Oscar-Nominated Shorts

I have capsule reviews for each of the animated and live-action shorts nominated for this year's Oscars at Spectrum Culture. They are mostly a wan bunch, lacking the spark of the best short-form artistry and in some cases feeling like mere fragments where a good short feels as if it contains the world. Even so, a few here and there piqued my curiosity, and some even entertained me.

The post with capsules is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Cactus River (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's shorts are the only thing more confounding than his full-length works, and Cactus River is his most obscure in some time. A black-and-white "tribute" to the Mekong River, Cactus River documents one of Joe's actors, Jenjira Pongpas, as she lives out her daily routine with her husband, an American ex-pat she met online and recently married. Sounds innocuous, until Joe plays the film at a lower frame rate, making it jerk around like a silent as the audio track plays only the roar of wind on a poorly covered mic and pops that somehow manage to be louder than the white noise.

Joe tends to attach a brief explanation to his shorts, perhaps anticipating the viewer's bafflement. Not that his statements are entirely helpful: they tend to be as cryptic as the films themselves, though they do sometimes offer a clue to be interpreted. The director's synopsis for this short relates how Jenjira changed her name to Nach, which means "water." Nach lives on the bank of the Mekong, which she worries will dry up soon thanks to Chinese dams. Does that explain the title, then? That this surging body of water may soon become an arid bed of desert plants? And if Jenjira now calls herself water, is she the river's heir? Perhaps this 10-minute abstract posits a Thai Anna Livia Plurabelle.

As ever with Joe's work, Cactus River overflows with indelible, evocative images. The choppy rhythms of the frame rate slow when the camera settles upon the Mekong in the frantic opening montage, put at ease by the river's flow (or, alternately, drying up with a blocked-off source. Nach's husband watches Thai TV on mute, the flicker of Joe's high-contrast film obscuring the image on the TV into what almost looks like a nuclear cataclysm until a cactus can eventually be made out, looming over its surroundings in a low-angle shot. The final, still image cuts to color as Nach beckons out over the river. Rebirth is a key feature of Joe's films, from the bifurcated structure of Tropical Malady to the reincarnation-cum-genre-tour that was Uncle Boonmee. As such, the last shot could be the "In Memoriam" photo for the Mekong, but also the first documented photo of its new avatar.

Capsule Reviews: Wavelength, Begone Dull Care, Bezhin Meadow

Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)

Michael Snow' legendary 45-minute structuralist work feels about three times its length, a slow zoom across a vast, near-empty office to a photo on the opposite wall. Yet the time and space experiment is a fascinating work of cinema, the steady shot using variations in exposure and other in-camera tweaks to subtly transform one space into another, and to turn day into night with a filter change. Further challenging the makeup of cinema (and the audience's patience) is the soundtrack mixing synthetic an oceanic waves into steady wails of unending noise. It is an undeniably infuriating experience, but also one of the most brilliantly conceptual breakdowns of cinema ever made. And as Snow's different filters and exposures warped space and time, I found myself bizarrely moved, the director's intellectual, self-critical use of the camera also something of an exhibition of the "magic" of film. Maybe it's weird to look sentimentally upon a film with a soundtrack gradually building to the hissing shriek of a boiling kettle, but there you go. Grade: A+

Begone Dull Care (Evelyn Lambert & Norman McLaren, 1949)

This 8-minute visualization of jazz music (specifically a three-movement piece by the Oscar Peterson Trio) is a triumph of early experimental filmmaking, using paint, scratches and animation in an abstract ballet of synesthesia. The frantic layering of unclear imagery and sound prefigures so much experimental cinema, yet the sheer giddiness of its dance of light and the complex layering of painted strips and extreme-close-ups on symbols gives Begone Dull Care a vivaciousness that rates it over all but the best of the works to clearly derive inspiration from it. This kind of filmmaking can seem closed off and intellectualized, but from the rolling, danceable bounce of Peterson's licks to the listing of credits in multiple languages, Begone Dull Care is clearly meant to be enjoyed by all. Grade: A

Bezhin Meadow (Sergei Eisenstein, 1937)

Reconstructed from a suppressed work about a boy who prevents his father from destroying the collective's food, Bezhin Meadow is, even as nothing more than a progression of film stills, a work of stunning beauty. The edit of the "film" that I saw opens on lush shots of nature, of branches criss-crossing the frame, before telling the audience that the evil father has beaten his wife to death and now plots against the son for loving the Soviet cause more than him. I normally can't bear to watch reassembled stills presented as a lost film; it's like finding fragments of poetry, or uncollected bars of an unfinished composition. But the stunning composition of Eisenstein's images is so gorgeous and the rhythm of his montage so unexpectedly preserved in the stacking of these static photos that Bezhin Meadow is not only watchable but one of the great director's most stirring works. That's true despite, or maybe because, of its unbearable irony, its propagandic shots in service to some of the most insane public collusions with communism—paranoia over "wrecking" of collective farms, the lionization of the child who reports his parents—apparently insufficient to prevent harsh censorship. This is never more clear than in the scenes in which religious imagery and symbolism is mockingly upended even as the film subtly supplants Christ for Stalin and upholds a new, secular fanaticism that relies upon the stifling religious iconography it seeks to destroy. So many of Eisenstein's film bear the burden of this sad irony in retrospect, but they are never anything less than stunning, even when censoring crackdowns reduce his work to nothing more than a glorified slideshow (and we're lucky to have even that).

Day & Night (Teddy Newton, 2010)

[The following is an entry in Pussy Goes Grrr's Short Animation Blogathon, running April 23-27.]

My first experience with short animation was, naturally, old Looney Tunes cartoons played in syndication on morning TV when I was growing up in the '90s. Yet it was through Pixar that I first got the chance to see shorts (either animated or live-action) on a big screen. I still remember the first of Pixar's theatrically attached shorts—Gen's Game, the loopy back-and-forth of an old man ferociously playing himself at chess in a park—better than the feature it accompanied, A Bug's Life. Though I was far, far too young to elucidate how the short's construction hooked me, the way its cuts and "angles" made the old player seem like two distinct people each formulating secret strategies against the other was riotous and thrilling. For the longest time, the lingering, nostalgic giddiness Gen's Game produced made it my favorite of the Pixar shorts.

Until Day & Night. Released 12 years after 1998's Gen's Game, Day & Night was the first Pixar short since that one to be superior to the film it supported. The difference is that the earlier film easily stood out against Pixar's sophomore slump. But Day & Night, that was attached to one of the studio's finest, the unexpectedly poignant, technically superfluous Toy Story 3. At six minutes long, Day & Night proves as much a technical achievement as the feature presentation, and its driving theme as simple and direct yet illuminating and intelligent as the themes of maturation and moving on in Toy Story 3.

True to the time limitations of the form, the short sets itself up quickly. Opening on the usual Pixar 3D animation of an idyllic field, the camera pulls back until it reveals this world as being the tightly contained view of a transparent being existing in 2D space against an infinite black void. Stumbling about in his morning routine, this being happens across someone just like him. Well, almost. Instead of showing an area basked in the morning sun, this other creature offers a window into night. Startled, the two soon engage in a hostile pissing match to demonstrate their superiority, each showing off what goes on at their respective times to impress and cow the other.

The thematic implications are obvious, and only more so as the shortened plot swiftly moves the two from antagonism to mutual admiration and cooperation. Capped off with an old lecture from Wayne Dyer about the importance of embracing the different, Day & Night makes a clear, direct argument for children that warns against xenophobia and just generally hating the unknown. But what makes the film truly masterful is how it's put together. The movement of the two beings in the 2D realm, as well as their moods and expressions, is demonstrated through objects and sounds captured within their portal bodies. For example, when Day wakes up to a rooster crow at the start, thunderclouds communicate the cracking of stiff joints and the sigh of pleasure he emits when he walks into the releasing rush of a waterfall is...well, guess. Even better is the integration of the outer 2D space with the 3D textures within, enhancing the texture of both levels. For a more in-depth account of how this looked in a theater with 3D glasses on, I direct you to Tim Brayton's simply magnificent contemporary review of the short, which he later named the best film of 2010.

Tim's review is so incredible that I'll pretty much stop here, unable to equal his piece, much less add to it. Even his title, "Hegel for Wee Folk," is brilliant, though it also offers perhaps the one area where I can object to him on any grounds. Though the use of 2D and 3D to illustrate the conflict between day and night certainly highlights Hegelian dialectic in several respects, the film's final moments, of the dualities of the two creatures reversing, move beyond Hegel into something more reminiscent of Levinas. When the two stand side by side, the sun setting in one and rising in another (complete with a brief meeting of the two semicircles at the midpoint of both bodies), the self and other invert and become irrelevant, fictitious projections that compel us not into the hatred cautioned against by Dyer but in the fundamental need for empathy as espoused by Levinas. Whether it owes more to Hegel or Levinas, though, Day & Night still broaches at least one of the most challenging philosophers in history, even as it presents a cogent, easily parsed out message for kids. It's one of the best short films I've ever seen.

Beneath the Earth Film Festival

OK gang, so recently I was a judge for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, which showcased short films by up-and-comers looking to prove their stuff. Of the seven films screened, I particularly enjoyed three and felt another three showed real promise (only one completely irritated me, but it shall remain nameless), and I was happy to have participated. Four of the films won for the various categories, but I'd like to briefly highlight the two big winners for Best Film and Audience Award:

Best Film: Photographs

I was extremely pleased to see this film win, though I can't conceive of how it couldn't. A brief, beautifully animated vignette of an old woman discovering a camera that doesn't seem all that much younger than her, Photographs is superb. Its wordless six minutes doesn't waste a second, yet the film takes its time in revealing the significance of the woman's innocent self-portraits. But even without the heartbreaking finale, Photographs is still a moving testament to the childlike properties that art instills in us and nourishes in even the bleakest, most unforgivingly adult situations.

Audience Award: After Ever After

I confess less enthusiasm for the audience award recipient, even if it's still not my least-favorite of the seven films. After Ever After works as a sort of mashup between the works of Michel Gondry and (500) Days of Summer, only it lacks the innovation and cheek of either. I was also ready to pounce on the occupation of its protagonist, the increasingly stale job of the adman, but reading that the director actually has worked for ad agencies mollified me somewhat. At least he's writing from experience; I feel like Hollywood just acknowledges what it really does when it puts its characters in advertising firms. But even if the film doesn't strike me as original or even remarkable, the aesthetic components are all in place: it displays solid editing, cinematography and direction throughout, which are all the things short films are supposed to hone.

The Janitor (Nicholas Ray, 1974)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

Nicholas Ray's contribution to the Wet Dreams anthology film, entitled "The Janitor," is a deconstruction of Nicholas Ray the symbol through the symbolic destruction of Nicholas Ray the man. Ray himself plays two of the film's three chief parts, those of a priest speaking to a teenage congregation and a janitor who toils in a movie studio that becomes increasingly connected to the priest's story through broken diegesis and metacinema. And through it all, the film adheres to the softcore theme behind the overall project.

The first striking aspect of the film is Ray's face. With his untamed hair, eye patch, lined face and perilous, craggy chasm of a mouth, Ray looks like Dionysus in decline, a hard-living hero now dessicated by self-abuse. That brand of self-abuse finds its way into the film's main form of self-abuse, and the swirling torrent of religiosity, sexual ecstasy, guilt and self-hatred that springs forth from this collision makes "The Janitor" an unexpected triumph. Unless you were watching this to get off, in which case the film is a horrendous failure.

The contrast between the janitor and priest suggests that one is the fever dream vision of the other. As the janitor dances playfully around the studio as he sweeps, the faraway priest has his young daughter pull up his stockings before he goes out to address his teenage following. There, he rants against Moses' commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery," his screed flowing in and out of coherence as occasional returns to the janitor show the man happily toiling away, lost in his own head.

Back with the congregation, the priest's words have such an overpowering effect that the teenagers begin to engage in an orgy, much to his consternation. "Stop!" he begs. "I still have plenty of things to tell you!" If the film's ragged assembly suggests a fight with his own cinematic proclivities, the sight of a visibly bemused Ray trying to calm his eroticized disciples works as a skewed look at his second career as a teacher, perhaps exposing his fears that he had not imparted what he wished onto his pupils.

The aesthetic experiments go even deeper. Post-sync sound turns the audio mix into a hodgepode of the skittering recorded sounds of clattering objects and hiss and the overdubbed speech of a French baritone with a voice so deep and ponderous that the separately recorded speech divorces from the diegetic world until it becomes dialogue and omniscience to bridge the two distinct scenarios. In effect, both the audio and visuals embody a duality in their construction, distinct halves not so much in opposition as all-out war, thrown at each other like atoms in a collider until they smash together and fuse. Ray long used this approach with character, most notably in the rival soldiers of Bitter Victory and the conservationist/poacher duo in Wind Across the Everglades; here, however, he uses the make-up of film itself.

By the end of the segment's 14 nigh-impenetrable minutes, Ray has covered such topics as religious guilt, the spirituality of the orgasm (and the sexual bliss of the spirit), incest and the structural elements of cinema. The daydream at last becomes a movie, and an enraged janitor pulls a rifle from a closet and fires into his own looming image, an act of meta-suicide that seems the oddly logical endpoint of Ray's corpus of self-annihilating icon erection and deconstruction. Though Ray would continue to tweak the previous year's experiment We Can't Go Home Again and make the part-doc Lightning Over Water with Wim Wenders, "The Janitor" is an unexpected yet curiously satisfying summary of one of the cinema's greatest voices.

When It Rains (Charles Burnett, 1995)

At first glance, Charles Burnett's 13-minute short When It Rains may seem a bit low-key to be worthy of Jonathan Rosenbaum's high praise (his being damn-near the only mention you can find of the once-obscure short). But if the best short films capture something of life in narrow time-frames, Burnett's jazz-blues riff on community life surely stands as a masterful condensation of his unique blend of Ozu's stark but deliberate framing and Rossellini's neorealism.

Set on a bustling New Year's Day, When It Rains depicts a man (Ayuko Babu) attempting to help a friend pay her rent to an impatient landlord threatening to throw her and her child out if she doesn't cough up the money by that evening. The man, a musician and griot (a sort of oral historian/poet), tries to help by calling on favors from people around the community. It's a simple setup, but then Burnett never needed much to make a masterpiece.

In his narration, the griot discusses roots, both ethnic and musical. He recounts the story of someone asking him how he can combine jazz and blues music, and he responds by detailing the tribal African music that forms the foundation of both. Jazz and blues are both percussive, jazz through the drums, blues through the sharply played chords of the guitar. Artistic and ethnic pride swirl until homogeneous in Babu's speech, which has a rhythm of its own and occasionally rhymes.

Burnett is a realist, but he is also a poet, and you can see it in these shots. The cash-strapped woman finds Babu at a gathering where musicians in the community play together. A number of people play percussion, ranging from older men and women clad in the African clothing they started wearing in the '60s to youngsters wearing jeans and hoodies awkwardly using drumsticks on the hand-drums. In the crowd, a middle-aged woman dances. The more political solidarity that might be represented by the dashiki-wearing older people in the crowd has given way to artistic unity and instruction through music.

Like he did in Killer of Sheep, Burnett mixes the diegetic sound and music at about the same level, potentially obscuring some of the words. Viewing this decision through scenes as the one just described, however, we can see Burnett uniting words and song, as if to say that the black community, when in touch with its roots, can communicate in music. Music is, after all, the most primitive and fundamental form of communication.

The film itself plays as a series of musical riffs, with each person Babu consults for money adding a distinctive flavor. The woman's ex-husband, once a Black Panther and draft dodger who now wears a suit and waxes his car, flatly refuses to help, his lack of attention sounding like bass beats carrying on the rhythm and refusing to be swayed by an instrument that should be following him, not the other way 'round. Soul, a junkyard owner, offers a lighter contrast when he immediately hands over his spare cash for the day to help a sister out. The griot always makes time to have a chat with the people he's talking to, asking about kids and friends instead of just begging, and the interactions only make these staccato vignettes deeper. As if Burnett's realist credentials were ever in doubt, a scene where a woman's chat with Babu is interrupted by her kid yanking impatiently on her arm and crying to use the bathroom. As in jazz, everything is deliberately mapped out, yet there's so much room for spontaneity.

The ending beautifully ties all these threads together: the griot's haggles do not get him the money he needs, but one broke street musician hands him an old John Handy album of the saxophonist's show at the Monterey Jazz Festival (an artifact of '60s countercultural tastes released just before rock became the decade's dominant artistic expression) as a show of sympathy. When Babu heads back to the landlord in a futile effort to take what money he could scrape together, the man practically jumps out of his skin when he sees the John Handy album and accepts it in lieu of payment. (All Babu can say is, "Damn, I'm glad I didn't have a rap album in my hand.") What better way to end a film about community spirit and interactive roots than with a bit of bartering?


[Like all of Charles Burnett's work, When It Rains was a hard piece to track down, at least until Milestone released a long-overdue DVD of his magnum opus, Killer of Sheep, along with his follow-up feature My Brother's Wedding and several shorts. Despite the horrid packaging, Milestone's set unearths buried treasures like this wonderful short and gives audiences a chance to discover the man Armond White deemed "the least well-known great American filmmaker." Hey, a stopped clock is right twice a day.]