10 result(s) tagged “Short Films”

On the last day of the “Short-Film Week” blog-a-thon, I had planned to write an essay on a music video of my readers’ choosing. But my polling functions went poof this week, and I’ve written enough. So I’ll let two of the videos on my ballot do (most of) the talking.

I chose these two because I can’t imagine a more efficient way for their effects to be achieved: a poignant look at the career of Johnny Cash, and a dead-on spoof of NFL Films. Sometimes and somehow, the music video can do things (beyond the song) that seem impossible in any other format, regardless if the aims are serious or silly.

The guy who dominates Stefan Nadelman’s documentary short Terminal Bar could be related to Robert Crumb, both in his physical features and his matter-of-fact way. He talks about everything from death by alcohol to bathroom blowjobs to the “destituted” people who frequented the titular establishment where he tended bar for a decade. And like the famous cartoonist Crumb, he seems perpetually amused, and it looks suspiciously like a defense mechanism.

He tells of putting cheap liquor in the bottles of more expensive brands, and brags that not one person ever noticed.

In talking about the clientele, he says that the white, working-class patrons died off — often because of booze — and were replaced by gay black men. With a shrug, without bitterness or judgment, he says something along the lines of: If you become a gay bar, you become a gay bar. Whatcha gonna do?

His name is Sheldon Nadelman. He is not the subject of the 23-minute movie, but its character is drawn from him: lively, detailed, aloof, unfocused, and scattershot.

(A warning for sensitive folk: This essay discusses and uses screen captures from a short film in which a man conquers mammoth bare breasts and inserts his entire naked body into a woman’s vagina. [And, magically, the number of Culture Snob readers grows exponentially.])

An object within an object of the same type — the novel within a novel, the film within a film — is rarely considered out of its context. Its meanings, and its narrative or thematic roles, are derived from its conversation with the larger work.

But if the object is nearly whole — that is, if it’s not just a fragment, if we have a reasonably full sense of its shape, structure, and content — looking at it in isolation can bear fruit and is an act of respect.

Robert Zemeckis’ Contact is a triumph of short-form —

What’s that?

Yes, I’m aware that Contact isn’t exactly short, but the Screen Actors Guild defines a feature film as a movie of 80 minutes or longer, and Contact’s 53-minute running —

Pardon me?

Yes, I know that Contact was 150 minutes long when it played in movie theaters. I’m not talking about that movie. It was terrible and interminable.

My version uses the same source material but starts at the 33-minute, 25-second mark and ends at one hour, 26 minutes, and five seconds. It’s a marvel of economy and —

Yes, as a matter of fact I do think you can chop off the first half-hour and the last hour of the theatrical version without losing —

What? You liked all that backstory and preface? You thought it was necessary? And you were satisfied with the way the movie dragged on, and ended &mdash and then ended again?

Now shut up and let me explain myself.

The animated T.R.A.N.S.I.T. is a feature-film plot distilled into 10 minutes, and it shows the ways in which the short film is more forgiving than longer cinematic forms. This movie operates wordlessly almost as a plot outline, and it’s gorgeous to look at and challenging to keep up with. It feels like a small, perfectly cut gem.

On reflection, that’s a good analogy, because Piet Kroon’s 1997 short is a beautiful piece of visual craftsmanship that fails as art in any rational analysis.

Like most of his movies, David Cronenberg’s Camera is a sly piece of work. On the surface, it’s an illustration of the effects of lighting, camera movement, recording format, performance, and even costumes.

Camera appears to be Cronenberg’s most warm and human work. But it packs a lot into its running time, and, on closer inspection, it’s a downer about submission to addiction.

Short movies are at once the most ubiquitous and the most neglected films there are, garnering little critical appraisal as objects themselves even as they’re unavoidable in everyday life.

This lack of analysis is in large part a function of their mostly less-than-noble intentions. Commercials for television (reused in movie theaters and online) are 30- or 60-second movies pushing a specific product or company. Music videos are similar but longer, designed to sell CDs, downloads, other merchandise, and concert tickets. Movie trailers are condensed versions of what they’re hawking, yet they’re generally so formulaic (more than the films themselves, if that’s possible), incoherent, and artless that they rarely seem to merit further discussion.

Then there are those labors of love, short works made with the understanding that few people outside of film festivals will ever see them. They, too, are often commercial, selling the potential of their creators as suitable talents for paying projects.

From December 2 through 8, Culture Snob and Ed Howard’s Only the Cinema are hosting the Short-Film Week blog-a-thon.

The blog-a-thon is technically over, but late submissions are welcome.

(The initial announcements are here and here. Pick up your logos here.)

Bookmark this entry and Only the Cinema to keep up on all the goings-on.

(List of contributions last updated at 11 a.m. on December 9, 2007.)

Anybody wanting to participate in or promote the “Short-Film Week” blog-a-thon is welcome to grab and use the two logos created by event co-host Ed Howard of Only the Cinema.

Continue reading to view and/or download the graphics.

When I read the initial announcement for “Short Film Day,” slated for December 4 at Ed Howard’s Only the Cinema, my heart sank.

I’d been mulling a short-film blog-a-thon for months, but was hesitant to set a date because of my experience with the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon; these things are a lot more work than I’d imagined.

So Ed beat me to it.

But then my barnacle/parasite/moocher antennae got all tingly, and I proposed that we co-host the blog-a-thon and expand it. He agreed.

Hence: Short-Film Week, running Sunday, December 2, through Saturday, December 8, 2007. During that week, write something, submit an old essay, or point us to your favorite writing on short films.

Commercials, music videos, movie trailers, and episodes of television programs are all fair game, as are proper short films — you know, the type that aren’t trying to sell something else.

E-mail Ed or me with questions or promises of contributions, or leave comments on our respective announcements.

Track all the exciting blogging action here and at Only the Cinema.