Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 40— Short Film Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
274/365: Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali, 1928 (YouTube, Open Culture, Amazon Prime)
Shorts are not — or shouldn’t try to be — mini-features, and thus they’re the Wild West, a terrain of structural and textual freedom that allows for nearly any aesthetic idea. Any conscientious film-culture neophyte should Hoover up as many of them as possible, and here’s perhaps the best place to start: Bunuel and Dali’s seminal Surrealist handgrenade is far more than just sixteen up-yours minutes of incendiary narrative hijinks, dead donkeys, misplaced armpit hair, ants, cocktail-shaker doorbells and severed hands. It’s more, in fact, than a movie — it’s a cultural explosion that’s still sending off shockwaves and flinging shrapnel, seeding our world with poisonous ideas about the sheer joy of irrationality. This is how many rules there are: none. The influence of this Surrealism house movie is incalculable, but trailing excursions into the vibe that are also classic-slash-essential, and very American, are Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 1943) (Vimeo, YouTube), and The Lead Shoes (Sidney Peterson, 1949) (Dailymotion, YouTube).
275/365: Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953) (Dailymotion)
Sure, it’s a Looney Tunes cartoon — but this classic-period Warner Bros. ditty takes the ironic self-conscious humor of the Jones-Freleng-Tashlin-Clampett-McKimson cartoon factory and quadrupled down on it, resulting in arguably the most postmodern short film ever made. As in, it’s not a film so much as a struggle to become a film — a struggle that essentially fails. A hapless pilgrim in a freeform animated universe totally subject to the satanic whims of an unseen filmmaker, Daffy Duck gamely tries on one genre scenario after another, only to have them sabotaged, and eventually open warfare erupts between the animator and their entirely handdrawn protagonist, killing the film in the process. Godardian when Godard was still just a cinephile and amateur critic, it’s a 7-minute masterpiece of self-reflexive wit.
276/365: The Heart of the World (Guy Maddin, 2000) (Guy-Maddin.com, Vimeo, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Crazed Winnipego, paleokino alchemist, obsessive fabulist, no-budget indie magus, and, recently, nerve-frayed quasi-meta-autobiographer, Maddin is a messiah of retro-handmade-ness in a movie age when visual style is judged by its achievement as consumerist distraction, and film history is considered nothing more than a forgotten cellar vault of musty effluvia. Every time he steps into the breach it feels, yet again, as if he’s reinventing the medium from the soil up, or from the foggy-skulled inside out. His features and his (many dozen) shorts have evolved through various inventive styles, but began with a bizarro fidelity to antique film modes, inhabited by deadpan anti-acting and physically stressed to resemble a run-down 16mm TV print that somebody, somewhere, watched the hell out of, a funny-gorgeous strategy that may’ve crested with this breathless short made for the Toronto Film Festival. A rampaging daydream of mutated Soviet silent-ness that becomes an exultant postmod movie-movie heart attack, it’s an inexhaustible gift. Nearly as bewitching: Maddin’s Odilon Redon, or the Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (1995) (Guy-Maddin.com), which he claims is his 5-minute remake of Abel Gance’s 4-hour La Roue, which Maddin hadn’t ever seen.
277/365: Murder Psalm (Stan Brakhage, 1980) (Dailymotion, YouTube)
Brakhage’s cult of eminence precedes him like the heralds of a holy man, and often seem as arcane — but welcome to the vast but semi-secret world of abstract experimental film. It’s best to remember his stunningly huge corpus as a poetic experiment in vision — not artistic vision, but actual optics; as Stan the Man would remind us over and over again (he died in 2003, leaving behind nearly 400 films, ranging from 30 seconds to several hours), in sensory experience begins consciousness, thought and the world. Though many of his films contain representational images and support serious themes (life, death, family, myth, war), many are pure visual riff, modulating texture, color, depth and form for their own fundamental sakes. Some like 1963’s Mothlight, didn’t even use a camera. This scorching discomfiture is a good place to begin, a purely emotional-associative essay made up mostly of abused found footage, and aggregating in its vagueness into a threatening and eloquent statement about violence.
278/365: The Comb (from the Museum of Sleep) (Timothy & Stephen Quay, 1990) (Dailymotion)
Twin stop-motion animators and explorers of a subconscious film realm all their own, the Quays found a new pallette with this dreamy dream — if Street of Crocodiles, their masterwork, is their journey to the end of night, then this is their Grimm Brothers morning, complete with sun-saturated hills and trees (adorned with cartographic lettering). Intercut with an anonymous woman’s “troubled sleep,” a blistered doll journeys through a skyless, uterine-red maze/forest by way of a ladder, which often leaves him in a narcoleptic daze and carries on itself, the doll’s detached hands fluttering around it like gnats. Essentially a drama of frustrated desire, the film’s saturated textures and discombobulating moments of strange drama find a rarefied slot in the Quays’ style trajectory, moving from tarnished existentialism to gray technodread to auroral phantasia. Of course, Street of Crocodiles is required as well.
279/365: A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958) (Dailymotion, Vimeo)
Not the first but the most influential “found footage” film — a term we’re using in its first and literal sense, not as it’s been misappropriated to label post-Blair Witch mock docs. Found footage filmmakers commonly take old commercial, industrial, educational or governmental film and reuse it subversively, co-opting and editing it and turning its original institutional meanings upside down. This droll assemblage seems arbitrary, but let Conner explain his M.O.: “I would see third-rate, cheap movies that came out of Poverty Row in Hollywood. They had a stock footage library and would use the same images again and again. When there was a scene in New York introduced, you would see the same shot of the Brooklyn Bridge… Also, it was cheaper to shoot in front of a rear projection screen in the studio instead of going out. People were walking in front of a movie! Cowboys would pick up their guns and point them, and up would pop shots taken from previous and larger productions: Indians attacking and things like that. So I became aware that there was a ‘universal movie’ that was being made all the time! It’s classic images. It’s the Mona Lisa, it’s the Sistine Chapel, it’s the Statue of Liberty… It seemed natural that I would make this movie called A Movie.” Conner’s subsequent films are all beautiful, troubling and hypnotic, if you can find them, particularly Report (1967), Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1976), Valse Triste (1977) and America Is Waiting (1981).
280/365: La Jetee (Chris Marker, 1962) (Vimeo, YouTube)
The only French New Wave sci-fi short ever adapted into a Hollywood movie (Terry Gilliam’s 1995 headtrip Twelve Monkeys), this utterly original film limns a complex time-travel-heading-off-the-apocalypse tale entirely using stark, brooding black-&-white still photographs — except for one revelatory moment of movement. Marker was the New Wave’s secret agent, working in many forms (docs, experiments, animations, essays, etc., but never narrative features) and staying defiantly behind the scenes, and though his filmography runs to over 75 hours of often radical work, he remains underexplored by cinephiles. You could say that this famous short, complete with killer twist ending, is atypical of Marker’s oeuvre, if there was anything typical about it at all. It rhymes beautifully with another French mind-bender made the same year, Robert Enrico’s chilly and famous An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube).
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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