Tag: short

Etienne Charles’s docushorts

Posted on by victorfraga

Jazz creole artist Etienne Charles is one of the genre’s most inventive musicians, garnering acclaim for three impressive and well-received albums for his own Culture Shock Music imprint. A man still in his twenties, Charles understands the vitality and power Creole music holds on those who listen to it, inviting audiences to see, listen and feel the music he espouses on a daily basis. His style of raw playing has been hailed hailed by The New York Times as “an auteur” and by Jazz Times as “a daring improviser who delivers with heart wrenching lyricism”.

Through a trilogy of short films, Charles shows the beauty Trinidad holds in both its visual and musical form. Charles’ blend of improvisation and first-class musicianship has an infectious quality that attracts fans of all ages. The films capture the artists pure spontaneity, thriving and diving through the Trinidad streets.Those of a cynical disposition might not regard the films as much more than “how to” television manuals, but there is a vestige of biting humour which merits the viewing of these films. And at least the music sounds stellar, which is more than you could say about a One Direction film!

To the many unversed in cultivated Caribbean culture, opening film Carnival the Sound of a People (Research) proves a tasty photograph, as an assemblage of clips shows a city dancing to the tribal appetisers of his trumpet playing. His mantras and manouevres incorporate the rhythms from the French, Spanish, English and Dutch speaking Caribbean formats in one salty menage. Music is often used as an act of rebellion and Bamboo opens with a title card reminding viewers of the terror British Colonial Rule threw down on the masquerade bands of 1884. Tumbling and towering the drums shimmer through the soundwaves, as a conflate of images show the power the percussive instruments still hold centuries later. For once these films seem frustratingly short, yet dissuade the view that drums and movies do not mix.

Which is where Jab Molaisse comes in, tying the triumvirate together in a cross cut patio of pop videography. Blue painted drummers begin the tribal rhythms that cuts from musician to musician with transcendental fusion. Together, the jive style silhouettes flips from percussive precision as the film speeds without dialogue, a six minute video of clever cuts and cross-shapes. In its own way, the films speak to each other with the sweet music that melodically sings in the listeners ear. So, a bit more than a trio of “how to” manuals!

Etienne Charles’s Docushorts shows on October 12th at 17:00 at the Soas Brunei Theatre, as part of the Native Spirit Festival. Grab your ticket now here!

Thirza Cuthand Retrospective

Posted on by victorfraga

Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Saskatchewan and grew up in Saskatoon, and she is of Cree origin. Starting in 1995, Cuthand began exploring short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, youth, love, and race, using national, sexual and Indigenous experiences to showcase in unfiltered raw exteriors.

Make no mistake, there is purity at play here. Collecting the confines, conditions and contractions of Cuthand’s milieu, the varied works slip together into one continuous narrative written years, even decades, apart. More to the point, the essays cross genres from the pointedly visual into the realms of performance arts.

In a life’s work, we are testimonies to a great becoming of life, love and failings, fearlessly guiding the wills and witnesses of expectations over a twenty four year story. The feelings, frailities and failures are true of all our lives, but Cuthand has the courage and power to be real about them. In a peerless recall of honesty, the collected works speak so mournfully with a communal power absent even in Richard Linklater’s extraordinary Boyhood (2014). Though they could be easily overlooked, the works radically question the everyday division between the artful and the mundane. In an art form traditionally more recondite than visual, Cuthand’s work sprawls through ages, genres and documentaries.

Early clips use archive footage of films and puppetry, playfully positing the questions of truthfulness from the companionship Disney princesses traditionally have provided women. Detailed in black and white, Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I’ Statement (1999) finds a subject discussing the frustrations of a bottom position. Bravely opening the chartered path of self discovery, the narrative continues in the striking Just Dandy (2013), an essay of entrapment read through a diary. Performances play with ease, ebullient in energised ease as the author describes her innermost thoughts at a talk more potently lit in colour.

Then there’s 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (2017), opening and centred on the butch director in the flirtatious pose which too often stamps itself on pornographic websites. From the confines of these video-confessionals, the films progress narratively and thematically in evolving the woman’s body from the shaded to the candid. In its own way, it’s a riff on the inhibitions a person feels in their comfort’s both in their naked thoughts and naked bodies. In their way, the audience grows in confidence with the naked exteriors with the subjects. Reclamation (2018, pictured at the top), the fieriest entry, imagines a dystopic future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the palpable consequences of the large scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. Visually inventive, the majority of the short films focus mostly on the experiences which the audience members find themselves longing to hear.

Topics and themes also explore the sadomasochistic lesboerotic subtexts in children’s entertainments, the temporal horrors migraine blindness inflicts and the dismal loneliness a young lesbian must endure in a Canadian school. Added to that the realities of an everyday struggle, the essays explore the different worlds an Indigenous person must walk. It’s not so different, yet completely different, to the worlds everyone else inhabits. A revelation of a series.

In addition to the short films listed above, the Thirza Cuthand Retrospective also includes the following pieces: Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory (1995), Sight (2012), 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99 (2015), Thirza Cuthand is an Indian Within the Meaning of the Indian Act (2017) and the more recent Less Lethal Fetishes (2019). The event takes place on October 13th at the Horse Hospital as part of the 13th Native Spirit Festival. Just click here for more information, and in order to get your tickets now!

Nimic

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

A cellist has a mind-bending encounter on the New York subway in Nimic, a brief riff on the theme of The Double from Greek maestro Yorgos Lanthimos. Baffling and inviting in equal measure, it will delight die-hard Lanthimostans while easily alienating fans of conventional three-act structures. In any case, it shows what Lanthimos is capable of with smaller resources and only 11 minutes of runtime.

The film begins with dramatic music scoring Father (Matt Dillon) waking up next to his wife (Susan Elle) and eating breakfast with his children. The music stops and starts, quickly revealing the Father rehearsing an orchestral piece. This deliberate use of artificial music helps to set the tone for Nimic, which is all about artificiality of performance itself. After rehearsal, he takes the New York Subway. He asks a woman (Daphné Patakia) the time. She pauses, looking like a typically antisocial user of New York transit systems. Then she copies him: “Do you have the time?”

This is a deliberately repetitive movie, working like a piece of music itself, repeating brief poetic motifs — a boiling egg, a subway ride, a cello being played — at a smooth and intriguing rhythm. She is his mimic. She follows him. He goes home to the mother of his children and says: “Children please, tell your mother who their real father is.” The mimic repeats the same, and the children respond: “How should we know? We’re just kids.” To the average person, this should seem obvious, but in Yorgos’ world, it’s a deliberate provocation; asking us to question standard norms in favour of strangeness and paranoia.

For Lanthimos completists — who are more likely to seek the movie out than the average viewer — Nimic presents all of his usual tricks. The usual perspective distorting fish-eye lens is here, along with whip pans and lateral tracking shots. Actors in Yorgos Lanthimos films do not emote very much. Like in Kubrick, their deadpan faces are part of the theme itself; a reflection of a dystopian world where nothing makes sense. Circling upon itself with twisted glee, this is a concept that could conceivably go on forever, a kind of Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) for nihilists.

Perhaps the title can give us a clue, yet it seems to be another one of Lanthimos’ tricks. On first glance Nimic looks like a deliberate misspelling of mimic, yet a cursory look at Wiktionary tells me that it’s the Romanian word for both “nothing” and “anything”. This double meaning is a fitting descriptor of the film itself, which some will find laden with deeper themes and others will find rather empty. Perhaps I need to watch it again. And again. And again.

The film premiered as part of the Fuori concorso: Shorts programme in the Locarno Film Festival 2019, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival. Out on Mubi on Friday, November 27th (2020).

Drive (Pulsión)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This Argentinan short, although computer generated, has the feel of stop-motion. It brings to mind work by Lars Von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. A narrative conveyed by a series of disturbing vignettes (think: the opening minutes of Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) is put together with the same kind of fastidious technical attention to detail you find in the Quay Brothers’ films. A couple of scenes borrow directly from one of the murders in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but in a clever way that shocks you much as those scenes in Psycho originally did. There’s a Lynchian feel about the whole thing – not just in the strange, quasi-industrial sounds recalling Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) or the weird lighting and heavily controlled mise-en-scène, but also in the overall feel of strange and terrible things happening within families and local communities, people adrift within the darkness of human existence.

One single viewing is not enough for this film which really only reveals itself on repeated viewings. There’s so much going on here in the characters of a father, a mother, a teenage boy and flashbacks to the teenager as a small baby. After the death of the father who is run over while drunk, the relationship between the son and the mother moves into abuse as she hits him for not eating his food and voyeurism as he spies on her through her bedroom keyhole, referencing similar scenarios in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and, again, Psycho. Added to the mix are an animal corpse, a gratuitous rabbit killing and human murders. One particularly shocking scene involves the boy’s estranged friend kissing a girl near an abandoned, wrecked car and the boy hurling a brick at the amorous couple from behind a wall.

The vignettes make the locations appear as model sets suspended in darkness, each built upon a square patch of ground lifted from a wider Cartesian grid. These scenes don’t just appear then disappear in time, their appearance is also isolated spatially from everything around them. It’s an extremely unsettling experience and a unique, highly idiosyncratic vision. One can imagine Casavecchia going on to further forays short or feature length, animation or live action. If he does start working in live action, I hope he keeps returning to animation too because his use of the medium is part of the reason the film works as well as it does here – and it feels as if he has a great deal more to offer audiences.

Drive (Pulsión) played in Annecy where it won a jury distinction for powerful storytelling. Watch the film trailer below: