Rob Parrish’s approach to making shorts is by taking clips from the Internet Archive, and recording his own audio over it to change the story completely. This particular short was altered from an education film about hygiene, to simply a man monologuing about his lifelong abhorrence for his sister’s smile.
“Judy’s Smile” recently won a “Rosebud Award” at the Rosebud Film Festival. Parrish releases one new video a week at his site Next to Heaven.
“Snowballs” is evidently the more bizarre of Harmony Korine’s two shorts sponsored by the designer brand Proenza Schouler. (The previous Korine short in the series, “Act da Fool,” is also available on YouTube.) “Snowballs” features two characters in Native American inspired clothing, and, not surprisingly, white trash.
CONTENT WARNING: This short contains some profanity.
A father and son witness a train wreck, and compete for the affection of the only survivor. Like much of Maddin‘s work, this short was well received at the Toronto International Film Festival. This film is also known by the long title The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity: Odilon Redon.
The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (Odilon Redon) from Guy Maddin on Vimeo.
Though most folks (who know him at all) know him thanks to his feature films, Guy Maddin is a master of the short film format, having birthed more than two dozen shorts in his career, many under five minutes. The Heart of the World, his apocalyptic valentine to Soviet constructivist cinema, is the director’s best known and most impressive brief work, but anything by Maddin is worth looking at for a few minutes. Therefore, we thought the three short films included on MGM’s The Saddest Music in the World DVD deserved their own synopses. At their best these mini-movies are like a shot of pure rye whiskey: they burn going down, but they give your soul a jolt, and you want another as soon as you’ve digested the first.
“A Trip to the Orphanage” appears to be an outtake from Saddest Music, reimagined as a pure mood piece. The finale of “Orphange”—when Maria de Medeiros kisses a sleepwalker on the cheek, and he says “goodnight, mother” to her—actually appears in the film. There, the episode has no explanation. You won’t get one in “Orphanage,” either. The man walks through a wintry street with a sleepy, dazed expression. We also see shots of de Medeiros’ China doll face, and briefly view her posing with an anonymous child. A woman appears and sings a generic aria of lament: “so fraught with pain his yearning soul…” A sparse piano accompanies her. Snow falls over all the characters, and lace curtains billowing in the wind are superimposed on the picture; sometimes there’s one set of drapes waving in the foreground and a second set in the background. Singer Sarah Constible’s voice is opera-trained and lovely, and “Orphanage” is a Canadian saudade that’s as melancholy as a lone snowflake drifting on the wind. It’s also just as light, and in a mere four minutes it’s there and gone, just like a dream.
“Sombra Dolorosa” returns us to more familiarly comic Maddin territory, with a deranged plot, hysterical intertitles (“to save your daughter you must defeat… El Muerto!!”), and the same psychotic editing that characterized Cowards Bend The Knee. It tells the story of a bereaved widow who must defeat death in a wrestling match, before an eclipse arrives, in order to save her daughter from suicide (“FROM SUICIDE!”, the titles Continue reading THREE GUY MADDIN SHORTS: “A TRIP TO THE ORPHANAGE” (2004)/”SOMBRA DOLOROSA” (2004)/”SISSY-BOY SLAP-PARTY” (1995)
With Halloween coming up, we made a point to pick out something especially eerie. In this short, two inseparable chimney sweepers are injected into a man’s brain, and make war with his memories.
CONTENT WARNING: This short contains brief animated gore.