Short Film

  • Robert Frank – Keep Busy (1975)

    Robert Frank1971-1980ArthouseShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    “I am filming the outside in order to look inside,” Robert Frank once said about his aesthetics. In Keep Busy his chosen home of Nova Scotia serves for the first time as the “outside” in an examination of the “inside.” The protagonists’ astounding verbal gymnastics and often incomprehensible interactions tend to descend into nonsense, and with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue, this film is reminiscent of the playful and parodying elements of the Beat fantasy Pull My Daisy. The interweaving of documentary and fiction with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue presents an absurd buzz of activity reminiscent of Beckett’s abstract comic grotesque.Read More »

  • Larry Gottheim – Barn Rushes (1971)

    Larry Gottheim1971-1980ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    The long way around the barn never looked so good. Larry Gottheim composed BARN RUSHES from eight tracking shots tracing the same arc around a barn in different conditions. The fact that nothing changes makes it all the much more apparent that everything does: a meditative approach that Tony Conrad described as “a textbook of atmosphere, camera vision and lighting, as they relate personal concept to purely visual relationships.” The simplicity of the film’s structure echoes the functional design of the barn while simultaneously suggesting a distinctly cinematic equivalent to Claude Monet’s serial views of Rouen Cathedral. – Max GoldbergRead More »

  • Ken Jacobs – The Georgetown Loop (1996)

    Ken Jacobs1991-2000ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    THE GEORGETOWN LOOP
    (Ken Jacobs, 1996, 11m, widescreen 35mm film, black and white, silent)

    Originally photographed in 1903, US Library of Congress collection. New arrangement in 1996 by Ken Jacobs, assisted by Florence Jacobs. 35mm optical rephotography by Sam Bush, Western Cine, Denver.

    I’ve been raiding the Paper Print Collection of the Library Of Congress in Washington, DC, since the late 1960s with TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON. It’s a preserve of early cinema. Until 1912, in order to copyright film, one deposited with the library a positive from the negative printed on paper, unprojectable, but – unlike nitrate prints – capable of weathering the years without Crumbling into chemical volatility. And there the stacks rested, safely out of mind, hundreds and hundreds of silent rolls most less than 30 meters, many Edisons, American Mutoscope And Biograph, Gaumont, Lubin, Vitagraph ; cine-snatches of life as it was lived, vaudevillians, proto-dramas, and too many state parades.Read More »

  • Tadeusz Makarczynski – Suita warszawska AKA Warsaw Suite (1946)

    1941-1950DocumentaryPolandShort FilmTadeusz Makarczynski

    Quote:
    A film suite divided into three parts showing successively the defeat of Warsaw, the gradual awakening of the capital and the first post-war Warsaw spring. The film has no commentary, only music, whose mood and rhythm are closely related to the character of the presented images.Read More »

  • Affonso Uchoa – Sete anos em Maio AKA Seven Years in May (2019)

    Affonso Uchoa2011-2020BrazilDocumentaryShort Film

    Following the internationally acclaimed film ARÁBIA, Brazilian filmmaker A onso Uchôa presents his new take on social injustice. In the darkness of the night and lit only by a bonfire, a young man delivers a long, sickening confession of a traumatic experience he su ered seven years before. One night, when coming back home from work, he was surprised by a group of cops looking for him at his mother’s house. Taken for another man, Rafael dos Santos was persecuted and violently abused by the police. From that moment on, his life changed forever, as if that night never ended. Read More »

  • Ken Jacobs – A Tom, Tom Chaser (2002)

    Ken Jacobs2001-2010ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    A Tom Tom Chaser is Jacobs’ 2002 poetic riff on the transformation of his classic film Tom Tom the Piper’s Son from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.Read More »

  • Ken Jacobs – Capitalism: Child Labor (2006)

    Ken Jacobs2001-2010ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    “Jolting in every sense of the word, this short masterwork flickers between stereographic cards depicting Victorian-era child laborers, creating a portrait of standardized horrors, endlessly reproduced.” —MoMARead More »

  • Fredi M. Murer – Balance (1965)

    Fredi M. Murer1961-1970ArthouseShort FilmSwitzerland

    Quote:
    A young man is balancing on a rope. A young woman with a pistol appers. In the middle of war noise, they won’t to bury him, when he suddenly awakes… A very early short from Murer and a key study for his later (and phantastic!!!) film “Pazifik – oder die Zufriedenen”. It’s a poetic aproach, which mixes up passion, love and fear of war.Read More »

  • Ken Jacobs – Window (1964)

    Ken Jacobs1961-1970ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience’s sense of gravity. The camera’s movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice. –K. J.Read More »

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