March 9th

March 9th is a 2010 short film from Croatia directed by Irena Škorić. It is currently being featured at the Libertaas Film Festival in Dubrovnik, Croatia. This short film is awkward to listen to when you know other people who would be disturbed by it are within hearing distance. Fortunately it has English subtitles, so the volume can be kept extremely low.

The story is pretty basic, a girl is having an affair with another man and is late to go meet her boyfriend for lunch. The point this short film seems to be making is that physical connections are not as strong or important as emotional ones. The girl does not really care if the man she leaves in her room is upset by the fact that she is still dating her boyfriend, but she is upset by the fact that she might be late to meet her boyfriend. The boyfriend’s pictures are what are on the walls, which shows the emotional connection she has to him even as she has a physical connection with another person. Likewise due to the camera’s disconnect from the physical actions the audience shares the girl’s disconnect to her bed partner.

Nina, Please

Nina, Please is a 2010 short film out of Croatia, directed by Barbara Vekarić. It is currently being featured at the Libertaas Film Festival in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

This short film is about the lack of communication, both verbally and physically, in the marriage of Nina and Neven after the birth of their daughter Tina.

The scene where Nina and Neven are eating dinner and it is completely quiet I do not believe. They have a small child, there is no way that house can be quiet. The silence is meant as a dramatic choice, to show that the two of them have stopped communicating. And then Nina starts talking about money and Neven is understanding about that, that is like the last thing you want to talk about when you are not communicating well because it is such a sensitive topic and can make people resent you if all you do it take money and cannot give anything back to them. Likewise the short film also goes silent after Tina starts screaming and thus Nina goes downstairs to yell at Neven for being loud and waking the child up. The silence agitates the disconnection here – they are talking, or rather yelling, at each other thinking they are communicating with the other person when they are really not reaching either person at all.

In regard to the physical element of their relationship, Neven wants to connect with her, but Nina had lost interest in physical closeness – probably a non-diagnosed case of postpartum depression. Neven even buys her a fancy new watch (unrelated to the dinner conversation) to try to at least get some sort of emotional reaction out of her and she is just totally disconnected from every attempt he tries to reach out to her. Nina tries to talk to her sister-in-law about her issue, but after finding out how often they have sex, decides to lie to her rather than tell the truth about her situation which derails the connection that they were building via the conversation. This scene, while also lacking background noise, has an active dialogue between the characters than them appear to be engaged in which shows that Nina is at least attempting to get somewhere with her problem via this conversation. The sister-in-law does give here a kind of “be serious” face after Nina lies about her physical involvement with Neven, but then the males return breaking that connection off completely.

René

René is a short 29-minute film from Switzerland. This short film was directed by Tobias Nölle in 2007. This short has won many awards as it has toured the festivals, including the 2007 Pardino d’oro for Best Swiss short film and the Prix de la Jeunesse / Youth Award from the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. It is is currently being played at the Libertaas Film Festival in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The main character in this short film, René, has this habit of making audio tapes and leaving them places. He also expresses a desire to have a cactus for his non-existent balcony. He talks a lot about the “white country” and how he cannot enter it, but that there are roads that go there through forests and snail shells. He also at a point goes and kicks a soccer ball and it lands into the forest, giving no echo and later wondering if he is a “scream without an echo”. He also kicks soccer balls into the ocean at some birds.

Nölle said in an interview with Helvetic Centre that:

“People like René live in a parallel world incongruent with our usual rationally structured reality. In making this film I wanted to create a visual atmospheric picture of René’s world, rather than explore the social aspects of the life of an outcast.”

Which makes the point here that René is more a juxtaposition through which the audience can see the “average” normal world they live in. His “abnormal” behavior and thoughts, which all humans have (seriously try writing stream-of-conscience style sometimes if you think this does not apply to you, it does), and takes it to a whole new level in order to talk about the condition of identity and how we construct our identity through relationships with the people and things around us. Nölle is trying to make a point that while most people conform to how society has set itself up, not everyone does, and they are still normal people do. It has to do with the difference between and objective and subjective viewpoint of reality. Objective reality is “normal” reality where things are how they are and physical life is a solid thing where we have no control over most things, where as subjective reality is the notion that reality is actually a lucid dream and none of it has to make sense because you are the dreamer and everything that is happening is a projection of your own creation. When René is trying to talk to the camera and reach out of his world he is trying to break from one reality into another – because technically everything that happens in René’s world is a dream as that is part of the magic of cinema, you can make dreams real. That is part of René’s struggle as well, finding people to connect with. Well he can’t have a “real” connection with another person if he is in a dream, because they are all his dreamed up bits. So part of what this short film is asking is how can people truly connect to reality and other people if they do not know themselves and part of it too is playing a satire on the idea of relationships in movies being “real” when they are only constructions.

Fantasmagorie

Fantasmagorie is a 1908 stop-motion hand drawn animation film directed by Emile Cohl. In making this short film Cohl became “The Father of the Animated Cartoon” as this was the first hand drawn animated film ever created. It also gives up on a traditional plot and opts instead for stream of consciousness to make it part of the very brief French art movement called Incoherent.

This film, while being stream of consciousness, is also make the viewer aware of the meta-narrative in a way. The short shows the animators hand at the beginning and the first scene the stick-human finds themselves in is in a theater, much like the audience watching this at the time would have, behind a lady with a very large hat, which is a mimicking of the annoying occurrence of having someone tall or otherwise blocking the screen from view. From the theater the stick-human takes the viewer through a journey on which is a fantasy creation – just like what a film set out to achieve, to take the audience beyond the theater as a place and into the realm of imagination.

Excelsior! Prince of Magicians

Excelsior! Prince of Magicians is a once thought lost 1901 short film by George Melies who did A Trip to the Moon. The thing about Melies though, is that he is the magician in this short film, being the actor as well as the director.

There is nothing too magical or ground breaking about this short film. It shows a short sequence of magic show tricks, aided in their execution by the awkward film negative cuts that string them together. What it is good at is taking an old theater art form of being on a stage in a theatre and transitioning into the new theater art form of cinema. This would have given audiences of the time a nice combination of a familiar act done in a new way. Though I feel like the art of magic tends to be more powerful when seen live than through a camera lens since the camera takes the magic out of the art since you can stop and edit bits together and it is no longer a completely organicly unfolding act.

Card Party

Card Party / Partie de Cartes is a 1987 short film directed by Leopoldo Fregoli. There is an extremely similar film with near the exact same title done up by Louis Lumiere, making finding much information about this particular short film very difficult.

It is similar to Lumiere’s style, as it depicts an everyday event, however it is also different than the Lumiere’s traditional work because it brings the audience closer to just a few people rather than showing a whole scene with many people in a crowd. I like the placement of the camera for this short film, it is the point of view of who the fourth player would be sitting where the camera was, but it does not feel invasive as there is not anyone actually sitting there, so it is suppose to make the audience think they are participating in the game as well. The camera in this film is much closer to the table than the camera in the Lumiere version, making this feat possible here, but not necessarily in Lumiere’s as their version feels more like you are just watching rather than part of the group and playing along.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat / L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat is a very short film composed of one stationary single shot of about fifty seconds, and was directed by the Lumiere brothers in 1985 – making this one of the classic beginnings of cinema.

The urban myth surrounding this film – that it made audiences run from the theaters in fear of being hit by the train – has even landed it on Time’s top list of horror films (view here).

Ion Martea of Culture Wars writes here that:

“The key to the Lumières’ success lies in frame composition. A perpendicular shot would have been impossible at the time (unless the camera operator had been suicidal), while a parallel one would have stopped at reproducing motion, with little effect over the audience. The emergence of the train on a diagonal line, however, both provided a sensation of identifying with the point of view of the travelers at La Ciotat, and created the illusion of a real vehicle, growing in size, making its grand entrance into the lives of the spectators. Therefore, audiences were not engaged as passive voyeurs, but were invited to join in the excitement actively, reacting passionately, experiencing something totally new.”

I think this short film is well worth the less than a minute it takes to view, if only for looking at the various hats the people are wearing as they walk by.

Alice in Wonderland

This version of Alice in Wonderland is the silent short film from 1903, which was directed by Cecil Hepeorth and Percy Stow. It was the original movie version of the Lewis Carol book of the same name and was partially restored by the BFI in 2010, however some parts are still lost.

Due to the rather damaged nature of parts of this film, it can be a bit awkward to watch at parts. For example there is a bit that lasts only a few seconds, with title card and all, where Alice goes to play with a dog (which I do not recall being in the books, though there was a bit about a mouse) and then it cuts to the White Rabbit’s house. The most together scenes appear to be the “down the rabbit hole” bit with the door and the drinks and cake as well as the card procession at the end, the tea party bit is undamaged compared to the rest of it but yet feels too short.

However, I will say it does appear to be attempting to stay true to there story of Alice in Wonderland, rather than mixing that with its second part Through the Looking Glass (ie Jabberwocky, Tweedledee / Tweedledumb, the Walrus and the Carpenter stories) as many movies are apt to do, as this included the bit where the Duchess’ baby turns into a pig, which many other versions would leave out.

It it hard to say much critically about this film as much of it is miss or damaged, but it is a nice short film to watch if one happens to like Alice in Wonderland as it is the first cinematic attempt to reproduce the story, which it still manages to do well enough for the audience to understand it even though parts are missing. Which is a real testament to the power of the story itself.