar in 1991, but Nick Park instead planned a sequel to A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit (1989), a short film that, in my estimation, showed far more promise. This next effort sees the pair with their feet firmly on terra firma, but in an adventure that is no less wacky than the last. Despite economic woes, Wallace has built a impressive contraption for Gromit's birthday – a pair of mechanical trousers. To offset his financial losses, Wallace opens up his home to lodgers, attracting the business of a creepy and silent penguin named Feathers McGraw. The sinister flightless avian soon sets about systematically severing the immortal bond between master and pet, in preparation for a devilishly cunning heist scheme.

Nick Park's films are held in reverence by the animation community, and with good cause. Rarely before had the claymation medium been utilised to create such rich animated characters; even previous successes like Closed Mondays (1974) couldn't evade the fact that they were produced using shifting masses of clay. The Wrong Trousers boasts but three characters – only one of whom can speak – and yet the relationship between the three is superbly authentic. Maybe it's the personal touch of recognising the animators' thumb-prints on every character, but somehow Park manages to capture every nuance of their behaviour, every tiny inflection of emotion. In half an hour, Gromit doesn't utter a single word, and yet he communicates his sadness, anger and excitement through an affectionate glance or downcast eye. Likewise, the sinister Feathers McGraw attains creepiness precisely through his silence. That he doesn't speak keeps his motives veiled in secrecy, and those beady, ominous eyes are probably enough to give young children nightmares.

Of course, most people love The Wrong Trousers for its humour, and there's plenty of it. That sparkling British humour is truly allowed to shine, and the gentle voice-acting of Peter Sallis has the sheer sincerity to carry the frequently-offbeat jokes. Whereas A Grand Day Out was a homage of sorts to the science-fiction genre, probably more in line with Georges Méliès than anyone else, this effort is an affectionate satire of the British crime films of the 1950s and 1960s. The evil penguin has the eccentric malevolence of Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers (1955), though without the fondness for articulate speech. The object of the villainous heist scheme resembles the titular jewel in The Pink Panther (1964). With mock seriousness, amateur sleuth Gromit paces his way through the clichés of the genre, culminating in a hilarious madcap locomotive chase along miniature train-tracks, which our hero must lay down as he goes. This sort of impeccable entertainment deserves to run for far longer than thirty minutes.
9/10

Music: Les Berceaux (1935, Dimitri Kirsanoff)

2009-02-22T21:14:00.000-08:00

Les Berceaux (1935)

France, 5 min

Directed by: Dimitri Kirsanoff

Starring: Ninon Vallin

As do most cinephiles, I first got onto avant-garde filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff through Ménilmontant (1926). Though I quite enjoyed this effort, the determinedly-disorientating editing style, for me, kept it from being the masterpiece many proclaim. Les Berceaux / The Cradles fortunately sees Kirsanoff severely toning down his erratic editing, and, indeed, you'd be tempted to believe that the director had forgotten his passion for Soviet montage in the intervening decade. This five-minute musical short film most strongly recalled Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov's similar Romance Sentimentale (1930), in that both films feature only singing female protagonists accompanied by a visual montage. But, as I mentioned, Kirsanoff's montage is slow, meditative; he finds a relaxing serenity in the woman's (Ninon Vallin) voice, as is conscious that quick-cut editing would likely interrupt the peacefulness of her song. Instead, he favours slow cross-fades and transitional wipes, and even utilises an imaginative visual technique to avoid some transitions altogether.

From what I gathered, Les Berceaux is about the dedicated sailors who venture out into the deepest ocean, and the wives who must await their return. The woman sits in her living room, gently rocking her infant's cradle as she sings, the movement mimicking the rolling motion of the ocean waves. Many men will lose their lives to the ocean's vast waters, but the juxtaposition of death and life (in the cradle) suggests an endless and noble cycle. Kirsanoff imaginatively places a rear-projection screen outside the woman's window, through which, as she sings, we can watch the ocean waves lapping up against the shore, or the ship charging majestically over the water. Also worth noting is that the film was photographed by Boris Kaufman, who later also shot On the Waterfront (1954) and 12 Angry Men (1957). In all, Les Berceaux is a pensive and peaceful ode to a life at sea, and fans of Kirsanoff should certainly seek it out.
8/10

Soviet: Ostrov / Island (1973, Fyodor Khitruk)

2009-02-22T21:04:00.000-08:00

Island (1973)

Soviet Union, 10 min

Directed by: Fyodor Khitruk

Written by: Fyodor Khitruk

Starring: Elena Chepoy (voice)

I only recognised Fyodor Khitruk as the director of the Soviet Winnie-the-Pooh films, beginning with Vinni-Pukh (1969), but here is another of his pleasant animated films. Winner of the Grand Prize for Best Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival, Ostrov / Island (1973) is a genial critique on the selfishness of modern society. Animated in a minimalist fashion that recalls a simple newspaper comic-strip, this ten-minute film uses the allegory of a person stranded on a minute desert island to explore the reluctance of others to lend a helping hand if it doesn't benefit themselves. This apparently suggests the moral degradation of society as a whole, symbolised by a floating newspaper than only features news of warfare, gory horror movies, half-dressed women and gunfire. As the main character patiently awaits his rescue, dozens of passersby either ignore his waving hand or exploit his unfortunate predicament for their own gain.

Ostrov takes a simple scenario and uses it to make an obvious point, but it does so in a pleasant manner – without hardly a hint of bitterness nor malice towards the society it is condemning; rather, it exhibits something closer to quiet disapproval. Produced at Soyuzmultfilm studio, the film seems like a political work, but not one specifically relevant towards the Soviet Union. Indeed, any Western country could be accused of the injustices featured in the film. While waiting on his island, the main character is interrogated by Interpol officers, conquered by an imperialist ship, loses his lone palm tree to greedy loggers, is consoled by a missionary who promptly abandons him, is thoroughly examined by impartial scientists, and harassed by journalists. He is eventually rescued, in a genuinely bittersweet ending, by somebody whose situation is just as hopeless as his own, suggesting that basic human goodness does still exist, however discretely.

7/10

Animation: The Man Who Planted Trees (1987, Frédéric Back)

2009-02-16T00:07:00.000-08:00

The Man Who Planted Trees (1987)

Canada, 30 min

Directed by: Frédéric Back

Written by: Jean Giono (story), Jean Roberts (translator)

Starring: Philippe Noiret (voice) (French-language version) ; Christopher Plummer (voice) (English-language version)

Frédéric Back's The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) is the one short film that has been fervently recommended to me above all others, and I'm surprised that it took me so very long to get around to it {fortunately, my stubbornness proved beneficial, since I was able to hold out for a high-quality copy}. My only previous experience with Back was his first Oscar-nominated effort All Nothing (1980) in May 2007, and I enjoyed its artistry, even if the basis in Creationism kept me distanced from its central themes. This effort, arguably Back's most celebrated, tells the story of Elezeard Bouffier, an old shepherd who singlehandedly created a forest through decades of planting seeds. Though I initially assumed that Bouffier was a real-life figure, he was, in fact, a fictional creation of author Jean Giono, who apparently perpetuated the misconception. Either way, this shepherd's story is powerful and inspirational, Back's animation giving life to Giono's uplifting tale.

When I recall Frédéric Back's work, the first contemporary animator who comes to mind is Aleksandr Petrov, whose paint-on-glass animation allows similar dream-like visuals that morph from one image to another like a shifting desert landscape. The Man Who Planted Trees doesn't resemble a moving oil painting, as does Petrov's work, but instead bears a slightly more minimalistic pastel-sketching style. Even so, the attention-to-detail is simply staggering. For the film's opening half, the colour palette is largely sepia-toned, emphasising the sheer barrenness of the desert, with bare rocks and coarse weeds lashed by a dry, bitter wind. As Bouffier plants his trees, Back gradually introduces colour into his work, symbolising the physical and spiritual rebirth of the region. My single slight criticism with the film is that the narration should probably have been used more sparingly. As warm as I found Christopher Plummer's voice, I think that some scenes would have proved more powerful had the viewer been left to his own accord, to absorb for himself the breathtaking beauty of Back's animation.

The Man Who Planted Trees serves, I think, as a fine counterpoint to Back's previous short film, All Nothing. In the latter, a dissatisfied Mankind rapes and pillages the life that his Creator has placed upon the planet. In this film, Mankind gives back to nature; rather than destroying life, Bouffier creates it himself, even as two World Wars rage overhead. On at least two occasions, the narrator {Christopher Plummer in the English-language version, Philippe Noiret in the French} remarks that what Bouffier accomplished makes him something akin to God. Indeed, the government officials who arrive to observe his forest can think of no other explanation for the miraculous rebirth, declaring it an astonishing natural phenomenon. Nobody can believe that all this joy could have been created by the hand of a single man. I interpreted this as a touchingly humanist statement. After all, if an old shepherd like Elezeard Bouffier can give rise to such life, why, indeed, do we need a God at all?
9/10

Comedy: The 'High Sign' (1921, Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton)

2009-02-13T15:20:00.000-08:00

The 'High Sign' (1921)
USA, 21 min
Directed by: Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton
Written by: Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton
Starring: Buster Keaton, Bartine Burkett, Charles Dorety, Al St. John

The entrance of Buster Keaton's unnamed character in The High Sign (1921) is, in some ways, reminiscent of Chaplin's Little Tramp persona. The wandering vagrant, named only Our Hero, is booted off a moving train, and lands in an unknown town, the audience denied any back-story or unnecessary exposition. Wandering into a nearby theme park, Buster deftly snatches a newspaper from a moving carousel (done so casually that he doesn't look like he's even trying), and attempts to read the mammoth broadsheet. In search of a job, he happens upon an opening for a talented sharp-shooter, and, despite inadvertently gunning down a duck with his practice shots, Buster feels that he's qualified enough for the position. Chaplin's Tramp was never averse to breaking the rules if he wasn't hurting anybody who didn't deserve it, and Keaton's Hero is no different. By rigging an ingenious dog-powered bell-ringer to falsify the carnival stall, Buster fools his massive employer into believing that he is an ace with the rifle.

But, of course, if the plan had gone smoothly, then there wouldn't have been a story to tell. It seems that the employer is also a member of the Blinking Buzzards mob, a bold bad bunch of blood-thirsty bandits with a curious affinity for the letter "b." Buster is enlisted to assassinate one of the gang's enemies, and, by a curious turn of events, is also employed as that very same man's bodyguard (our hero, ever the hopeless romantic, accepts the latter job only to impress the target's pretty daughter, played by Bartine Burkett). When he steadfastly refuses to carry out the hit, Buster's reckless bid to escape the Buzzards' fists leads him on a farcical anarchic chase through concealed doorways and hidden compartments, a madcap comedic set-piece that never takes the time to slow down. Despite this memorable virtuoso finale, Keaton apparently felt unsure of the quality of his first independent two-reeler, and The High Sign was shelved until the following year, when a broken ankle slowed the performer's output.
8/10

Animation: Voyage to Next (1974, John Hubley)

2009-02-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

Voyage to Next (1974)

USA, 10 mins

Directed by: John Hubley

Written by: John Hubley, Faith Hubley, Saul H. Mendlovitz

Starring: Dizzy Gillespie (voice), Maureen Stapleton (voice)

Voyage into Next (1974) is a quaint little anti-war statement, the sort of laid-back, hippie-inspired short film that one would expect the 1970s to have produced. But it was also directed by John and Faith Hubley, a husband-and-wife animating team whose work is more subtle and understated than most. Many of the pair's films were produced by animating unrehearsed conversations (usually) between two people, and I had previously enjoyed their Windy Day (1968), which excellently utilised this free-wheeling technique. Voyage into Next was obviously more tightly-scripted, and that the film was to be an anti-war cartoon restricted the voice actors (namely Maureen Stapleton and Dizzy Gillespie) in which conversational paths they could take. Stapleton and Gillespie play Mother Earth and Father Time, respectively, as they observe the destructive conflicts waged between the human nations (represented here as floating boxes) and ponder why our species so unthinkably forgot the virtues of sharing that allowed our ancestors to progress beyond the Stone Age.

There's nothing particularly impressive about the Hubleys' style of animation – minimalist line-drawn human figures highlighted with soft shades of colour – but their style is distinctive, later influencing short films such as the Oscar-winning Leisure (1976). The two well-known voice actors are perfectly chosen (Dizzy Gillespie has one of the coolest-sounding voices ever), and the jazz musician's music is employed successfully to create the film's lighthearted mood, despite the grimness of the subject matter. Mother Earth and Father Time oversee their lilliputian creations, hidden amid mini puffs of artillery smoke, and contemplate their inability to alter human history. The future, it seems, is not in the hands of the gods, but in our own. Of course we have the ability to achieve peace and mutual understanding once more… but will we attain it in time? Voyage into Next was nominated for an Academy Award in 1975, but lost out to the inferior claymation Closed Mondays (1974).

7/10

Avant-Garde: All My Life (1966, Bruce Baillie)

2009-02-06T01:50:00.000-08:00

All My Life (1966)

USA, 3 min

Directed by: Bruce Baillie

I can't say that the prospect of a 3-minute leftwards pan was appealing to me, but I actually found All My Life (1966) quite relaxing. A filmmaker should never underestimate the power of a well-chosen soundtrack, and Ella Fitzgerald's "All My Life" works perfectly, evoking a simpler time and place. I don't see any reason why a backyard fence, examined from right-to-left, should be nostalgic in any way, but it is. The camera follows along the length of the fence, sometimes tilting upwards to take into account the bushes, and ends the film by rising up into the sky, passing a telephone wire and losing itself in the emptiness of the blue overhead. Aside from the camera movements, there's no action and no story. Just a fence, that music, and the memory of a childhood you'd forgotten.

Many of the avant-garde films of the 1960s have a tendency to be unintelligible, and often very grating. All My Life doesn't really have an obvious point to it, but, whatever it's doing, it seems to make a lot of sense. Maybe the length of fence represents a man's life (the film's title seems to support this idea). The missing pickets represent our mistakes in life. The continual leftwards-panning of the camera is inspired by the idea that, though we move leisurely through our lifetimes, we are nonetheless constantly moving forward, never able to turn around and correct the mistakes of our past, having always to suffer the consequences of our errors. At the end of our fences, of course, we go to Heaven, completely removed from the life we'd lived before. It's a novel interpretation, perhaps, but I like it.

7/10

Animation: Windy Day (1968, John & Faith Hubley)

2009-01-29T19:56:00.000-08:00

Windy Day (1968)
USA, 8 min
Directed by: John Hubley, Faith Hubley
Starring: Emily Hubley (voice), Georgia Hubley (voice)

John and Faith Hubley shared a fruitful career in the field of animation, and were awarded three Oscars for Moonbird (1959), The Hole (1962) and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature (1966), respectively, as well as four further nominations. Windy Day (1968) was produced in a similar manner to many of their cartoons – the animation was built around the pre-recorded conversation of two people. In this case, it is the directors' young children, Emily and Georgia Hubley, who carry on a free-wheeling exchange of dialogue that feels natural and spontaneous. One daughter wants to act out a medieval fairy-tale, but the other is hesitant, and the conversation switches topics frequently and haphazardly, even touching on the mature concepts of love, marriage, dreams, life and death. The two girls speak of such ideas with enthusiasm and naive innocence, but their conclusions are surprisingly insightful, and the animation almost struggles to keep up with their rapidly-switching topics of discussion.

Animation has always been the ideal medium for converting into visuals the free-association of human thoughts and interaction. Ideas and subject matter spontaneously change and switch back again, and the mind repeatedly conjures up fantastic flights of imagination and association. Like leaves on a breeze, thoughts and dreams materialise seemingly out of thin air, carving out random and erratic paths. Caroline and Frank Mouris' Frank Film (1973) employed a similar idea, instead animating with collages of magazine photographs. More recently, John Raskin's I Met the Walrus (2007) ascribed visual illustrations to an archival interview with the late John Lennon. The Hubleys' Windy Day takes together the dreams and aspirations of their two young daughters and converts them into a visual fairy-tale, a vivid meditation on the nature of life and innocence. At the 1969 Academy Awards, John and Faith Hubley lost out to the similarly-titled Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968), which was awarded posthumously to Walt Disney.
7/10

Soviet: A Strange Voice (1949, Ivan Ivanov-Vano)

2009-01-21T21:51:00.000-08:00

A Strange Voice (1949)

Soviet Union, 10 min

Directed by: Ivan Ivanov-Vano

Written by: Dmitri Tarasov

I'd previously only been familiar with animator Ivan Ivanov-Vano through this collaborations with Yuriy Norshteyn, but he was quite a prominent figure in the field of Soviet animation, active for nearly sixty years from the 1920s. In fact, he is often affectionately termed the "Patriarch of Soviet animation." A Strange Voice (1949) is a breathtakingly beautiful example of the master's craft, despite serving propagandistic purposes. By the 1940s, Soviet artists at Soyuzmultfilm studio had been influenced considerably by the American work of Walt Disney, and thus their animation has a quiet, realistic style that is far removed from the more unique (and, by then, obsolete) cartoon designs that had originated in the Soviet Union {see Bazaar (1934), and you'll know what I mean}. Given the degree to which Soyuzmultfilm owed its new style to American animators, it's rather ironic that this particular cartoon condemns the work of foreign artists, albeit in the guise of a pleasant and amusing cartoon made to appeal to Russian youngsters.

A Strange Voice opens in the pristine Russian wilderness, where a nightingale regales the other birds with his beautiful whistling song. Then a stranger arrives in the midst. A black-and-white crow awkwardly alights on a branch and denounces the nightingale's performance as being outdated. She proposes to give a concert of her own singing voice, and the Russian birds politely accept the offer. But when the crow opens her mouth, there is no beautiful singing voice, but only the grating honk of a trumpet. Apparently, this cartoon has American jazz in its sights, and the Russians are to have no part in this grotesque new brand of music. The crow is unceremoniously whistled and then pecked off the stage, and the humble nightingale is able to continue its pleasant song. Providing you look past the propaganda, this ten-minute short is beautifully animated, with a nice musical soundtrack. And, for the record, I happen to like jazz.

8/10

Avant-Garde: Blinkity Blank (1955, Norman McLaren)

2009-01-19T23:59:00.000-08:00

Blinkity Blank (1955)
Canada, 5 min
Directed by: Norman McLaren

The idea of creating visuals to match existing music was certainly not a new one, either in animation {see Disney's wonderful Fantasia (1940)} or live-action {see Jean Mitry's Pacific 231 (1949)}. With Blinkity Blank (1955), offbeat Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren offers his own bizarre take on the technique, matching simple two-dimensional images (etched directly onto the cell print) to some classy jazz music by Maurice Blackburn. The idea, I must admit, works better in theory than in execution. I liked how McLaren attempted to replicate the subtle musical melodies using purely visual cues, in effect the closest a deaf person will ever get to hearing the music for himself. But he doesn't quite pull it off. McLaren's primitive etched outlines, depicting anything from birds to umbrellas, communicate the tempo of the music, but not the emotion. It takes a masterpiece like Fantasia, with its breathtaking Technicolor animation and gentle pacing, to achieve this aim most completely.

Contrary to my first impressions, apparently there is a story behind the animation in Blinkity Blank – something to do with a bird and its cage. However, I was too busy nursing a migraine to worry too much about these details. McLaren's animation flashes in and out of frame, flickering like a strobe light, and I found it almost maddening to keep my eyes open. Had the film simply been dull or monotonous, I should still have admired the craftsmanship, which, despite the rudimentary animation, must have taken a lot of work. However, once again, it gave me a splitting headache {the first film to do so since the latest Bond flick, Quantum of Solace (2008)}, and I just can't support a film that inflicted pain upon me. My relationship so far with Norman McLaren has been an ambiguous one. While I found Pas de deux (1968) to be absolutely mesmerising, I was pretty much indifferent to his most famous short, Neighbours (1952). Given time, I'm sure that I'll find at least another of his films that I love.
4/10

Claymation: Creature Comforts (1989, Nick Park)

2009-01-15T04:36:00.000-08:00

Creature Comforts (1989)
UK, 5 min
Directed by: Nick Park
Written by: Nick Park (uncredited)
Starring: Julie Sedgewick (voice)

Nick Park's Creature Comforts (1989) beat out competition from the likes of Bruno Bozzetto and Nick Park to win the 1991 Oscar for Best Animated Short. In all honesty, I haven't seen nominee Cavallette (1990), but I still think that the Academy got their ballots mixed up. Just for the record, I find A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit (1989) to be the much better short film, with an entertaining, fully-structured narrative and no shortage of imagination. Creature Comforts has a nice premise and some good jokes, but it's all over so very quickly, leaving only a shallow impression that doesn't bode well for repeat viewings. Nevertheless, the animal characters have that wonderful home-grown "Wallace and Gromit" look about them, always a lovely trademark of Aardman Animations, as well as charming British accents that add some sophistication to the zoo inhabitants' gripes. I’ve always wondered why the British have inherently sophisticated accents.

This five-minute short film is basically just a series of very brief vignettes in which zoo animals are interviewed for their opinions on life in captivity. Some animals have some good things to say about it, but most do nothing but complain, particularly a certain South American carnivore who goes on at length about the "lack of space" in his enclosure. There's a family of polar bears who are eager to get their opinions across, and miss having steak in their diets. I also liked the turtle that "tries to spend as little time in here as possible," although that is more easily said than done. The quaintness of the dialogue is probably due to the filming technique, which was to interview zoo visitors off the street, request that they behave like animals, and produce the animation around these results. In 2003, Creature Comforts was expanded into a successful TV series, though the even greater success of the Wallace and Gromit franchise validates, I think, my feelings about which is the better film.
6/10

Comedy: One Week (1920, Edward F Cline, Buster Keaton)

2009-01-12T16:11:00.000-08:00

One Week (1920)

USA, 19 min

Directed by: Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton

Written by: Edward F. Cline (story & screenplay), Buster Keaton (story & screenplay)

Starring: Buster Keaton, Sybil Seely, Joe Roberts

One Week (1920) was the first of Buster Keaton's independent two-reelers, though The High Sign (1921) was filmed first and shelved until the following year. The story starts out where most romantic comedies end: with a picturesque wedding ceremony, during which adoring relatives toss confetti and, oddly, second-hand footwear. The lucky groom (Keaton) and his bride (Sybil Seely) strike out for their new home, purchased by a well-meaning uncle. Of course, only in a Keaton short must the husband and wife construct their own house, utilising a do-it-yourself kit that goes awry when the bride's former lover switches the numbers around. The resultant dwelling would not have looked out of place in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), though Keaton is evidently proud of his handiwork, and is thus prepared to overlook the most minor of blunders (such as having the front door on the second-floor). This short served as a trial-run of sorts for the feature Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), for here we see an early version of Keaton's famous "saved-by-the-window" falling wall stunt.

One Week is one of Keaton's finest shorts, with no shortage of imagination, and a continuous string of episodic gags. In one scene, our hero rather coarsely knocks out a traffic policeman, and it's probably no coincidence that the victim is a Charles Chaplin-lookalike. Many of the Keaton's films utilise aspects of engineering, such as The Electric House (1922), in which the actor is commissioned to update a client's home with state-of-the-art technology. In One Week, the product of Keaton's labours doesn't appear quite so impressive, though the house does misbehave is equally hilarious ways. In a vigorous windstorm, the entire building is transformed into a deliriously-spinning carousel, the inhabitants thrown across the room with almost brutal centrifugal force. Leading lady Sybil Seely impressively keeps up with Keaton's comedic antics, even contributing a few laughs of her own, rather than serving only as a beautiful romantic interest. Not that Seely didn't have the "beautiful" aspect covered, the film's show-stopping moment seeing the actress drop her bar of soap while bathing in the tub. A modest cameraman's hand spares us the details, however.

8/10

Horror: Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968, Jonathan Miller)

2009-01-10T16:30:00.000-08:00

Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968)

UK, 42 min

Directed by: Jonathan Miller

Written by: M.R. James (story), Jonathan Miller (adaptation)

Starring: Michael Hordern, Ambrose Coghill, George Woodbridge, Nora Gordon, Freda Dowie

All good ghost stories should be in black-and-white. There's something inherently creepy in the crisp, greyish tones of B&W photography, effectively evoking a time and place where scientific logic didn't hold such sway, and the existence of lingering human spirits seemed more plausible. Jonathan Miller's Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968) was released as an episode of the BBC television series Omnibus (1967-2002), and was adapted from a short story by M.R. James. Though hampered in some ways by a brief running time, preventing any in-depth exploration of the main character, the film is a classic supernatural chiller, a creepy ghost story in the same stylistic vein as Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) and Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963). Michael Hordern is perfect as the doddering old academic professor who mumbles his way across the exquisite Norfolk coastal countryside, detached from almost all social interaction. With the rustle of bedsheets and the soft whisper of a man's voice, Professor Parkins will discover that his life isn't quite as "lonely" as he thought it was.

At its thematic core, Whistle and I'll Come to You is less a ghost story, and more of a character study. One might choose not to take the bed-rustling spirits literally, and to consider them the manifestation of Professor Parkins' unwillingness to consciously acknowledge the possibility of the supernatural. When asked whether or not he believes in spirits, the professor evades the question with an assortment of largely-irrelevant intellectual musings, boasting a sort of academic elitism that leaves his sincere breakfast companion (Ambrose Coghill) – who is consistently kept at a distance – feeling foolish. The film's brief opening narration notes that M.R. James originally intended his story as an allegorical criticism of "intellectual pride," and this theme always sits at the forefront. Having placed his complete faith in the superiority of academic and scientific thinking, Professor Parkins has lost the ability to coherently interact with other people, and his snobbery extends towards the outright rejection of such far-fetched notions in folklore as that of ghosts. Subconsciously, however, there is always that niggling doubt: what if he's wrong?

Whistle and I'll Come to You has an extraordinary emptiness that I think works extremely well. Very few scenes actually contain any traces of the supernatural, but, as we have already been told that we are watching a ghost story, paranormality is allowed to pervade every moment. Professor Parkins wanders the windy Norfolk coastline, pausing to take in the views, to eat lunch, to read a book – in any other context, such sequences may have bordered on tedium, but our anticipation of the unnatural consistently keeps us holding our breath. Most of the film's icy shivers are brought about through uncanny use of sound effects, knowingly exploiting the instinctive human fear of that which we can hear but not see; the nearby rustling of bedsheets, in these circumstances, was one of the most unsettling noises I've ever heard in a film. Unfortunately, at just 42-minutes in length, the film does feel rather incomplete, as though it is merely the opening half of a feature-length film. Still, considering the medium for which it was made, Jonathan Miller has undoubtedly achieved excellence in the horror genre.

8/10

Soviet: The Marathon (1988, Aleksandr Petrov, Michael Tumelya)

2009-01-09T01:28:00.000-08:00

The Marathon (1988)
Soviet Union, 2 min
Directed by: Aleksandr Petrov, Mikhail Tumelya

After several years working as art director on such films as Alexei Karaev’s Welcome (1986), Aleksandr Petrov’s first film as director was The Marathon (1988), which he co-directed with Michael Tumelya. This brief tribute to Walt Disney’s immortal creation Mickey Mouse possesses none of the breathtaking visuals for which Petrov would later become known, but it is nonetheless a powerful piece of work, even at just two minutes in length. The film was produced to celebrate the character’s 60th anniversary, and that Roy E. Disney and a group of American animators paid a visit to the USSR in 1988 probably gave some added incentive. By all reports, Disney was thrilled with the effort. While it was Korova (1989) – Petrov’s diploma work – that really established Petrov as an imminent animation genius (he received the first of his Oscar nominations), this earlier student short, by its potent simplicity, is well worth tracking down for all fans of the director.

The film opens in 1928, with a young child looking at a reflection of himself in the mirror, which is actually a cinema screen. Along comes the guiding hand of Walt Disney, who transforms the child’s reflected image into none other than Mickey Mouse. Having found an immortal friend in this big-eared critter, the child and Mickey begin dancing joyously opposite each other. As the film progresses, the baby becomes a boy, the boy becomes a young man, the young man becomes an adult, and the adult has finally become an old man. Mickey Mouse, unchanged and still bringing joy to this old man’s heart, continues with his enthusiastic dancing. By the end of the film, the man is frail and near death, but a grandchild wringing at his arm becomes equally enthralled by the image of Mickey cavorting across the television screen. Walt Disney may be dead, and Mickey’s original fans may be getting on in years, but this big-eared rodent will always be around to bring delight to the hearts of millions.
7/10

Thriller: The Key to Reserva (2007, Martin Scorsese)

2009-01-07T20:35:00.000-08:00

The Key to Reserva (2007)

Spain, 10 min

Directed by: Martin Scorsese

Written by: Ted Griffin (writer)
Starring: Simon Baker, Kelli O'Hara, Michael Stuhlbarg, Christopher Denham, Richard Easton, Martin Scorsese

From one Hitchcock fan to another: Bravo, Marty Scorsese! Given the task of producing a commercial for Freixenet Wines, the prominent director enthusiastically crafted an endearing homage to the Master of Suspense, in the guise of a "rediscovered" Hitchcock script. The Key to Reserva (2007) is that very rare thing – an advertisement that is absolutely a joy to watch, so much so that you can easily ignore the advertising itself and consider the prized Freixenet wine-bottle just another of Hitchcock's unlikely MacGuffins. The film even tries to obscure the fact that it is merely a commercial, with Scorsese starring as himself in a documentary framing device that sees him excitedly boasting about his plans to film three fragmented pages from an unproduced Hitchcock script. One is hardly likely to fall for the ruse nowadays, but, when the short first emerged on the internet, I have no doubt that many people were swindled, even if the promise of Marty-doing-Hitch would have seemed simply too amazing to be true.

Scorsese's The Key to Reserva opens with screeching violins over opening credits that might have been designed by Saul Bass. We fade into the strings of a violin, as a musician twangs vigorously at his instrument, and Scorsese pulls off a breathtaking crane shot – over the heads of the orchestra audience and into the entrance hall – that would have made Hitchcock proud. What follows is an exciting amalgamation of homages to the director's greatest set-pieces, including references to Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo (1958)… right at the end, there's also a very subtle nod towards The Birds (1963), though you'll have to pay close attention! Hitchcock's film-making techniques are recreated in a slightly-exaggerated but nonetheless affectionate way, and Scorsese delights in exploring the singular stylistic touches - the spectacular long-shots, the overstated angles, the creative use of light and shadow to communicate approaching danger - that made the director such an influential figure in American cinema.

Some directors, such as Brian DePalma, have made a living out of homaging The Master of Suspense, but to witness one of cinema's contemporary greats expressing such gratitude towards Hitchcock is something else altogether. Scorsese even establishes himself as quite an entertaining actor, his self-portrayal occasionally touching on Woody Allen in terms of neurotic, boyishly-excited energy. Even long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker gets an appearance, adding another layer of authenticity to the ingenious framing device. Scorsese's film-within-a-film is almost completely wordless, undoubtedly following in the footsteps of a similar set-piece in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and that the story opens mid-stream adds a hint of tantalising ambiguity. But do you know what would be even better? Nothing would thrill me more than for Martin Scorsese to re-hire screenwriter Ted Griffin, expand these "rediscovered" pages into a feature-length treatment, and release The Key to Reserva into cinemas by 2011. I'd be first in line, and nobody would be admitted after the opening credits.

8/10

Comedy: The Living Playing Cards (1904, Georges Méliès)

2009-01-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

The Living Playing Cards (1904)
France, 3 min
Directed by: Georges Méliès
Written by: n/a
Starring: Georges Méliès

WARNING: Plot and/or ending details may follow!!! [paragraph 3 only]

Considering that Georges Méliès was a stage magician before he took an interest in cinema, it's no surprise that he liked to incorporate countless little "magic acts" into his films. As a rule, his narrative-driven films {such as A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904)} are by far his most impressive works, not only for their revolutionary storytelling structures, but also for their seemingly-boundless imagination and creativity. Nevertheless, further genius is to be found in Méliès' shorter "gimmick films," which translated the magician's tricks to the cinema screen and proved crucial in the development of visual effects. Too often, early filmmakers like Edison and the Lumière brothers employed this new technology for purely documentary purposes, presenting audiences with brief snippets of everyday life. However, this French "Cinemagician" took a vastly different outlook on the possibilities made feasible by the humble cinematograph: he made the impossible happen before our very eyes.

The Living Playing Cards (1904), along with the delightfully-whimsical The Four Troublesome Heads (1898), is one of Méliès' most inventive special-effects showcases. The film starts simply enough, with Méliès – our host, as always – stepping out onto the stage and showing the audience a playing card. It is too small for anybody to decipher, so, with a quick slide of the wrist, the card is suddenly substantially larger. He then manages to transfer the card image onto a large, blank sheet of paper, and then the Queen on the life-sized card is magically transformed into a living, breathing queen who emerges from the paper and walks around the stage. These transformations – some more refined than others – employ the use of quick cuts, multiple dissolves and cross-fades, techniques with which Méliès had been experimenting for many years. The two-minute film is presented in the style of a traditional magic act, presenting contemporary audiences with a format with which they were familiar, but somewhat furtively offering the magician a greater flexibility with his tricks.

The most entertaining part of the film takes place at the very end, when Méliès accidentally transforms the King on the playing card into a real-life King, who bursts threateningly from his sheet of paper. Terrified, Méliès flees the stage in fear. Just as he does this, the King throws off his costume to reveal that he is Méliès himself! The first time I saw this, I was genuinely taken aback by the unexpected reveal, and it took several closer inspections to deduce how the trick was actually performed; from what I was able to tell, the director substituted himself into the King's clothes at the very moment that the costume were cast aside. Such an act demonstrates very effectively the advantages enjoyed by Méliès once he had adopted this revolutionary new technology, and, ever since, magicians have struggled vainly to keep up with the advancements presented by the cinematic medium. If magicians are now a dying breed, they can blame their unemployment on clever little films like this one.
8/10

Avant-Garde: Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff)

2009-01-05T23:27:00.000-08:00

Ménilmontant (1926)

France, 38 min

Directed by: Dimitri Kirsanoff

Written by: Dimitri Kirsanoff

Starring: Nadia Sibirskaïa, Yolande Beaulieu, Guy Belmont, Jean Pasquier, Maurice Ronsard

Dimitri Kirsanoff, born in Estonia but operating mostly in Paris, was heavily influenced by the theories of Soviet Montage. In his most famous short film, Ménilmontant (1926) – still frightfully obscure in most circles – he adheres to this style strictly, almost obsessively. His preference towards a brisk editing pace carries a unique vitality that is also seen in the work of Soviet masters Eisenstein and Vertov, who pioneered and perfected the technique of montage in the mid-to-late 1920s. But, nevertheless, I don't think it works quite as well here. The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) – perhaps the two most recognised works of Soviet montage – utilise their chosen editing style to full effect precisely because they place greater emphasis on the collective over the individual, in accordance with traditional Communist ideology. There is deliberately no emotional connection attempted nor made between the viewer and any individual movie character, for that would be contrary to the filmmaker's intentions (interestingly, however, the montage fell out of preference from the 1930s in favour of Soviet realism).

Ménilmontant falters because it strives to create an emotional connection with the characters (particularly the younger sister, played by Nadia Sibirskaïa), but Kirsanoff's chosen editing style continually keeps the audience at an arm's length. The closest he comes to true pathos is with the park-bench sequence, when an old man offers some bread and meat to the famished woman, delicately avoiding eye contact to preserve her dignity. Even in this scene, the montage style intrudes. A director like Chaplin (and I'm a romantic at heart, so he's naturally one of favourite filmmakers) would have placed the camera at a distance, framing the profiles of both the woman and the old man within the same shot, thus capturing the subtle emotions and inflections of both parties simultaneously. Kirsanoff somewhat confuses the scene, cutting sequentially between the woman, the man and the food in a manner that reduces a simple, poignant act of kindness into a technical exercise in film editing. It works adequately, of course, a precise demonstration of the Kuleshov Effect, but there's relatively little heart in it.

But we'll cease with my complaints hereafter. I know my own film tastes well enough to recognise that what I disliked about the film – its emotional distance, for example – represents precisely what others love about it. There's no doubting that the photography (when it's kept on screen long enough) is breathtakingly spectacular, making accomplished use of lighting, shadows and in-camera optical effects such as dissolves, irises and superimpositions. There are touches of the surreal. Kirsanoff cuts non-discriminately forwards in time, backwards and into his characters' dreams, fragmenting time and reality into a series of shattered images, their individual meanings obscure until considered sequentially as in the pieces of a puzzle. Most impressive, I thought, was how several shots captured the linear perspective of roads and alleys, watching his characters gradually depart into the distance as though merely following the predetermined pathways of their future. The film ends exactly as it begins – with a bloody and unexplained murder – suggesting the inevitable cycle of human suffering, its causes unknown and forever incomprehensible.

7/10

Soviet: The Glass Harmonica (1968, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy)

2009-01-05T01:01:00.000-08:00

The Glass Harmonica (1968)

Soviet Union, 19 min

Directed by: Andrey Khrzhanovskiy

Written by: Gennadi Shpalikov

Andrey Khrzhanovskiy's The Glass Harmonica (1968) is a very political piece of animation, and I know too little about the history of the Soviet Union to make any accurate interpretations of the film's meaning. However, I'm going to have a go at it, anyway. The craftsman of the glass harmonica arrives in a town whose citizens have become corrupted by and obsessed with the lure of money (symbolised by a single gold coin held in the hand of a shifty-looking bureaucrat). The love of wealth has transformed these people into grotesque and disgusting beasts, who roam throughout the streets thinking only of money. This, I'd imagine, would be a critique of capitalism, certainly something that one would expect from the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. When the craftsman returns to the town with his harmonica, the melodious tune of his instrument brings back the humanity of its inhabitants. They break out of their beastly cocoons, becoming beautiful human beings once again; one person offers his coat and hat to a homeless man.

Together, the townsfolk restore their clock-tower to its former glory, perhaps symbolising the rejuvenation and preservation of Russia's culture and history (once money became the town's chief concern, the clock-tower was the first monument to be stripped and defaced, presumably for monetary gain). All this seems like a perfectly acceptable message for Soyuzmultfilm studio under the Soviet Union. However, my research is telling me that The Glass Harmonica suffered strict censorship and was initially withheld from release. There must be a more subtle subtext that I'm missing. Perhaps the film's depiction of a cold totalitarian society struck the censors as being far too familiar for comfort; what was supposedly a critique of the Bourgeois was instead an attack on the oppressive Soviet government. Whatever the politics, Khrzhanovskiy's film nonetheless deserves to be watched for its unique and surreal visuals and stirring classical score. The people are animated as rather sterile painted portraits that only exhibit fractured movements, though they take on a more realistic and romantic appearance after hearing the music of the glass harmonica.

8/10

Drama: Das Kleine Chaos / The Little Chaos (1966, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

2009-01-03T20:15:00.000-08:00

The Little Chaos (1966)
West Germany, 9 min
Directed by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Written by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Christoph Roser, Marite Greiselis, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Greta Rehfeld

My first film from Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a nine-minute short, one of the director's earliest efforts. The film follows three youths, caught up in the rebellious counter-culture of the 1960s, who decide to supplement their meagre incomes (selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door) by orchestrating a home robbery. The three aspiring criminals – played by Christoph Roser, Marite Greiselis and Fassbinder himself – bust into the home of a frightened woman (Greta Rehfeld) and demand her money. The characters, particularly Fassbinder's Franz, do plenty of over-the-top posturing, no doubt in homage to the James Cagney style of acting that dominated gangster movies of the 1930s and 1940s (the film even references this sub-genre of Hollywood filmmaking, musing that "I'd like to see a gangster movie that ends well, for once"). The scene of a home invasion surprisingly called to mind A Clockwork Orange (1971), though I don't know how likely it is that Stanley Kubrick received inspiration from the amateur work of an emerging German director.

Though The Little Chaos (1966) was undoubtedly shot on a limited budget, and the cinematography certainly betrays these limitations, Fassbinder does know how to position his camera, alternating between close-up static shots and more dynamic hand-held pans. The film opens with a long zoom across a road, as an enigmatic jazz tune overwhelms the soundtrack, suggesting the brand of classy crime capers that became popular in the 1960s. The acting is adequate enough, though certainly not authentic. Fassbinder mugs determinedly to the camera, a faux tough-guy who perpetually seems to have a foul odour beneath his nostrils. Roser's character is much more tender and introverted, a likable enough guy who's obviously been roped into something in which he desires no part. The film ends with "I Can't Control Myself" by The Troggs on the soundtrack, followed by the wail of police sirens. The three petty criminals will probably get away with it this time, but one gets the feeling that they won't be so fortunate on their next venture.
6/10

Cartoon: Plane Crazy (1928, Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks)

2009-01-03T16:25:00.000-08:00

Plane Crazy (1928)

USA, 6 min

Directed by: Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks

Written by: n/a

Starring: Walt Disney (voice)

This is where it all began. Plane Crazy (1928) – and not Steamboat Willie (1928), as is often claimed – marks the humble debut of Mickey Mouse, perhaps the most recognisable and beloved cartoon character ever created. This little rodent was originally envisioned as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a successful character designed by Walt Disney for Charles Mintz of Universal Studios. Mintz had demanded that Disney take a pay-cut, shortly after reminding him that he personally held copyright of Oswald, and had already contracted most of Disney's employees. To Mintz's surprise, the ambitious animator and businessman instead struck out alone, animators Ub Iwerks and Les Clark among the few who remained loyal to him. The first Mickey Mouse cartoon was released on May 15, 1928, in California, where its reception was initially rather lukewarm. The animation itself is not particularly notable, but the jokes are clever, funny and amusingly mean-spirited. Mickey's following would grow, however, and more than anybody – not even the forward-thinking Disney – could ever have anticipated.

At least in his first year, Mickey wasn't much of a gentleman. For one, he wasn't averse to harassing livestock if he could get some benefit out of them – here, a turkey is robbed of its tail feathers, and a cow is grabbed by the udder, which tastefully spurts milk everywhere. Mickey decides that he wants to be an aviator, though his knowledge stretches little beyond how Charles Lindbergh ("Lindy") styled his hair. This dangerous hobby is no doubt fuelled by a desire to impress Minnie the Mouse (here also making her debut), but, when she doesn't respond as planned, Mickey coldly forces a kiss out of her. Disney claims that inspiration for his character partially came from Charles Chaplin's tramp character, though there's very little of that here: the look of pure mischievous evil on his face after being romantically rejected by Minnie is almost frightening! Plane Crazy was originally released as a silent cartoon, but, following the success of Steamboat Willie, it was re-released with sound effects and synchronised music.

7/10

Avant-Garde: Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage)

2009-01-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

Window Water Baby Moving (1959)

USA, 13 min

Directed by: Stan Brakhage

Written by: n/a

Starring: Stan Brakhage, Jane Brakhage, Myrrena Brakhage

Quite a few years ago, I attended a secondary school excursion to the Melbourne Museum, where we focused primarily upon the science of the human body. As part of the tour, we also attended a screening for the IMAX film The Human Body (2001), which used some nifty film-making techniques to demonstrate the workings of our organs, bones and muscles. The documentary even delved into the subject of reproduction, though I couldn't help noticing that the newly-born infant emerged in an peculiar state of utter cleanliness. Avant-garde Stan Brakhage apparently had no such inclinations towards prudishness. Perhaps his most notorious film, Window Water Baby Moving (1959) {filmed in November 1958} documents in unflinching detail the birth of his first-born daughter, Myrrena Brakhage. Unlike the bewildering Mothlight (1963), this is a Brakhage film that one doesn't need to decipher; the editing and images tell the entire story, not just of a human birth, but of the tender emotional bond between husband and wife, parent and child, and the all-seeing lens of the movie camera.

As a warning to potential viewers, Window Water Baby Moving (1959) doesn't recoil from capturing the most intimate (and explicit) moments of the baby's delivery. Events that would ordinarily be glossed over in other films, such as the cutting of the umbilical cord, or the ejection of the placenta (which looks just as painful as getting the baby out), are documented in detail, over a 13-minute running time that feels substantially longer. Being a student of biology myself, I felt confident that I could manage well enough, though the truth is that I'm a complete prude. In fact, I probably should have filmed myself watching the film, because my facial expressions must have betrayed something akin to revulsion on at least one occasion. However, as soon as that tiny head emerged from the necessary orifice, I began to understand this "miracle of birth" that people talk about so frequently. Even this term, however, is a misnomer, given that there's absolutely nothing miraculous about reproduction – in fact, it's perhaps the most natural phenomenon of all.

Brakhage's film surprised me in that I had expected a straightforward, literal documentation of the childbirth process, filmed in that continuous hand-held manner that characterises most modern home movies. However, his use of editing really breathes emotion into every scene. Even throughout the most crucial moments of the delivery, Brakhage cuts to shots of his wife, Jane, sharing an affectionate smile with the camera, or the couple's tightly-clasped hands, the husband offering his love and support during a time when the male was typically ejected from the room. Window Water Baby Moving is a movingly personal ode to the immortal bond of family, and to cinema's ability to capture and bottle these emotions as best as it can. Brakhage obviously found this documentary excursion to be a worthwhile endeavour, because he repeated the effort several years later with Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961), to record the birth of one of Myrrena's siblings. Not for the faint-hearted, but an unmissable avant-garde experience.

8/10

A warm welcome to "Short Cuts," the new stronghold of short films!

2009-01-03T01:22:00.001-08:00

Well, perhaps I'm exaggerating.

This blog (my third, as avid readers will note) was initially envisioned as a team project with Josh Tschantret (a.k.a. fake_username), but he went off and created a short film blog all by himself, so now we have what I would consider a healthy rivalry. In any case, if my musings aren't enough for you, please feel free to head over there and browse.

Cinema was born as the short film. From the earliest days of Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) until the mid-1910s, films running less than one hour were the norm. Believe it or not, it was we Australians who broke the mould, producing the feature-length The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) [only fragments of this film remain today, and have been excellently restored by the National Film and Sound Archive.

Once features became dominant, due largely to the efforts of D.W. Griffith, it seems that short films fell mostly out of favour. Today, they are usually seen as inferior cinema, allowing budding directors to explore new techniques and make a name for themselves. Though this is certainly true in many cases, I remain adamant that masterpieces are just as common among short-subjects as they are among features, and this blog allows an avenue through which I can demonstrate this.
Just to get the ball rolling, here are my fifty favourite short films of all time, as of today. My interest skews slightly more towards animation than live-action (and you'll note a particular preference for Soviet animation), but I nonetheless think that it's a adequately eclectic selection:

1) Skazka skazok {Tale of Tales} (1979, Yuriy Norshteyn)
2) The Old Mill (1937, Wilfred Jackson)
3) La Jetée {The Pier} (1962, Chris Marker)
4) Le Voyage à travers l'impossible {The Impossible Voyage} (1904, Georges Méliès)
5) Yozhik v tumane {Hedgehog in the Fog} (1975, Yuriy Norshteyn)
6) Le Voyage dans la lune {A Trip to the Moon} (1902, Georges Méliès)
7) The Old Man and the Sea (1999, Aleksandr Petrov)
8) Geri’s Game (1997, Jan Pinkava)
9) The Tell-Tale Heart (1953, Ted Parmelee)
10) The Fountain of Youth (1958, Orson Welles)

11) Zhiltsy starogo doma {The Lodgers of an Old House} (1987, Alexei Karaev)
12) A Warning to the Curious (1972, Lawrence Gordon Clark)
13) Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968, Jonathan Miller)
14) Feed the Kitty (1952, Chuck Jones)
15) The Signalman (1976, Lawrence Gordon Clark)
16) One Froggy Evening (1955, Chuck Jones)
17) Suur Tõll {Toell the Great} (1980, Rein Raamat)
18) Partie de campagne {A Day in the Country} (1936, Jean Renoir)
19) Moya lyubov {My Love} (2006, Aleksandr Petrov)
20) Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora {The Cameraman's Revenge} (1912, Wladyslaw Starewicz)

21) The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, James Sibley Watson, Melville Webber)
22) Frank Film (1973, Caroline Mouris, Frank Mouris)
23) Zhil-byl pyos {There was a Dog} (1981, Eduard Nazarov)
24) Vesennie Melodii {Spring Melodies} (1946, Dmitry Babichenko)
25) A Corner in Wheat (1909, D.W. Griffith)
26) Son smeshnogo cheloveka {The Dream of a Ridiculous Man} (1992, Aleksandr Petrov)
27) Romance sentimentale {Sentimental Romance} (1930, Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei M. Eisenstein)
28) Precious Images (1986, Chuck Workman)
29) Korova {Cow} (1989, Aleksandr Petrov)
30) Pas de deux {Duet} (1968, Norman McLaren)

31) Skazki Lesa {Forest Tales} (1997, Elena Petkevich)
32) Polizeibericht Überfall {Assault} (1928, Ernö Metzner)
33) Film (1965, Alan Schneider)
34) Ugly Duckling (1939, Jack Cutting)
35) Nuit et brouillard {Night and Fog} (1955, Alain Resnais)
36) Steklyannaya garmonika {The Glass Harmonica} (1968, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy)
37) Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage)
38) The Key to Reserva (2007, Martin Scorsese)
39) Duck Amuck (1953, Chuck Jones)
40) Un chien andalou {An Andalusian Dog} (1929, Luis Buñuel)

41) More (1998, Mark Osborne)
42) Flowers and Trees (1932, Burt Gillett)
43) Tsaplya i zhuravl {The Heron and the Crane} (1974, Yuriy Norshteyn)
44) The Thieving Hand (1908, J. Stuart Blackton)
45) OffOn (1972, Scott Bartlett)
46) Frankenstein (1910, J. Searle Dawley)
47) The Skeleton Dance (1929, Walt Disney)
48) La Petite marchande d'allumettes {The Little Match Girl} (1928, Jean Renoir, Jean Tédesco)
49) A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit (1989, Nick Park)
50) The Cat Concerto (1947, Joseph Barbera, William Hanna)