Even to call this short a documentary would be misleading. It is, rather, a moving picture in the literal sense of the word, to be looked at as though it were a photograph. The cards show quotes from Whitman's Leaves of Grass (10 mins.).
Bit late, I know, but here is the film that, strangely, is known as The Hasher's Delirium in the English-speaking world, although it is clearly about the effects of alcohol. Someone write a thesis about the pro-alcohol bias in the Anglosphere, or something! Anyway, the one-minute film goes like this (and don't miss the bit where he kicks himself in the arse):
All the benefits of drug consumption without the negative health effects. Only at the CoR!
No time for blogging proper, but here's the 1928 Fall of the House of Usher (13 mins.), not to be confused with the film of the same name from the same year by someone else whose name escapes me right now. It's from the abstract/expressionist school of storytelling, so some people say that it's best to brush up on the plot of Poe's story that it is based on. Fair enough, you otherwise won't know what's going on. But then, do you really have to?
Directed by J. Stuart Blackton and starring the wonderfully-named Paul Panzer, the version below has music and sound effects added by Matthew Hawes. You might think that sound is one of the rare cases of something that's so bad it's good, or you might prefer to turn the volume down, though for those in the latter group, there is a silent version online that has better picture quality.
Let me warn our younger readers in particular, though, that nicotine isn't nearly as psychoactive as the film suggests. If you absolutely must get addicted to a drug, at least choose one that does something for you!
Ah, Friday, it's a vague concept . . . and days of the week, they're all social constructions anyway, right?
O.k., maybe not. But to make up for the lateness, here's an extra-long short, Ballet mécanique, directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy and scored by George Antheil. The visuals are pretty standard dadaist fare, but the music! I don't work out, but if I did, this is the music I'd put on.
Hey, if the comments I'd already written reappear, I'll post them, but for now it seems that The Great Blogger Timeout ate them. And I'm not going to write them again. The artist's name is Eric Lindell.
Some say it's 1929, some say it's 1931, I say it's certainly cute in the utmost. Use full screen mode to watch (as the frame is reduced for reasons unknown to me), but if you're prone to earworms, don't say you haven't been warned.
Why did Tigers evolve into cats? So as not to scare little boys and girls!
As promised two weeks ago, here's a film about what happens to you when you drink too much, kids! Nine minutes long, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend was apparently more or less a ripoff of a French film called Rêve à la lune, which I haven't seen (I have been unable to determine whether it's lost). Anyway, the first two minutes or so are exposition and not all that interesting, but after that things take off and you can learn where William Friedkin got his ideas for The Exorcist from. Great soundtrack, lots of fun!
Never mind L'Arroseur arrosé; this is the first great comedy. It's forty seconds long and pretty darn silly.
As you may have noticed, the bloke gets drunk unrealistically quickly. That is, it's like the film is sped up, only it's not sped up! A proper humanities major could extract a well-sounding concept from this and tell you how that yields some deep insight into the human condition. I can't. Sorry. What I can is tell you that in two week's time I'll post a short that shows you what happens if you drink too much beer. And it's not pretty.
Another fortnight's passed, so it's time for another short. This place is starting to look like a film blog, given my recent frequency of posting, but I just don't have the time.
So - below is the very short Danse serpentine from the Lumière company. It ought not to be confused with the film of the same name from the same year by Melies, which is lost - funnily enough, the Melies film has more votes on imdb, probably because it is filed as Danse serpentine (1896/I), while the film below is (1896/II).
The film's colour may be a bit surprising. They didn't have colour film in 1896, but they did have cheap labour to do the colouring by hand, which accounts for the film's psychedelic effect. Full-screen mode strongly suggested.
Better than drugs, eh? That's a suggestion for your weekend, kids!
No series of shorts without Buster Keaton, the man who wasn't all that funny, but perhaps the greatest action director ever. Case in point, the 17-minutes Neighbors:
I bet economists have a name for this: Due to time restrictions, I've recently watched only few feature-length movies and substituted for this by watching the odd short that's quickly available from the web.* I.e., early shorts. There's a lot of good stuff to be found, so we have a new series: Short Friday. Let's see how long it will last and how good I'll be at keeping the schedule.
We'll start with the pretty insane, more-comedy-than-romantic 1912 Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora, the first surviving film by Ladislav Starevich. (Various English-language titles for the film can be found; apparently it means something along the lines of, "The Cameraman's Revenge.") You may notice that it's a stop-motion picture in which all roles are played by dead bugs. Why? Wikipedia explains:
Starewicz had interests in a number of different areas; by 1910 he was named Director of the Museum of Natural History in Kovno, Lithuania. There he made four short live-action documentaries for the museum. For the fifth film, Starewicz wished to record the battle of two stag beetles, but was stymied by the fact that the nocturnal creatures inevitably went to sleep whenever the stage lighting was turned on.
Opportunity knocks!
Starevich's signature piece is Fetiche Mascote, but, hey, Citizen Kane ain't Orson Welles' best film either.
_______ *Does that make shorts sort of a Giffen good perhaps?
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