From the title alone, one will likely infer that “Nagasaki Ding-Dong” is not your average short film. Rather, Nagasaki seems to be an experiment on just how far one can stray from the norm. Filled with nauseating scenes and sounds, it’s unpleasant nature will leave weird enthusiasts satisfied with a weighty feeling of unease.
Tag Archives: Surrealism
SATURDAY SHORT: MARIKO TAKAHASHI’S FITNESS VIDEO FOR BEING APPRAISED AS AN “EX-FAT GIRL” (2004)
We’ll leave it to you to describe this… special… video for yourself. We’re just going to supply the background: this short film was created by commercial director and artist Nagi Noda for a short film compilation sponsored by Panasonic celebrating the Olympics. We haven’t seen the other nine films in the series (no one has for six years now), but we suspect that this poodle fitness video (a parody of fitness guru Susan Powter) was not quite what the corporate giant expected when they commissioned the project.
52. SANTA SANGRE (1989)
AKA Holy Blood (literal translation)
“My mother is dead. I had a terrible relationship with her. She had many problems with my father, and she never caressed me. So I didn’t have a mother who touched me.”–Alejandro Jodorowsky in La Constellation Jodorowsky
DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky
FEATURING: Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Adan Jodorowsky, Sabrina Dennison, Guy Stockwell
PLOT: Fenix, a young carnival boy is understandably traumatized when he sees his knife-thrower father cut off his mother’s arms in a domestic melee. Years later, he lives an animalistic existence in a mental asylum, until one day he escapes when his armless mother calls to him from outside his cell window. The two perform a stage act where the son serves as the arms of his mother; she dominates his every move offstage, makes him serve as her arms, and orders him to kill, repeatedly.
BACKGROUND:
- After completing The Holy Mountain in 1973, Jodorowsky planned to make an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel “Dune,” which fell through. He did not direct again until 1980’s poorly regarded Tusk, a film over which he had little creative control and which he has since disowned.
- Santa Sangre is supposedly inspired by the story of a real life Mexican serial killer (whose name is variously given as Gregorio Cárdenas or Gojo Cardinas).
- Young Fenix and adult Fenix are played by Adan and Axel, Jodorowsky’s sons.
- The MPAA originally rated Santa Sangre R for “bizarre, graphic violence;” when the NC-17 designation began in 1990, the film was reclassified to the more restictive rating for “extremely explicit violence.”
- Empire Magazine’s combined readers/critics poll voted Santa Sangre the 476th best movie of all time.
- Before making this film Jodorowsky had founded an unofficial school of psychotherapy called “psycho-magic”; one of the basic tenets of the theory is a belief in a “family unconscious.”
- The mother’s given name—“Concha”—is slang for “vagina” in many Latin American countries, including Jodorowsky’s native Chile.
- The movie is an Italian/Mexican co-production, and was co-written and co-produced by Claudio (brother of horror maestro Dario) Argento.
- OBSCURE CONNECTION: Producer Rene Cardona, Jr., himself a prolific B-movie director, was the son of the Rene Cardona who directed El Santo movies and appeared in Brainiac.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The most representative images are any of the moments where Fenix stands behind his mother and acts as her hands, especially when he is wearing his long red plastic nails. The most affecting sight, however, may be a dying elephant with blood trickling out of his trunk.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: You could argue that Santa Sangre isn’t that weird, but that
Original trailer for Santa Sangre (German)
would only be in comparison to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s previous films. Although he does deliver Felliniesque carnivals, an elephant funeral, a cult that worships an armless girl, a hermaphrodite wrestler, and graveside hallucinations featuring zombie brides, the obscure auteur actually scales back his mystical obtuseness a tad in this psychedelic slasher movie. The result is his most popular and accessible film—if anything by Jodorowsky can be considered accessible.
COMMENTS: In a way, Santa Sangre is Jodorowsky lite. Compared to his hippie-era Continue reading 52. SANTA SANGRE (1989)
48. INLAND EMPIRE (2006)
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“My response to viewers who are puzzled by the plots is, I don’t think you’re so puzzled as you may think. We all have a certain amount of intuition, and that is something that can be trusted and should be trusted… And so when you see something that’s abstract in a film, and you seem to be getting lost, the thing to do is to start talking to your friends, and they’ll say something and you’ll find yourself disagreeing with that, and realize that you really had formed opinions, and you had a scenario that made sense in your mind, and that’s valid. We know more than we think.”—direct advice from David Lynch on understanding his films
DIRECTED BY: David Lynch
FEATURING: Laura Dern
PLOT: INLAND EMPIRE shifts around on a dozen tectonic plates of varying levels of surreality, but the unstable base layer involves Laura Dern as actress Nikki Grace cast in a melodrama based on an unproduced Polish screenplay which was abandoned as cursed after its two leads were murdered. As she acts out the adulterous scenario, Grace becomes confused, coming to believe at times that she is the character in the screenplay. After consummating a relationship with her handsome co-star, that reality slips away and Dern is seen playing several different characters, wandering around in a series of loosely interconnected sketches that involve (among other stories) an abused woman confessing her hatred of men to a psychiatrist, the lives of a gaggle of lip-syncing prostitutes, infidelity dramas, and a sobbing woman watching a room full of bunnies in an absurdist television sitcom.
BACKGROUND:
- The film began as a series of individual short films shot on digital video, as Lynch was exploring the new format. After Laura Dern suggested working on a project with the director, Lynch later noticed recurring themes in the shorts he was shooting, and decided to put them together into a feature film.
- In his announcement for the movie and in interviews afterward, Lynch has said that he is done shooting on film and will work exclusively with digital video from now on, citing the greater freedom afforded by the format and going so far as to say that the idea of going back to film makes him feel “sick and weak.”
- Lynch reported that he wrote the film scene by scene, working without a finished script and trusting that connections would appear.
- The footage of the rabbits is recycled from a series of short films called “Rabbits” that was exclusively screened on davidlynch.com.
- Lynch has said he decided to title the movie INLAND EMPIRE after hearing Dern say that her husband hailed from that Southern California enclave, simply because he liked the sound of the words.
- Lynch invested his own money to get the film made. He also distributed the film himself, thus facing no pressure to make cuts to the finished product.
- David Lynch himself sings on the soundtrack.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The nattily-dressed, stiff and deliberately posed bunny-people from the series of short “Rabbit” films, who were so evocative that Lynch decided to give them a new home in INLAND EMPIRE.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: INLAND EMPIRE is David Lynch at his most deliberately unhinged, experimenting with how far he can stray from linear narrative while still producing a work that feels thematically whole, searching for the minimum number of recurring images and themes needed to stitch a piece together so that it tantalizingly approaches coherence without ever actually resolving.
Trailer for INLAND EMPIRE
COMMENTS: INLAND EMPIRE is a frustrating movie, or, more charitably put, a Continue reading 48. INLAND EMPIRE (2006)
BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH (2002)
DIRECTED BY: David Lynch
FEATURING: Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Catherine Coulson
PLOT: A series of six short films spanning director David Lynch’s career from the
1960s through the 1990s. We track Lynch from his early years as a highly experimental student to a macabre master of the darkly surreal with these films that show a man who needed to grow and challenge himself as a creative force.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As collections of short films go, this is one of the most mercurial and hard-to-peg I’ve ever seen. There’s really no denying the odd nature of Lynch’s efforts. The first film alone, a minute-long animated loop of six hideous plaster sculptures throwing up, stands as a timeless testament to Lynch’s nightmarish creative vision. And the gut-wrenching scope of his silent feature, entitled “The Grandmother”, is a window into the mind of a radically different artist than the one Lynch has become. But, honestly, the quality and sheer atmosphere present in most of Lynch’s features feels absent here, and there’s not enough memorable material to consider this a momentous release.
COMMENTS: Much like a renowned painter or an extremely colorful luchador, a filmmaker’s work becomes more lionized as his fame grows, even his mistakes. David Lynch is a very famous filmmaker, so it’s only appropriate that this assortment of short subjects should come out to cement his status as an iconic artist and a true visionary in the world of the nightmarish and the utterly bizarre. But those die-hard fans of the man who seek a diamond in the rough here, a Pollack behind the frame of this small cache of movies, will likely find themselves disappointed, or at the very least conflicted.
If short films represent the transformation of a filmmaker as as he/she goes from one project to another, this gathering of shorts spanning Lynch’s career is a shadowy, rocky road. Half of these films don’t desire to be much more than insubstantial experiments, hokey dumping grounds for ideas that are really just there to try something out. They merely exist in a tangible form for the consumer because of the marketable name of Lynch, not because they actually have some sort of deliciously demented merit and are worth seeing for any length of time. And while the three that are good are indeed very good, it’s easy to put this one on the borderline with the vibes I get from the other three.
Let’s break it down by feature, shall we?
“Six Figures getting Sick (Six Times)” – A minute long film loop featuring a set of six Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH (2002)