Tag Archives: Surrealism

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: WOFL 2106 (2006)

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With the success of his shorts “The External World” (2011) and “Please Say Something” (2009) in festivals across the globe, David O’Reilly has become a shorts director who is not so easily overlooked anymore. Although “WOFL 2106” may not be his best short to date, it is a great introduction into his work.

WARNING: A few complaints have been made about the sound in this video. It can be a little jarring, so if you have sensitive ears be sure to keep the volume a little lower than normal.

WOFL 2106 (HD) from David OReilly on Vimeo.

More from David O’Reilly can be found on his Vimeo profile in the link above. Keep in mind, though, that some of his material does contain strong language, some violence, and sexual content.

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: KABOOM (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Gregg Araki

FEATURING: Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett, , Chris Zylka, James Duval

PLOT: A sensitive college freshman experiences sexual awakening, stumbles upon a murder mystery, and uncovers secrets about his family while once in a while working on his film studies major, all set amidst scores of colorful visions, voodoo hallucinations, and sexy encounters.

Still from Kaboom

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Kaboom is a tough one to pin down.  It takes a while to get a handle on itself, combining a wealth of different ideas and subplots that don’t quite add up, but it does command my respect with its delightfully trippy visual approach and boldly unhinged ending.  It must be said: this movie is definitely weird.  But is it List-worthy?

COMMENTS: Enrolled in a clean and modern college replete with impossibly beautiful, voraciously horny undergrads, Smith (Dekker) has plenty of free time to sleep with or fantasize about most of the people he comes across.  While he becomes a surprise sex-buddy for the blunt and sexy London (Temple), his best friend Stella (Bennett) begins dating a real-life witch with a clingy personality.  Through many sexual escapades and relationship woes, a lingering murder mystery involving a scantily-clad redhead and some creepy men in animal masks worries Smith for months.  The more he delves into the puzzle, the more he seems to get konked on the head or chased by mysterious figures no one else sees.  And it all seems to tie into his recurring dream featuring those closest to him and a bright red dumpster.

With its over-exposed, over-saturated cinematography and frequent use of dreams and hallucinations, Kaboom definitely finds its way into “surreal” territory.  The vibrant color schemes, kooky mod fashion, slightly pornographic sex scenes, and sarcastic one-liners belie the dark undertones involving mysterious killings and abductions, masked men, witchcraft, and a sinister doomsday cult.  This dichotomy can work against the film as a whole; the tone is uneven and the script flits back and forth with awkward attempts at cohesion.  However, seeing these distinct narrative halves somehow come together in a completely unexpected way makes for an admittedly compelling and memorable viewing.

Kaboom has its drawbacks—dialogue that tries too hard to be funny, a few too many sex scenes (which I didn’t think was possible), some stilted performances—but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy myself.  Everything (and everyone) was just so pretty!  It gets weirder as it progresses, and it’s better for it, and the brash, unexpected ending definitely has a special effect on audiences (there was a good mix of “Huh…”, “Ha!”, and “What the hell?!” at my screening).  It is riddled with twists and turns, and is sure to keep anyone with a libido somewhat interested, but I’m still not quite sure just what to make of it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Araki lets his absurdist imagination run wild, and ‘Kaboom’ takes the time-honored gambit of gradually revealing that nothing is as it seems to delightfully cockamamie extremes.”–Kevin Thomas, The LA Times (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: FAUST (1994)

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DIRECTED BY:  Jan Svankmajer

FEATURING:  Petr Cepek

PLOT:  A grim “Everyman” is lured to a decaying theater and prompted to re-enact an adaptation of the Faust legend, with the lines of reality and fiction frequently skewed.

Still from Faust (1994)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Svankmajer offers a strange and twisted version of the famous story with little in the way of exposition or explanation. Humans interact with claymation figures and life-size puppets, the scenery changes without warning from theatrical sets to real-life exteriors, and mysteries and ambiguities abound. While the foundations of the Faust tale are definitely there, they’ve been contorted and disguised into true Svankmajer surrealism.

COMMENTS:  I haven’t actually read any of the multiple versions of the Faust legend (most notably adapted by Christopher Marlowe and Goethe), so Svankmajer’s film was my introduction. The wordless opening depicts a sullen middle-aged man who is given a map with a red dot. After some strange happenings in his apartment, he decides to follow it and ends up in a dark theater populated by a silent crew and an array of stop-motion oddities. For reasons unknown, he dresses himself up as Faust and begins reading the script aloud, eventually making his way to a stage facing a recently-assembled audience. He gets stage fright and abandons the costume and stage, but continually finds himself back in character, summoning the devil’s demonic aid Mephisto, signing away his soul, and generally making a black magical mess of things. His real life merges seamlessly with his performance, as he switches back and forth between puppet form and human form, painted backdrops and the streets of Prague.

What makes Faust so puzzling is the lead character’s complete refusal to question what is happening to him—the viewer is in the dark for the entirety of the film, left to either coax out some explanation for the events onscreen or abandon any attempt at making sense of things (I opted for the latter). Our Everyman is compelled to act out the legend, with demonic apparitions and mysterious sights appearing in both the “stage” version and his supposedly real life, casting a dreamlike shadow over all of the proceedings. Two silent and conniving fellows follow him around, manipulating his actions without clear motivation. Like a more horrific  Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the protagonist seems lost and aimless until he is speaking pre-penned lines out of a Faust script, eventually becoming the character he speaks for simply because there is little other choice. His strange experience is revealed to be cyclical: a host of unassuming “Everymen” have surely fallen prey to Faust‘s allure.

Regardless of the story’s meandering, perplexing structure, the imagery alone is enough to captivate any viewer. A clay baby forms itself out of an hourglass and proceeds to evolve through all the stages of life; huge wooden heads roll down a mountain path and assemble themselves into puppet forms of an angel and a devil; a restaurant table inexplicably spouts wine; a host of puppet royalty drowns in a painted sea; Mephisto takes on the eerily sculpted appearance of Petr Cepek when he speaks; a team of ballerinas harvest hay in unison; a human man gets down and dirty with a wooden devil disguised as a female puppet. It’s all there, and more! Along with, of course, Svankmajer’s noted ear for terrific and often unsettling sound effects.

It’s weird, it’s confusing, it’s imaginative: Faust transforms a familiar tale into a strange and compelling dream. The words remain true to the source material, but all of the visuals are wonderfully bizarre and often without precedent.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Svankmajer introduces a dark, squishy, perversely surreal world: It’s part Lewis Carroll, part Kafka, part David Lynch and absolutely not American… Using stylistic elements that he’s developed over 40 years of film making — live action and stop-motion animation, wooden and clay figures, grotesque imagery and vivid sound effects — Svankmajer creates the warped, disturbing logic of a bad dream.”–Edward Guthman, San Francisco Chronicle

 

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Faust [Blu-ray]

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List Candidates, Shorts

LIST CANDIDATE: THE FILMS OF SUZAN PITT (1979/1995/2006)

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RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Suzan Pitt

FEATURING: Jose Luis Rodriguez Avalos (“El Doctor”)

PLOT: A collection of three surreal animated shorts.  In “El Doctor”, a Mexican doctor visits odd patients while dreaming of a long dead love.  “Joy Street” contrasts a the life of a whimsical anthropomorphic ashtray with its suicidally depressed owner.  “Asparagus” is a totally abstract surrealist film featuring a faceless woman and obscene iterations of the titular vegetable.

Still from Asparagus (1979)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  It’s a question of classification, not of weirdness or quality.  Counting these three short films, made decades apart, as one “movie” for List purposes would clearly be cheating.  That means that we’re really only considering the compilation’s main event, “Asparagus,” for inclusion on the List, which raises the metaphysical question: how good/weird does a short have to be take away a spot from a deserving feature length presentation?  Some shorts will eventually make the List.  “The Heart of the World,” though a “must see” weird film, was eliminated from consideration for being too slim at just over three minutes long.  Pitt’s impressive work clocks in at 18 minutes—should that be enough to put it on equal footing with films that run four or five times as long?

COMMENTS:  Considering the shorts included in The Films of Suzan Pitt from most recent to oldest, and coincidentally from least favorite to most highly recommended:

“El Doctor” sports the crudest animation of the three shorts; deliberately, because the style means to evoke Mexican folk art.  We find the title character slumped at a bar, dreaming of riding into the sunset on horseback with a señorita, but soon the world-weary médico is called away to his strange and melancholy rounds.  These appointments—which take the form of miracles—don’t do too much for the main narrative; mainly, they supply Pitt with the opportunity to take mini-flights of fancy.  There’s not much to the story other than these surreal digressions.  One patient is pocked with holes from which flowers grow, giving Pitt the opportunity to film a field of flowers as if they were a rainforest (an image which pervades all Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE FILMS OF SUZAN PITT (1979/1995/2006) →