#short films

Here are four short films created as part of a filmmaking competition I set-up, a collaboration between National Theatre and IdeasTap. Each team saw the show, took part in a story workshop and were assigned a professional filmmaker to support them and, I hope you’ll agree, the results are very different and fascinating.

Crimson Rose by Dana Boulos

“I am young, I am beautiful, but I will fuck you over just like anybody else”

The Syed Family Xmas Eve Game Night (2021) dir. Fawzia Mirza, 11 min.

The film stars Kausar Mohammed as Noor, a queer Muslim woman who brings her Puerto Rican partner Luz (Vico Ortiz) home to a family gathering for the first time. The film was written by Mohammed, partially based on her own life.

“Well, I have two [older] sisters whom I love very, very, much. I also have a partner that I love very much, my girlfriend. The first Christmas that I introduced my partner to my middle sister, everything was great. But being there and having the anxiety of bringing someone you love to meet someone you look up to so much, it had my mind thinking up all these things that could go wrong.  A Taboo game going wrong was one of them, so was a chai battle. That’s how I came up with the idea for this short.” -Kausar Mohammed[x]

Documentaries without people: the modernist apartments of Kyiv, Ukraine in Left Bank (2020, Nate Robert and Anton Lebedev, dir.)

Availableon Vimeo

The Girl Is Mime

From London’s 48 Hour Film Project

There are so many amazing short films out there. Here is one starring Martin Freeman to get you started.

Clickhere for bonus production stills!

Awesome!

You can check out other brilliant Daily Crumb stuff on Youtube HERE.

(via@blogtorwho)

lifesuxvx:

David Bowie in his second to first screen appearance. The Image is a silent black and white X-rated (for violence) short horror film that was only ever screened in porno theaters.

Wow! I have never heard of this, let alone seen it. Amazing!

(The [end) of history illusion] • 2017 • Celia Rowlson-Hall

A short film commissioned by Miu Miu for Women’s Tales.

WILL’S ART HOUSE

Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line(1970)

Over the course of 11 minutes, an image slowly reveals itself. I recommend that you expand the video to full screen, and make yourself watch the whole thing without looking away.

Some would disagree with me, though. IMDB user commenter “hrivers” gives this film one star out of a possible ten, and says, “This is easily the most useless, ridiculous piece of film ever shot.” He adds, “If there were a negative rating that I could give this film, I would choose it in an instant,” and goes on to rail against the Cinema Studies professor who made him watch it. This is the only review that “hrivers” has ever posted on IMDB, which I think is wonderful.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Werner Herzog’s Huie’s Predigt(Huie’s Sermon) (1981)

Released the same year as Herzog’s better-known snapshot of Christianity in America, God’s Angry Man,Huie’s Predigt is nothing more or less than a passionate 40-minute sermon by Huie Rogers, bishop of the African American Bible Way Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Brooklyn. Rogers’ high-energy oration - partly sung - plays out in its entirety, followed by a glimpse of a baptism ritual. Herzog’s only editorializing comes with two street scenes of boarded-up houses and businesses in the church’s neighborhood. One of Herzog’s least-known films, Huie’s Predigt was probably best appreciated by its original German TV audience, who would have had unfamiliar with the fire-and-brimstone oratory style common in America’s black Christian churches.

Huie Rogers is still an active bishop, and you can learn more about him and his church here.

InHerzog on Herzog, the director told interviewer Paul Cronin…

“Huie’s Sermon was shot in Brooklyn, New York. I just bumped into Bishop Huie Rogers and asked if I could make a film about him. The film needs no discussion. It is a very pure work about the joys of life, of faith and of filmmaking. There is great joy in the image of Huie as he starts completely harmless and gradually whips himself and his flock up into the most wondrous ecstatic fervour”

THE WONDER EMPORIUM DAWN-OF-CINEMA REVUE

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Buster Keaton in The Butcher Boy(1917)

After four years of throwing pies and falling on his backside at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Films,  The Butcher Boy marked Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s first movie for Comique - his own company, in partnership with producer Joseph M. Schenck. More importantly, it marked the screen debut of Buster Keaton, who eventually took over Arbuckle’s studio when he moved on to features at Paramount. Keaton would credit Arbuckle as his filmmaking mentor, and became Arbuckle’s most outspoken supporter in the film community following the murder scandal of Labor Day 1921.

In his 1960 autobiography My Wonderful World of Slapstick, Keaton recalled production of The Butcher Boy…

Roscoe - none of us who knew him personally ever called him Fatty - took the camera apart for me so I would understand how it worked and what it could do. He showed me how film was developed, cut, and then spliced together. But the greatest thing to me about picturemaking was the way it automatically did away with the physical limitations of the theatre. On the stage, even one as immense as the New York Hippodrome stage, one could show only so much.

The camera had no such limitations. The whole world was its stage. If you wanted cities, deserts, the Atlantic Ocean, Persia, or the Rocky Mountains for your scenery and background, you merely took your camera to them.

He went on to recall Arbuckle fondly…

The longer I worked with Roscoe the more I liked him. I respected without reservation his work both as an actor and a comedy director. He took falls no other man of his weight ever attempted, had a wonderful mind for action gags, which he could devise on the spot. Roscoe loved all the world, and the whole world loved him in those days. His popularity as a performer was increasing so rapidly that soon he ranked second only to Charlie Chaplin.

Arbuckle was that rarity, a truly jolly fat man. He had no meanness, malice, or jealousy in him. Everything seemed to amuse and delight him. He was free with his advice and too free in spending and lending money.

I could not have found a better-natured man to teach me the movie business, or a more knowledgeable one. We never had an argument. I can only remember one thing he ever said that I disagreed with.

“You must never forget,” he told me that day, “that the average mentality of our movie audience is twelve years.”

I thought that over for a long time, for three whole months in fact. Then I said to Roscoe, “I think you’d better forget this idea that the movie audience has a twelve-year-old mind. Anyone who believes that won’t be in pictures for very long, in my opinion.”

I pointed out how rapidly pictures were improving technically. The studios were also offering better stories all of the time, using superior equipment, getting more intelligent directors. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was fascinating people who had never before thought of the movies as anything but an interesting toy. They’d shown Griffith’s masterpiece at a two dollar top, which was as much as was charged then for some Broadway plays. “Every time anyone makes another good picture,” I said, “people with adult minds will come to see it.”

On thinking it over, Arbuckle said I was right. But the low estimate of the audience’s mind, I notice, survives to this day in Hollywood. I sometimes wonder if TV, free or not, could have overtaken and overwhelmed the movie industry so quickly if its studio bosses had rejected that myth.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

The FinishingLine(1977)

This 20-minute British Transport safety film warns kids of the danger of playing on the railway tracks via a horrifying fantasy world in which children are run over by trains. All of this is presented in stark, unflinching, unsentimental detail, with all sorts of graphic shots of mauled and bloody tots splayed across train tracks. The climactic shot, of dozens of children’s corpses lined one-by-one along the railway, is like the famous Civil War crane shot from Gone With the Wind crossed with… I dunno, Night and Fog?

Director John Krish was assigned to make an anti-vandalism film, but was told not to show any shots of vandalism, so kids wouldn’t know how to do it. So, he made cold, bitter lemonade out of lemons. The resulting film is ruthlessly dark even by the standards of safety scare films, so much so that it was quickly withdrawn from TV circulation and became the subject of polarized debate in the British media. But The Finishing Line has had an afterlife as a horror curio - Nicolas Winding Refn recently put up money for its restoration.

From an interview with KrishinFangoria…

JANISSE: That image of them all lying on the tracks…

KRISH: I wanted it to look like the Somme from 1914. The reaction was always the same – silence. And about three or four people always wanting to leave in the middle. And when I was commissioned to make a film about vandalism on the railway, the proviso was that I mustn’t show any. Write a film about vandalism but don’t show any in case it sets an example, gives them ideas. Being faced with this brief, what the hell do you do? So I got in touch with a mate who was in advertising, we’d made commercials together, and he’s got a kind of sideways mind sometimes, and we spent time just talking around it, just talking, talking. And by this time two months had gone past, and I had no ideas. But I wanted to make a film, not sit around trying to find an idea. And I came up with this idea of a sports day on the railway line, and I was absolutely sure they would turn it down so that I could get on with something else, and bugger me, they loved it. They loved it! The psychologist in the British Transport’s employ said, “This is exactly what we need!”

[…]

HOGAN: But I can imagine, I mean, as much as people go on about “Oh, it’s disturbing, we have to ban it,” all that sort of thing, you put kids in front of a camera and say “you’re going to play dead and we’re going to put fake blood all over you”, they love that!

JANISSE: I’ve heard from a lot of British people my own age who grew up in the 70s that they felt there was actually a mandate to scare them out of their wits with the children’s programming. Being on the other side of that, as one of the filmmakers, what do you think about that? There definitely was an unusual amount of scary programming for kids at that time, why do you think that was?

KRISH: I think it was because we had such limited screen time to bring the message home – and maximising the drama, making every shot count, was an imperative. I don’t believe there was a mandate to scare – it’s just that the casualty statistics, burns, road deaths and others were and are so high that these Awful Warnings were made in an atmosphere of hope that they’d stay in the minds of those of all ages and changes might happen… It was, I believe, a forlorn hope – although a fire info two-minuter I made with a stunt man coming out of a room ablaze from head to foot did save a life – there was a news item in a local South London Paper from a parent who, having seen the footage, knew not to open the door of a burning room and saved her family.

“Masterpiece”