The Village

The Village, an awarded short animation by Mark Baker, United Kingdom (1993)
I recall a British documentary set in a village all in turmoil over two newcomers, an elderly couple, who dared to erect an ugly, unusually high wall around their house.
The villagers were interviewed, one by one, each explaining the fatality of the blow that the wall caused to their community as a whole. They all agreed: the new couple hiding behind that suspect wall is up to no good, no good at all!  
And the more the villagers spoke, the more they let slip... tiny snippets demonstrating that they climbed, and drilled a loophole into, that wall to pry and spy.
The couple living behind the wall never showed themselves, or their house.

Distractions

'A Handy Tip for the Easily Distracted', a vignette created by Miranda July that didn't make it in the final cut of The Future (which premiered at Sundance 2011). Now go and take your hostages for tomorrow: for distractions are on the attack more on Mondays than on any other days in the week.
For those of you who are not familiar with Miranda July: Gem has featured her a few times before. Our radar has also caught her in a recent UK performance. We would have loved to outbid the audience.

Cashback NSFW

NSFW
'Cashback' is an awarded short film directed by Sean Ellis (2004). Ellis later developed it into a feature film of the same title (2006).
Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff) works three nights a week at the local Sainsbury's to be able to pay for his art classes. While his fellow employees perfect their individual ways of killing time, Ben finds the fundamentals of still life in every corner of the supermarket. Boredom, too, is a state of mind.

Peacock's roar

'I Just Want To Kiss You', a short Brit film by Jamie Thraves starring Martin Freeman and Harry Peacock (1989).
Two lads sittin' on the dock of the day...
wasting time...
An endearing hommage to, apparently, Truffaut. Though I find it more leaning toward Godard.
Whatever you do, don't miss Peacock's roar at 3:09.
And at the very end of it all, do look at the title again. Who, and whom?

7:35 in the morning

‘7:35 de la Mañana’ is an awarded short film – a masterpiece in a tiny format really – written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo (Spain, 2003). Vigalondo also appeared in the film, as Tipo (the male lead).
I will keep my silence on this one. It would be a shame to reveal anything about it. Ignorance is bliss.
Be sure to set the English subtitles in caption. Then: enjoy.
A personal favourite.

Try it smiling

'On S'Embrasse?' (transl. Shall we hug?) is a short film by Pierre-Olivier Mornas featuring an aspiring actress, a looming audition, a refuge bar and a teenie-weenie story waiting to crush you (France, 2001).

Cowboys, art films and emotional landscapes

'World Cinema' is a short film about art films and cowboys by Joel and Ethan Coen (2007).
A film of three minutes commissioned by the Cannes Film Festival, 'World Cinema' for some reason fails to appear on the Chacun Son Cinéma (transl. 'to each his own cinema') anthology.
Dan (Josh Brolin) enters an art cinema that is clearly off his beaten track, or anybody else's for that matter. Forced to choose between two foreign movies, Dan enlists help from the young man selling tickets. The dialogue between Dan and the young man is curious and amusing; the true beauty of this short, however, lies in the window that lands a momentary view, for seconds only, into the emotional landscapes that Dan inhabits under his cowboy exterior.
A gem.

Narrator: Luis

This is 'Luis', the second stop-motion film in the 'Lucia, Luis & El Lobo' series created and directed by Cristóbal León, Niles Atallah and Joaquín Cociña (2008, produced by the Diluvio Gallery, Chile).
Currently in development is the third (feature) film in the series, 'La Casa Lobo', transl. The Wolf House. According to the synopsis of the project, the last film in the series will feature Bella, a young woman waking-up inside a strange house she doesn't recognise. The house, strangely alive, shall behave as if Bella has lived in it for ages. The house will hold Bella captive, and during her futile attempts to leave Bella shall encounter, and develop complex feelings for, the Beast. According to the authors themselves, 'La Casa Lobo' is a 'confused and perverted fairytale' about the Beauty and the Beast locked in a no-escape house. The fable will be narrated by Bella, a 'compulsive liar, a protagonist who has serious deficiencies in her memory.'
Beautiful? Creepy? Mad? Sad?
Animation and fairy tales are forever removed from that feeling of safety they once invoked in us... Can you imagine that this is what you would run to at 7 p.m. when you and your friends turned from your games in haste to catch the cartoon for the day? When all you worried about was that they would show something like Tom & Jerry and nothing like La Linea?

Narrator: Lucia

This is 'Lucia', an awarded short stop-motion animation film (a part of the 'Lucia, Luis & El Lobo' series) created and directed by Cristóbal León as the animator, Niles Atallah as the art director and Joaquín Cociña as the writer (2007, produced by the Diluvio Gallery, Chile).
In a unique merge of illustration and stop-motion animation, we see a sequence of digital stills with animation, charcoal drawings, puppets and other props. The film is shot frame by frame with a digital camera. Every visual element comes to life as it self-constructs, hides, re-appears, self-destructs ...
The narrative is whispered by the charcoal Lucia, appearing and vanishing from the frame. We soon realise that the narrator is not reliable, the real story is hidden behind the whispered distortions and changing frames: we may never be in position to reconstruct it.
The authors themselves describe the series as stories "of a physical and mental world that falls apart, destroys itself and reconstructs itself time and again." As the narrator changes, the space and story repeatedly dismantle and reassemble to mirror those changes.
"What makes this such an exciting project for us," the authors conclude, "is the idea of making a feature film like one creates a painting or sculpture: a film made of cardboard, charcoal and waste."

A moment out of time

'Pass This On' is an old single by a mysterious Swedish duo of siblings: The Knife (the track later appeared in the 'Deep Cuts' album, 2003). The video of the track, in its fomat, is rather a short film than a music video. Directed by Bo Johan Renck, this is a tiny masterpiece in its own right.
A slow party for a local football club. It appears from the melancholic mood that the team just lost a game. Or is it just a regular hangout for the football guys? The setting appears to be a pre-Ikea Scandinavian cottage that probably acts as a hunters hangout on Wednesdays and as a venue for birthday parties on Fridays. In this particular moment, out of time, the entertainment in the venue is a drag show provided to football players by a lipsynching travestite. The tune is catchy, remeniscent of disco hits, and yet... there is this lingering feeling that something is off... It makes you feel uncomfortable. The performer, seductive and alluring, moves to that very element of the song that is off... The audience feels it, too. You can almost hear their thoughts as the camera zooms on them.
"This feels all wrong, this feels all wrong, but... Do I actually like this...?"
The viewers don't communicate among eachother. The song seems to leave no room for mobs or couplings. Once lured to dance, each spectator dances alone, toward rather than with the performer... the caster of the spell... the pied piper...
What will happen once the tune dissapears?
And why is only the girl bewildered? She seems the only person to have escaped the allure...
The bewildered girl is Karin Dreijer Andersson, the actual singer: the most we were allowed, to date, to see of this duet. The Knife hardly ever appears in public, and then wearing beaks (!) and masked.
The song of whispers, the video of spells and the band of fairies: a fairy tale.

Mixtape

Remember those mixtapes? "I made a mixtape for you," he'd whisper, and then he'd run away in haste. This is about one of those. 'Mixtape', a cute short film by Luke Snellin (2009).

Scenes from the suburban wars

I always get excited about the 'storytelling' songs. They are so rare.
The song is 'Suburbs' by Arcade Fire, an indie rock band from Quebec. This is the title song from Arcade Fire's third album (Suburbs, 2010). Press here for lyrics.
The video, directed by Spike Jonze, is but a preview of 'Scenes From The Suburbs' - a short film yet to be released by Arcade Fire before the end of this year.
The story line is intriguing and it may very well be a SF peep into (not so distant) future of suburban wars. I'll reserve my comments until the full film is released.
Another project of Arcade Fire not to be missed is their interactive music video for 'We used to Wait' (another track from their Suburbs album, this one directed by Chris Milk). This video will enable you to bring your own personal childhood into the visuals of the film. Provided that you have not, like I, crawled from the place far beyond the seven oceans (still to be explored to full lenghts by Google Map). While there are other similar interactive projects online (notably 'Cuckoo' by Lissie, where the visuals change with the concrete weather at your current location: it will snow if you are watching from Moscow, but not if you are watching from San Francisco), they are more a gag than a tool and they rarely reach you on a more personal, emotional level.
On a separate note, I wish the previews of full feature movies were more like this one: a project that feels complete, stirs your interest, yet doesn't reveal the plot. Then again, why DON'T they ever make previews of full feature movies in the form of a music video anyway? It certainly beats the commercials format that prompts us to go and get popcorn and coke.

Needles or pins

An underground cult classic. This Little Red Riding Hood is a short film directed by David Kaplan and narrated by Quentin Crisp. It premiered in 1997 on the Sundance Film Festival.
The film follows the storyline of The Story of Grandmother rather than Little Red Riding Hood (Perrault) or Little Red Cap (Grimm). The Story of Grandmother is a record made by Paul Delarue of a pre-Perrault tale that was retold for centuries by the camp fires in France.
The story is very short. Maria Tatar recapitulated it as follows:
“This Gallic heroine escapes falling victim to the wolf and instead joins the ranks of trickster figures. After arriving at grandmother’s house and unwittingly eating “meat” and drinking “wine” that turns out to be the flesh and blood of her grandmother, she performs a striptease for the wolf, gets into bed with him, and escapes by pleading with the wolf for a chance to go outdoors and relieve herself.”
In the context of its time, this was no tale for children. This was adult entertainment, a running storytelling performance delivered with suspense and crude humour.
For the listeners knew then as they know now that it is completely inevitable. Little Red Riding Hood will get to the Grandmother’s house and encounter a wolf, regardless of whether she takes the path of pins or the path of needles. The duel between the wolf and the little red is expected as soon as we followed her into the woods.
Always the bets are taken and we always play, hoping against hope that she will be more like Sheherezade.

Nightmare

What are you doing, son?
I am dreaming, mother. I am dreaming, mother, about how I sing,
and about how you ask me, in my dream: what are you doing, son?
What, in your dream, are you singing about, son?
I’m singing, mother, about how I had a house.
But now I haven’t got a house. This is what I’m singing about, mother.
About how, mother, I had a voice, and my own language I had.
But now I haven’t got a voice, also a language I haven’t got.
In a voice I haven’t got, in a language I haven’t got,
in a house I haven’t got, I sing a song, mother.

Mustafa Nadarevic reciting Nightmare, a poem by Sidran Abdullah, a Bosnian writer and poet. The scene is taken from Perfect Circle, a Bosnian film directed by Ademir Kenovic (1997).
Sidran Abdulah wrote distinguished screenplays for some of the best Yugoslav films from the 1980s: When Father Was Away On Business (directed by Kusturica), Do you remember Dolly Bell? (directed by Kusturica) and Kuduz (directed by Ademir Kenovic).

Poema 20

Another video poem from the Moving Poetry Series (Four Seasons Productions). The setting is a tango bar in Argentina in 1922 and the poem is Poema 20 by Pablo Neruda.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.

Stealing sugar from the castle

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.
just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see
Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

From My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems (2005), by Robert Bly.

Two cars, one night

two cars, one night from kofe on Vimeo.

Taika Waititi's awarded short film Two Cars, One Night (2003, New Zealand).
Two Maori children, one magic moment.

Back in 1929

Bessie Smith mourning for her man - blacker than midnight - who left New York for St Louis (he done left this town). A truly stunning performance.
The excerpt is taken from a short film St Louis Blues (1929).
The short was filmed in Astoria, Queens. Bessie was accompanied by the Fletcher Henderson orchestra, the Hall Johnson Choir and, on piano, by James P. Johnson.

Lindyhopping

A scene from After Seben, a 1929 sound short set in a Harlem nightclub, featuring also George Snowden doing the lindy hop. You won't have any trouble figuring out which dancing couple George Snowden, the Shorty Stump, belongs to. To the one that must have won.

Metro

Merci!, a short awarded film by Christine Rabette (Belgium, 2003).