Brilliant shorts you've seen

[nomos]

Bruno's comment that to plants "we must seem a blur" reminded me of a short German animation called 'Das Rad' ('The Wheel') which I saw a a few years ago on the CBC's shortlived experimental film/video prorgam Zed TV. Like most things, it's now on YouTube. It depicts a brief episode - the blurry rise and fall of human civilization - in the life of two world weary rocks.

Watch the video at YouTube

I'm also fascinated with a somewhat mysterious Canadian collective named Clyde Henry. I read about them years ago in a sidebar article that had them doing top secret work for the Department of National Defence and producing short films about forest gnomes who discuss Max Ophuls films over espresso. Later, I discovered that they have a website upon which they've made some of their work available for viewing. Click below to see a different gnome flick in the style of the National Film Board's 'Hinterland Who's Who' wildlife vignettes (familiar to anyone who remembers Canadian television in the 1970s and early 80s). But whereas a lot of people would simply run with that camp reference, Clyde Henry simply use the familiar form as a container for an endearing depiction of a (mostly) solitary drunkard gnome. The genius is in the attention to the gnome's sensual life - dangling his feet off the edge of tree stump while his eyes flood with sunlight; the satisfaction derived from giving a mushroom a well placed kick.

Watch the video at Clyde Henry

 

[nomos]

Anyone else?

 

[STN]

Always up for a bit of Svankmeyer (sp?) especially 'Meat Love'...

 

[bruno]

nice shorts, nomos! no, not the ones you're wearing.

the first brought to mind investigations of a dog, briefly. both parties are more or less in the dark and at the mercy of people through 'limitations' in how they perceive reality.

i had to overcome my hatred of gnomes to see the second one. it made me smile! at school in edmonton we were treated to wildlife documentaries and animation constantly. the names and images are lost in time but the general impression is very benign, part of my (probably distorted) memory of canada as an eden. if you could point out a comprehensive source for these things online i would be grateful, i'm sure i'd recognise quite a few of them.

the only animation i have seen recently is of cheburashka and a collection of animated shorts for kids from the soviet bloc, beautiful stuff. i'll have to ask the person that showed these to me for the names, it was literally all in russian.

 

[nomos]

i had to overcome my hatred of gnomes to see the second one. it made me smile! at school in edmonton we were treated to wildlife documentaries and animation constantly. the names and images are lost in time but the general impression is very benign, part of my (probably distorted) memory of canada as an eden. if you could point out a comprehensive source for these things online i would be grateful, i'm sure i'd recognise quite a few of them.

The NFB should have these available either on their website, on the cartoon channel or in libraries, but the unfortunate truth is that most of their work is locked away. Worse, good portions of it are said to be either rotting or disintegrating. It's sad given how much innovative and original work was done there. Although Montreal has a public NFB theatre called the Cinemathque where you can sit sit a small booth while a robot fetches films for you to watch. I'm not sure how much of the collection is available.

Interesting that your memories of Canada are edenic and filtered through the NFB. Boards of Canada obviously play on that too. I'm not an expat but my early childhood memories, beginning around 1977-78 are also strongly inflected by the analogue grain of sounds and images from the NFB and CBC. They were odd sights and sounds for an infant mind - imperfectly colourful, shadowy, still to be standardized. And of course children's programming at the time was quite strange because it had been colonized by former hippies and the acidic overtones were still in effect.

 

[shudder]

I'm of only a slightly newer vintage (born in '83), and NFB sights and sounds still have some (though not as much) hold over me. The animation for the Logdriver's Waltz is a classic. I love all the sort of blippy bloopy animations of dots extending into lines and folding into circles. Did you see that NFB film recently on the classic-animator-on-the-skids Ryan Larkin? His clips were great too.

Also, I love that they still ran Hinterland Who's Who spots when I was growing up. Remember those?

There's one of the NFB Cinematheques in Toronto too. Same deal. It used to free but now, scandalously, it's just very cheap.

 

[yyaldrin]

i hadn't heard of "das rad" before. the old youtube link doesn't work anymore but there's another version online here:



it is great actually! very clever how they managed to give an idea of how fast certain processes are happening but also how very minuscule and tiny the time is in which we live. it often makes sense to take the role of a stone, a mountain, a cloud, a sea and to watch and listen.

 

[IdleRich]

Probably mentioned before but I love the Spanish (short) horror film La Cabina... also the Russian animation The Mascot (and anything by that guy Starewicz or however you spell it).

 

[IdleRich]

It's here actually



Not great quality but you can still see some of the magical animation.

 

[IdleRich]

Here's La Cabina, if you've never seen it you really should - just watch it without reading anything about it