In an unlikely combination of one of America cinema’s most influential filmmaker’s and one of the fathers of avant-garde films, Elia Kazan and Ralph Steiner combine forces to create a wonderfully subversive short titled Pie in the Sky (1936), where there might not be enough pie for everyone here but thems the breaks and if you follow the rules you might just get “pie in the sky when you die”.
The idea of “having it all” has become a potent and perilous one in recent feminism, a heady combination of inviting women to strive for an elusive work-life balance and a constant reminder of the inevitability that something has to give. It is in this headspace that We Wanted More, a short-form psychological thriller, settles in for its sleek fifteen minute runtime. The film follows Hannah (Christine Horne), a singer on the precipice of a potentially career-defining world tour who has other things on her mind. She has just split up with a boyfriend, and in a meeting with her manager (Angela Asher), it becomes clear that Hannah had been hoping to settle down and have a child.
I think we all carry that little nagging voice in the back of our minds that tells us that we aren’t good enough, we’re only fooling ourselves, everyone is out to get us or some such variety of self-doubt to various degrees of potency. Familiar takes that nagging voice and manifests it as a physical entity, in the fine Canadian tradition of Cronenberg’ian body horror. If only the pain and existential turmoil that plague us through our lives could be manifested physically so that we could purge it for good. It might be a hell of a lot easier than listening to it nagging at the back of our minds, second-guessing our every decision and acting as an introspective foe as it pushes us to act in ways that are seemingly contrary to our nature, but are likely our most honest primal instincts at work.
Phantom shots take us through the wet streets of Ars as a disembodied narrator tells us the story of Jean-Mari Vianney; the complex savior of a village, harsh tyrant of strict Christian ideology, and saintly man who transformed his village and saved it from the evils of dancing and working on Sundays. In a film that uses its camera as a ghostly figure that traverses and haunts the village of Ars, Jacques Demy freezes time and space as he shows us the former haunts of Vianney;
Chris Marker teamed with filmmaker Yannick Bellon to create Remembrance of Things to Come (2003), a photo essay set to film that documents the work of director Bellon’s mother, photographer Denise Bellon. Now is where description becomes difficult, as the film has an almost surrealistic quality, much like the photographs of Bellon and the artists she admired and socialized with. Surrealism is in fused into the film as we watch Bellon’s photographs on the screen, sometimes dissolving into one another while a narrator, Alexandra Stewart, reads us biographical information and quotes from Bellon and others.
Chris Marker’s The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967), co-directed by Francois Reichengach, draws its title from a Zen proverb reading “If the five sides of the pentagon appear impregnable, attack the sixth side.” If that sounds enigmatic, it is but it is also a great place to start when discussing the anti-war movement in the U. S. in the late 1960s as this film does.
La Jetée is an interesting short film from the legendary (and recently deceased) French filmmaker Chris Marker. Not only is it interesting in its plot, that of a boy who sees his own death take place in front of him (more on that in a moment), but that it is told without moving images. Each shot is a still-frame photograph narrated in the first person.
“You’re glued to that thing,” my mother would moan in my youth when, enticed by the enveloping glow of whatever new gadget found its way into my palm—be it Gameboy, phone, MP3 player perhaps—I would grow further and further distanced from the physical world, trading tangible for virtual. It’s a common sentiment treated with the utmost seriousness in Reboot, Joe Kawasaki’s punchy techno-thriller short that sees his amnesia-stricken hacker heroine Stat awaken—face bloodied, apartment thrashed, identity unclear—with an iPhone, mysteriously displaying an ominous countdown, literally adhered to her palm.
The ominous rumbling of trains provides the foreboding soundtrack in anticipation of the horrors of our unknown destination. Terrified breaths in the dark echo that of the audience, both audience and passenger unsure of what darkness hides and ill-comforted by the tepid revelations of daylight as we are given a firsthand perspective of the horrors of a concentration camp, its wretched concrete walls and homogenous cubes all designed with the express intent of stripping humans of their defining characteristics.
Societal norms and the adherence to taboos is a necessity in the successful cohabitation of the members of a population. For order to exist, there have to be certain black and white moral constructs and lines that must never be crossed, but these lines often remain steadfast despite progressions in technology and new attitudes from cultural evolution. One illogical holdover from bygone days of biological necessity is the aversion to images that remind us of our own mortality. This aversion encapsulates images of death, disease, and certain ubiquitous realities of our biological existence. It is understandable why we have developed a natural tendency to avoid death and decay as our biological machine has been imbued with the pragmatic will to survive, but why images of childbirth have fallen into the realm of visual taboo is perplexing. Perhaps it is borne from feelings of superiority over other “lower” forms of life. Such images serve as reminders of our own biological similarities with every other form of life, particularly mammalian life, and uncomfortably force us to contend with irrefutable proof of our own animal existence.