Slurp has created a number of shorts using 80’s style music and special effects. This one in particular, made to advertise a weekly party in Barcelona, features a bunch of cats.
Tag Archives: Experimental
CAPSULE: FILM SOCIALISME (2010)
DIRECTED BY: Jean-Luc Godard
FEATURING: Marine Battaggia, Catherine Tanvier, Christian Sinniger, Gulliver Hecq, Eye Haidara, Élisabeth Vitali
PLOT: Snippets of scenes involving passengers on a cruise ship are followed by a long segment exploring a rural French family who run a gas station; it’s topped off with impressionistic travelogues to Egypt, Palestine, and other locales.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s weird—by way of being random and impenetrable—but it’s also boring. Really boring. Had Jean-Luc Godard’s name not been attached, this movie would remain happily unseen by all but a handful of unlucky film festival attendees.
COMMENTS: Jean-Luc Godard has been telling French magazines that “cinema is dead” (though he would say “le cinéma est mort” and translate it as “film dead.”) Film Socialisme is the work of an auteur who truly believes that sentiment: it’s a dispassionate, bloodless dissection of moving images. It offers us actors but no characters, situations but no drama, incidents but no story, ideas but no argument, and challenges but no rewards. Deliberately obtuse, Film Socialisme sets out to frustrate: the first thing English speakers will notice is that Godard chooses not to fully translate the French dialogue, opting instead to tell the story through what he calls “Navajo English.” Large portions of the French dialogue are left untranslated, and when the viewer does see subtitles he reads only snatches like “watch notell time” and “itshim wariswar.” Sometimes the language will switch from French to English or German or Russian, sometimes in the middle of a conversation; one presumes that this provides brief opportunities for Francophones to enjoy “Navajo French.” Structurally, Film Socialisme is divided into three chapters. The first, titled “Des choses comme ça,” takes place aboard a cruise liner and explores fragments of stories from various travelers that don’t appear to add up to anything: a woman is trying to learn to speak cat by watching kitties on her laptop, a couple have a conversation about the Allied landing in North Africa while ignoring an apparently drunk woman Continue reading CAPSULE: FILM SOCIALISME (2010)
SATURDAY SHORT: COMBINATION SPAWNS (2009)
An over-the-top psychedelic animation using fractals. Needless to say, we love over-the-top.
CAPSULE: CINEMA 16: EUROPEAN SHORT FILMS (U.S. EDITION) (2007)
DIRECTED BY: Juan Solanas, Andrea Arnold, Christopher Nolan, Roy Andersson, Toby MacDonald, Lynne Ramsay, Jan Svankmajer, Mathieu Kassovitz, Run Wrake, Virgil Widrich, Ridley Scott, Lars von Trier, Balint Kenyeres, Anders Thomas Jensen, Martin McDonagh, Nanni Moretti
FEATURING: Natalie Press, Brendan Gleeson, Rúaidhrí Conroy, Klas-Gösta Olsson, Kris Marshall, Johannes Silberschneider, Tony Scott, Ulrich Thomsen
PLOT: This collection of sixteen award-winning shorts made by Europeans (mostly Brits) is a mix of dramas, comedies, and experimental pieces.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Compilations aren’t eligible for the List. Although there are several short films on this set that are both weird, and great for their length, none of them have the weight it would take to displace a full-length feature film from the List.
COMMENTS: Like any box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get with this collection of sixteen shorts—it could be a caramel, a raspberry creme, or one of the dreaded coconuts. The wide array of styles from artists working free of commercial concerns makes collections like this excellent primers on what cinema can accomplish, and this selection from short film specialists Cinema 16 is one of the most award-studded compilations you’ll find. Not having to worry about the box office receipts allows short film-makers to experiment with technique and go weirder than they otherwise would; indeed, about half of the movies here have at least a nodding acquaintance with the bizarre, while a couple are full-fledged works of surrealist art. But no matter what direction your tastes run, rest assured there is something here to delight, and to bore, every film fan.
For completeness’ sake, I’ll briefly run down the realism-based entries first, in ascending order of quality. We’ll then spend a little more time with the experimental offerings, a few of which are extremely important to the world of weird film.
The oldest film, Ridley Scott’s 1956 Boy and Bicycle, about a lad who takes a bike ride to the Continue reading CAPSULE: CINEMA 16: EUROPEAN SHORT FILMS (U.S. EDITION) (2007)
SATURDAY SHORT: THE PIANO (2011)
A beautiful, high-intensity piano duet comes to life, and the performers of the piece become the victims of its story.