Using a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 early one August morning, Claude Lelouch attached a camera to the bumper of the car and sped through the streets of Paris. He set the route to be from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur, which is straight through the heart of Paris. When this film was first shown, Lelouch was arrested, and because of this, the footage spent many years underground until it was finally released on DVD in 2003.
Category: Short
An ironic backstage short, in which a young actress in her dressing-room, preparing to go onstage for a play which she tells us is failing, reflects on the performers’ and audiences’ lack of enthusiasm, and reminisces about a failed love affair. Meanwhile, the other performers carouse enthusiastically and we hear the audience’s enthusiastic response.
Four people at the breakfast table, an American family, are locked in the beat of the editing table. The short, pulsating sequence at the family table shows, in its original state, a classic, deceptive harmony. Matin Arnold deconstructs this scenario of normality by destroying its original continuity. It catches on the tinny sounds and bizarre body movements of the subjects, which, in reaction, become snagged on the continuity. The message that lies deep under the surface of the family idyll, suppressed or lost, is exposed–that message is war.
An homage to action films, it tells the story of a chase using scraps of other films as different types of animation (using 65,000 paper printouts of images from 400 live action films) illustrate a classic chase scene scenario: A woman is abducted and a man comes to her rescue, but during their escape they find themselves in the enemy’s secret headquarters.
The story of two 17-year-old boys. They are wearing medals around their necks. They have their pockets full of chewing gum something that they chew ceaselessly. They are wearing blue jeans. They spend the day along the beach front in Cannes looking for girls to win over.
In a small village in Provence, on the first day of school, a young boy throws his bag into the river on a bet, and the retrieval of it leads to a thrilling adventure.
A landmark of both experimental and queer filmmaking, Kenneth Anger’s film is a bizarre, disturbing dreamscape of violation, rape, and homoerotic sadomasochism. The film opens with Anger, who made this film when he was only 17, awaking from a troubled dream and leaving his house to go on a stroll. He is confronted by a band of buff sailors who proceed to beat, manhandled, and molest him. Recalling other surrealist masterpieces such as Un Chien andalou and Meshes in the Afternoon, this film uses elliptical narrative structure and dream-like visual metaphors and puns.
Sándor Reisenbüchler’s animated film of the Ferenc Juhász poem is a magical mythological tale featuring numerous folklore symbols, in which due to the horrors of war and the evil of man the Sun and the Moon vanished from the sky. This visionary film singing of the universal struggle between fairy tale Good and Evil was considered by the director a sort of ars poetica. The film was shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1969.