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Although all three volumes in the Cinema 16 series are excellent, the strongest for this viewer is the European collection. To explain this one may point to the fact that this is the most 'auteur' heavy of the three volumes (featuring films by Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, Roy Andersson, Patrice Laconte, Tom Tykwer, Nanni Moretti, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Jan Svankmajer), but some of the strongest films of the collection come from newcomers and relative unknowns (Lukas Moodysson, Virgil Widrich, Juan Solanas).
One of these opens the collection, Moodysson's 1997 Bara Prata Lite (Talk), an unsettling character study of a late middle-aged man, Birger (Sten Ljunggren), who wanders through life yearning for human contact. We first see him on a bus, making small talk to a girl –who avoids him– telling her he works at Volvo. We then see him at a Volvo plant, trying to give an employee a helping hand with his work, but receiving a cool rebuke. He receives the same reception at a restaurant, where an impatient employee tells him to leave and that he no longer works there. By now we realize he is a disturbed man who has not adjusted to whatever slings mid-life have thrown at him. He returns home and begins to make a series of crank phone calls, each becoming increasingly more aggressive. In the last he makes sexual advances toward the person (woman we assume) at the other end of the line. Just as the call comes to an abrupt end and he places the receiver down, the door bell rings. And, as if fate has unjustly turned to his side, a young attractive woman soliciting for Jehovah's Witness appears at his door. Even though the man has not shown any overt signs of violence, we immediately feel for the safety of the woman. And our fear becomes warranted when his passive aggressive behaviour alerts the young woman to the potential danger. After uncomfortable small talk she tries to leave his apartment but he forcibly restrains her, throwing her onto the floor and accidentally killing her. Rather than adjusting to the act, he simply lies her down in bed and proceeds to watch television with her, acting as if she were a living companion. Everything in the film is understated. No music, no sinister lighting, just a restraint performance of a quietly disturbed man, at once sad, pathetic, and terrifying. Director Moodysson injects tension in subtle ways, like the unexpected cut to an imposing low angle shot of Birger as he rises to block the young woman's path from couch to door. This is followed by a shot which registers fear on her face for the first time. On the commentary track director Moodysson calls this his 'Swedish Psycho,' in reference to the Mary Harron film of 1999 An American Psycho, and notes the cultural differences that shape the films. Whereas the killer in Harron's film is born out of an American cultural context –consumerism– the killer in his film is a product of what he calls a "Swedish sickness –loneliness."
Talk
The collection provides some breathing room with the lighter toned second film, Patrice Locante's two-shot film Le Batteur du Bolero (Bolero's Drummer, 1992). After a brief opening shot which begins at the back feet of an orchestra conductor, then tilts up his body, the film cuts a seven minute plus long take that dollies forward, to the left of the conductor and around the orchestra, and continues to dolly lateral across the stage settling at a medium close-up profile shot of the drummer, where it remains for the duration of the film, capturing the drummer's every little wince, gesture, and sigh of exasperation as he plays along to the monotonous rhythm of Ravel's "Bolero" (you can hymn it to yourself).
As we learn from the commentary (and would have surmised from the performance), the player is not a real drummer, but a comic actor, Jacques Villeret (playing to a recording, not live). Laconte admits that he has always found this music boring…but was always fascinated by what a drummer would be doing during the piece. Laconte had this perverse idea in his head for years, but it became a reality only when he mentioned it to Cannes Festival director Gilles Jacob, who loved the idea and told him: you make and I'll show it (so is that how it works at the big festivals?).
A playful tone is continued with the next film, also French, Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave run through, Charlotte et Veronique, ou tous le garcons s'appellent Patrick (1957). Factoring in the age of this film, Cinema 16 presents an excellent looking transfer (one of the best in the collection). Charlotte et Veronique clearly foreshadows Breathless and the New Wave style in many respects: the focus on young, urban people who are restless, always in movement; the fresh and frank approach to sexuality and male-female relations; the promiscuous male; the on-location cinematography and use of natural light; reflexivity (all the people sitting in cafes are reading cinema mags); and the filming of interior spaces (the way the flat is lit and decorated with art posters); the parallels between women and art (a woman is framed with a painting behind her on the wall in one shot). The one glaring difference is in the use of 'coincidence': two female friends meet and set up a date with the same man. Only in the final scene do the two friends learn that they have been duped by the man –when they see him on the street with yet a third woman– but it doesn't bother them in the least. Cinema 16 did well to entrust the commentary track to British film scholar and Francophile Colin MacCabe.
As noted earlier, two of the strongest films in the European collection are from relative unknowns, Copy Shop 2001, by Virgil Wildrich and L'Homme sans tete (The Man Without a Head, 2003) by Juan Solanas. Copy Shop is a perfect example of the prime strength of the short film format: take one good idea and go with it just before it becomes tired. Director Wildrich takes the simple premise of a copy shop worker becoming a subject/victim of his own device. The film develops from a simple premise: what would happen if a human being can be photocopied like a sheet of paper? While working the photocopier the lead character accidentally copies his hand, which triggers the endless duplication of his being. He wakes up the next day into a new spatial and temporal world order, where his reality enfolds upon itself and different points in the film co-exist at the same time. Similar to Groundhog Day, where the Bill Murray character wakes up endlessly to repeat the same day, the character is here physically repeated into the same space and time. He walks into his bathroom, stares into the mirror and exits, while another version of himself moves into the bathroom to replace him. Once he arrives at his shop there are a dozen of him waiting there for him. The black and white film was downgraded to increase grain and contrast to emulate a silent film aesthetic, perhaps as a nod to Buster Keaton's 1921 silent comedy classic The Playhouse, which employed a similar effect of duplication where Keaton used (mainly) in-camera effects to allow him to play every member of an orchestra, the stagehands, and audience. The film concludes with perhaps another tip of the hat to Keaton, in this case his sublime short film Cops, where he is chased through the streets by dozens of police officers. In Copy Shop the man is chased to the rooftop by his army of doubles, and jumps off into a field of clones lining the city street below (280 according to the commentary track by Wildrich).
For the technically inclined, Wildrich's commentary track is especially helpful because it explains the process behind the film's duplication effects. The film was shot with a digital camera, with each frame copied to nearly 18,000 digital frames, which were then animated (like a flip book) and shot on 35mm. The result is a perfect example of a film where form and content are indissoluble; a film about copied paper made out of copied paper. This process is revealed in a wonderfully subtle reflexive moment where we see an edge of the paper fluttering (perhaps another nod to Keaton, who was the first silent comedian to consistently inject touches of reflexivity in his films). Even the minimalist 'repetitive' music by Alexander Zlamal reflects this 'indissoluble form-content.'
Copy Shop
For the theoretically inclined, the film can be seen as a coy adaptation of Jean Baudrillard's postmodern concept of the 'simulacrum': an image without a clearly defined reference point in reality, a product of an image-intense society where the link between the signifier-signified is broken down.
The visually spellbinding L'Homme sans tete shares this thematic/formal motif with Copy Shop (along with Doodlebug): repetition. Employing a seamless combination of live action and computer animation, Solanas constructs a strange yet believable world that looks like a distillation of every dystopian cityscape imagined. A world where headless people can walk into a shop and try on a head like a pair of new shoes (giving a wholly new meaning to 'head shop'). The long walks the headless man Phelps takes to the shop through the city are reminiscent of those taken by Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins) in Lynch's The Elephant Man. One can also read the film as a social allegory on race. For example, in the depicted society headless people are minorities, and in one scene we see Phelps try on a black head, which brings him great pleasure, until he looks down and notices his white hands.
Theme of Repetition in Copy Shop, Doodlebug and L'Homme sans tete
Three early shorts by established directors represent clear templates for later works: Epilog by Tom Tykwer, Germany, 1991), Harlig Ar Jorden (World of Glory) by Roy Andersson, Sweden, 1991 and Nocturne by Lars von trier, Denmark, 1980. The strongest of the three is Harlig Ar Jorden (World of Glory) Roy Andersson, Sweden, 1991, a run through for his next film, the feature Songs from the Second Floor (2001). Like the latter film, World of Glory employs a rigid, minimalist formal style (long take sequence shots filmed with static camera, concentration of long shot range, sparse art design, muted colors) and deadpan acting to erect an Expressionist satire on contemporary Swedish values. The film opens with a haunting, unexplained opening shot: a group of nude humans, men, women and children, are herded into the back of large truck and executed by exhaust fumes which are directed back into the hull of the truck by a tube. This charnel-house truck –which can be seen as a reference to the Nazi concentration camps– reappears in the background of a later shot through a storefront window. In the enlightening commentary track director Andersson confirms the Holocaust allusion, admitting that although these atrocities did not happen in Sweden, issues of race biology were prevalent in Sweden at that time.
World of Glory
The film's final shot is just as haunting as the first. Shot in silent film styled color tinting, the lead character, standing in his bedroom in front of his wife in bed, places his hands over his ears in a recreation of the Munch's famous painting The Scream and whimpers pathetically to his wife, "There is someone screaming" (the faint sound of a person screaming in pain is heard off-screen, which, as Andersson notes in the commentary track, is meant to link back to the opening scene and the crying girl forced into the truck).
World of Glory
The film is quite indescribable in terms of genre. Is it comedy? Surrealism? Social satire? Indeed, is it even science fiction, in that the people we see are only pale shadows of human beings. They exhibit either no emotion, or too much, and their stiff movements and ghost-like faces could suggest an aliens-have-taken-over scenario. For example, why do people periodically turn their head to acknowledge the camera, as if looking for approval from some omnipotent off-screen presence? Sweden as envisaged by Andersson is populated by pasty, grey-faced (mainly) men wearing grey suits, ties and briefcases in hand: the typical 'salaryman' or Volvo employee. In the enlightening commentary track director Andersson says that the film is a condensed and simplified reflection of Swedish mentality and their value system. Based on what we see, we can extrapolate this to mean things such as order, functionality, pragmatism, material comfort, guilt, and alcoholism.
Alongside the film's intriguing content is an interesting narrative structure. The film is sixteen minutes long, comprised of fifteen shots which are self-contained scenes. Each of the scenes is 'pillowed' by black leader which lasts three to five seconds. The structure looks like this (length of the shots in parenthesis):
Opening Credits 0-0'45"
Scene 1) 0'45"-2'46" (1'01"). Black Frames 2'46"-2'50" (04")
Scene 2) 2'50"-3'43" (53"). BF: 3'43"-3'46" (03")
Scene 3) 3'46"-4'23" (37"). BF: 4'23"-4'26" (03")
Scene 4) 4'26"-4'54" (28"). BF: 4'54"-4'59" (05")
Scene 5) 4'59"-5'29" (30"). BF: 5'29"-5'33" (04")
Scene 6) 5'33"-6'24" (51"). BF: 6'24"-6'28" (04")
Scene 7) 6'28"-6'48" (20"). BF: 6'48"-6'53" (05")
Scene 8) 6'53"-7'46" (53"). BF: 7'46"-7'50" (04")
Scene 9) 7'50"-8'25" (35"). BF: 8'25"-8'28" (03")
Scene 10) 8'28"-9'11" (43"). BF: 9'11"-9'16" (05")
Scene 11) 9'16"-10'32" (1'16"). BF: 10'32"-10'36" (04")
Scene 12) 10'36"-11'49" (1'13"). BF: 11'49"-11'54" (05")
Scene 13) 11'54"-12'36" (42"). BF: 12'36"-12'40" (04")
Scene 14) 12’40"-13'50" (1'10"). BF 13'50"-13'55" (05")
Scene 15) 13'55"-14'45" (50")
Closing Credits 14'45"-15'45"
Not counting the black frames, the film has an exceedingly high average shot length (ASL) of 56".
As much as the Andersson short, Tykwer's Epilog is the blueprint for a later breakthrough feature, Run Lola Run (1998). In this case an act repeats (once here, not three times) with a different conclusion the subsequent time (another instance of the noted theme of repetition discussed earlier). The camera tracks 360 degrees around a young couple in deep argument. When the woman tells the man to "piss off," he quietly sits by the side of the bed, takes a gun out of the night table and shoots the woman. The next scene begins as if a flashback to the actions that led to this murder, and plays out identically, safe for the twist: the gun is no longer in the drawer, but in the woman's hands. In a comically reflexive gesture the man notes the change and says out loud –"This isn't right!"– moments before he is shot by the woman. The feel of the film, with the circular camera movements and the interior domestic setting recalls Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette (1976). Although a simple exercise in 'non-reliable' flashback, or, as Tykwer notes in the commentary track, an exercise in "how time effects narrative structure," the execution is perfect; and there are enough subtle touches that warrant repeated viewings. Tykwer's commentary track is one of the better on this volume, blending production history, discussing influences, and venturing analysis (something which too few directors are up to).
The third 'blueprint' short is Lars von Trier's Nocturne, an eight minute short made as his graduation project for The National Film School of Denmark which bears a strong relationship to Elements of Crime and Zentropa. The film is an exercise in creating a mood of extreme claustrophobia or agoraphobia. The premise is simple. A young woman terrified of daylight must muster up the courage to leave her apartment to catch an early morning flight. The cinematography steals the show, rendering her room a tenebrous cavern of murky colors and shifting tones, splintered by a deep red ceiling bulb. The use of slow motion and barely audible music, sound, and hushed voices add to the sense of quietude. As Trier reveals in the commentary, the film was greatly influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky (especially The Mirror), which is particularly evident in an overhead slow motion shot where pieces of paper rain down onto her grounded body. This commentary track by Trier and his cinematographer Tomas Gisslasson is one of the most entertaining in the collection. Both filmmakers have fun remembering the film, interpreting its meaning, and poking fun at their own youthful pretensions (their fixation on 'geometrical spacing,' explained as a visual design of moving lines from vertical to horizontal).
The European volume also includes two British shorts which couldn't be different in tone, the Scottish Fridge, directed by Peter Mullan and My Wrongs8245-8249 and 117, directed by the English Chris Morris. Fridge is a bleak, depressive, black and white slice of life in a rundown council estate in Govanhill, Glasgow. The central protagonists are two alcoholics, Rudy (Gary Lewis) and his girlfriend Alice (Vickie Masson ). A run-in with a couple of threatening teens leads to a third young boy being accidentally locked inside an icebox. The trapped boy serves two functions, one dramatic, one symbolic. In the former sense the incident places these hapless people in an unlikely position of responsibility, having to figure out how to open the icebox before the boy suffocates to death. In the symbolic sense, the fridge functions as a metaphor for social/class entrapment, made clear with the high angle shot which zooms out to frame the woman engulfed between the grey, decrepit buildings. We also see other people framed peering through their doors and windows, as if afraid to venture out into the bleak landscape.
Fridge
Morris' film is a comic variant (with a dark edge) on the premise of the talking dog, or the man who thinks he has a talking dog (no one else but the man 'hears' the dog talk). Earlier versions include the films A Boy and His Dog, Lucky, and the classic science fiction novel Sirius. The comic variant of the man and his talking dog is like the dummy and the ventriloquist, with the ventriloquist (man) as the comic foil to the dummy (talking dog). In this case the talking dog –a Doberman named Rothko– is the man's lawyer and continually gets the young man into embarrassing and dangerous social situations. An example is the following hilarious exchange between the dog, the man, and a bus employee asking for fare.
Bus Employee: Have you got any money?
Dog to the Man. Ask to pay on account.
Man to the Bus Employee: Could we…uh…pay on account?
Bus Employee: Off the next stop please.
Dog to the Man: Oh, now you've upset the flaky old cock.
Man to the Bus Employee: He didn't mean to call you that.
Bus Employee: What?
Man to the Bus Employee: Flaky old cock.
Perhaps it is fitting that this unusual film comes with a unique commentary track by the film's production runner, simply named Nick, which is a 'running commentary' on the film, rather than about the film. For example, at one point he digresses to discuss the relative merit of films with dog in the title (White Dog, Dog Star Man, Un chien andalou, Dog Day Afternoon, etc.).
The single Italian entry in the collection is Nanni Moretti's Il Giorno della Prima di close-Up (The Opening Day of Close-Up), an enjoyable and not so subtle satire on a) the archaic and philistine habits of Italian film goers, who prefer dubbed to subtitles films, and American films to art films; and b) an auto-critique of his own (apparently) obsessive and perfectionist nature. Moretti stars as himself, a neurotic producer/independent theatre owner preparing for the opening day of Kiarostami's Close-Up. Moretti comes across as a control freak, telling the receptionist and ticket taker how they should address customers, asking the concession clerk what type of sandwiches they have, or asking the projectionist to raise the volume a sliver. The film is book-ended by figures which demonstrate the dominance of Hollywood, a theme he deals with in Caro Diario and Aprile. It opens with Moretti measuring the size of different movie ads in the newspaper, noting how much larger the ads for the commercial films are than the one for Close-Up. It ends with him waking up in the middle of the night to hear the box-office results of the previous day, with mainstream American films having out grossed Close-Up ten-fold.
The flagship volume for the Cinema 16 series was the British compilation. Its success prompted the second volume, on European directors, which was subsequently followed by the third volume, on filmmakers from the United States. The wonderful diversity of films across these three DVDs are testament to the particular joys of the short film. The handsomely produced DVDs also include valuable supplementary material in the form of commentary tracks and succinct liner notes and credits for each film. We can only hope that this celebration of the short film has only begun and that Luke Morris is hard at work on an Asian or Canadian volume!
British Short Films
1) About a Girl (Dir. Brian Percival, 2001, 10 mins.)
2) Boy & Bicycle (Dir. Ridley Scott, 1958, 27 mins.)
3) Dear Phone (Dir. Peter Greenaway, 1976, 17 mins.)
4) Doodlebug (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 1997, 3 mins.)
5) Eight (Dir. Stephen Daldry, 1998, 13 mins.)
6) Gasman (Dir. Lynne Ramsey, 1997, 15 mins.)
7) Girl Chewing Gum (Dir. John Smith, 1976, 12 mins.)
8) Home (Dir. Morag McKinnon, 198, 11 mins.)
9) Joyride (Dir. Jim Gillespie, 1995, 10 mins.)
10) Inside-Out (Dir. Tom & Charles Guard, 1999, 7 mins.)
11) Je T'aime John Wayne (Dir. Toby Macdonald, 2000, 10 mins.)
12) The Sheep Thief (Dir. Asif Kapadia, 1997, 24 min.)
13) The Short and the Curlies (Dir. Mike Leigh, 1987, 17 mins.)
14) Telling Lies (Dir. Simon Ellis, 4000, 4 mins)
15) UK Images (Dir. Martin Parr, 1997, 6 mins.)
16) Who's My Favorite Girl? (Dir. Adrian J. McDowall, 1999, 15 mins.)
American Short Films
1) The Lunch Date (Dir. Adam Davidson, 1990, 11 mins)
2) Five Feet High and Rising (Dir. Peter Sollett, 1999, 29 min)
3) Freiheit (Dir. George Lucas, 1966, 3 mins)
4) Daybreak Express (Dir. D.A. Pennebaker, 1953, 5 mins)
5) Vincent (Dir. Tim Burton, 1982, 6 mins)
6) Terminal Bar (Dir. Stefan Nadelman, 2002, 22 mins)
7) Terry Tate: Office Linebacker (Dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2003, 4 mins)
8) Necrology: Roll Call of the Dead (Dir. Standish Lawder, 1969-70, 12 mins)
9) The Discipline Of D.E. (Dir. Gus Van Sant, 1982, 13 mins)
10) The Wrath of Cobble Hill (Dir. Adam Parrish King, 2005, 15 mins)
11) George Lucas in Love (Dir. Joe Nussbaum, 1999, 8 mins)
12) Meshes of the Afternoon (Dir. Maya Deren, 1943,15 mins)
13) Carmen (Dir. Alexander Payne, 1985, 18 mins)
14) Feelings (Dir. Todd Solondz, 1984, 4 mins)
15) Paperboys (Dir. Mike Mills, 2001, 41 mins)
16) Screen Test: Helmut (Dir. Andy Warhol, 1964, 5 mins)
European Short Films
1) Bara Prata Lite [Talk] (Dir. Lukas Moodysson, Swedish, 1997, 14 mins.)
2) Le Batteur du Bolero [The Drummer of Bolero] (Dir. Patrice Leconte, France, 1992, 8 mins.)
3) Charlotte et Veronique, ou tous le garcons s'appellent Patrick [Charlotte and Veronique, or all the boys are named Patrick] (Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1957, 21 mins.)
4) Copy Shop (Dir. Virgil Wildrich, Austria, 2001, 12 mins.)
5) Epilog (Dir. Tom Tykwer, Germany, 1991, 12 mins.)
6) Fridge (Dir. Peter Mullan, Scotland, 1996, 20 mins.)
7) Il Giorno della Prima di close-Up [The Opening Day of Close-Up] (Dir. Nanni Moretto, Italy, 1996, 7 mins.)
8) Gisele Kerozene (Dir. Jan Kounen, Holland-France, 1999, 4 mins.)
9) Harlig Ar Jorden [World of Glory] (Dir. Roy Andersson, Sweden, 1991, 16 mins.)
10) L'Homme sans tete [The Man Without a Head] (Dir. Juan Solanas, France, 2003, 18 mins.)
11) Koncert Zyczen [Concert of Wishes] (Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland, 1968, 16 mins.)
12) Jabberwocky (Dir. Jan Svankmajer, Czech Republic, 1971, 13 mins)
13) My Wrongs8245-8249 and 117 (Dir. Chris Morris, 2003, UK, 12 mins)
14) Nocturne (Dir. Lars von trier, Denmark, 1980, 8 mins.)
15) El Secdleto de la Tlompeta (Dir. Javier Fesser, Spain, 1995, 18 mins.)
16) Election Night (Dir. Anders Thomas Jensen, Denmark, 1998, 11 mins.)
About Donato Totaro: Donato Totaro has been the editor of the online film journal Offscreen since its inception in 1997. Totaro received his PhD in Film & Television from the University of Warwick (UK) and is a part-time lecturer in Film Studies at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). He has published on recent Asian cinema, the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, the horror genre and is currently preparing a manuscript entitled Time and the Long Take in Narrative Cinema.
See more articles by Donato Totaro
Filed under: European Cinema Non Fiction Cinema Popular Genre
Keywords: Animation British Cinema French Cinema Maya Deren New Wave Short Film
Other essays in this issue:
- Small Gauge Trauma
- Agit-prop Cuban Style
- Sisyphus and Suburbia: A Contextual Study of David Lynch's Dumbland
- Small Gauge Trauma
- Industrie/Industry: Oeuvres récentes / Recent works by Richard Kerr
Related Essays:
- Small Gauge Trauma
- An interview with director Mikhäil Kobakhidzé.
- FCMM 2002 Dossier : Short Films Exposed
- Masterclass! Short Film Workshops in New Zealand
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