Emily Hagins, who just turned 22, has been making films for the past 12 years, including four features. Making films has been a part of her life for nearly as long as she can remember and she has the distinction of being the youngest ever recipient of an AFS Grant for film production.
We asked her to choose a short that she especially likes. She chose CARPARK from a London collective that calls itself Birdbox Studio.
She explains:
I love this short because it’s a complete story in one and a half minutes. It doesn’t need to use dialog, different angles, or even color (except for one crucial shot at the end). It’s simple storytelling at it’s best, with a universal sense of humor. It’s not flashy, but uses it’s cinematic techniques effectively to make every moment memorable.
If we are fortunate enough as a species to survive for another few thousand years, future generations who seek to understand who we really were will have an ally from our era. Frederick Wiseman has been making documentaries for nearly 50 years now. His films are acutely observed, seemingly fly-on-the-wall documents on subjects such as American public universities, police departments, juvenile courts, high schools, boxing gyms, mental health hospitals and more (many) more.
I am always surprised when I run into someone who has never entered the world of Frederick Wiseman, or worse, those who find the films boring. For me, these are the most interesting docs ever made. For example, we see and hear a beat cop speaking and through his inflections, his euphemisms, his Freudian slips, his body language and in a million other ways, we understand something about the class system, about race, about ethnicity and about humanity itself.
In this poignant clip from HIGH SCHOOL – (poignant is really the word for it) a young teacher in a Philadelphia high school introduces poetic concepts to her students using a heartbreakingly naive Simon & Garfunkel song. The dewy idealism of the era could not be better illustrated. This is Wiseman’s art.
Zack McGhee is an AFS member who can frequently be seen at film events around town. He is a man of immaculate taste and one of our favorite people to talk movies with. He has started a podcast called ‘My Favorite Movies’ in which he interviews knowledgable parties, all of them from Austin so far, about their favorite films, their lives, their taste etc. It’s surprisingly fascinating. The diversity of choices (THE NEVERENDING STORY, THE GOOD THE BAD & THE UGLY, UHF) is a reflection of Austin’s movie culture.
A couple of weeks back I spoke to Zack about my own life, my shadowy past, my road to a career in film programming and, naturally, my favorite movie TOUCH OF EVIL. It’s available on the site. Enjoy.
Our ongoing Selected Shorts series continues here with a choice from AFS Board Member, Austin Chronicle Editor and Austin film legend Louis Black: The first time I was shown Henry Griffin’s 2004 short film narrated by John Lurie was by the always brilliant Nicky Katt in one of the only 30 houses actually on the beach in LaJolla. As the waves crashed translucent, he had rearranged the house, lit an army of candles, re-wired the media center and defrosted all the food in my friend’s refrigerator but all paled in comparrison to this stunning somewhat punk-romantic loose homage to Chris Marker’s seminal La Jetee. All done with still photos with only a few seconds total of action I quickly sent Jonathan Demme a copy, he raved about it, and have subsequently shown my favorite short film of the last decade to everyone I can force to watch it, many of whom asked for a copy. When I finally met the wonderous and multi-talented Griffin I asked why he hadn’t submitted his masterpiece to SXSW. He said that he had, it had been rejected. WATCH THIS FILM (except if you haven’t seen La Jetee, because you should not allow any more of your life to pass without having seen it). Watch TORTURED BY JOY here.
A lot of today’s cinephiles don’t know the name Pauline Kael, or if they do, they have some mistaken impression of her. For everyone who is ooh-ing and aah-ing over the first couple of Tarantino-programmed New Beverly calendars, or about his work in general, you must look to Kael. She provided the intellectual basis of QT’s critical thought and you can see it not only throughout all of his work but also in the way we have processed and understood (particularly Hollywood) films ever since. She wasn’t perfect and to invoke her name is to draw fire from many quarters, but she was brilliant both as critic and writer.
Here’s a nice long interview with her where she goes places she never did in her writing. Also, it’s a joy to hear her speak extemporaneously in such recognizably Kaelian sentences and paragraphs.
Zacherley The Cool Ghoul (aka John Zacherle, born in 1918 and still alive!!!) hosted late night Chiller Theater broadcasts of classic horror movies in New York and Philadelphia in the ’50s and ’60s. His monster schtick followed him around to his next job too, hosting a teen dance party show called Disk-O-Teen in Newark. Here he is, drumming up some excitement for the Box Tops, featuring Alex Chilton. This clip is awkward, great, uncomfortable and oddly perfect. Hope you enjoy it.
Our ongoing Selected Shorts series presents different short films presented by creative luminary types. This time we have a short provided for us by Justin Ishmael, CEO of Mondo, the world’s leading purveyors of specialty printed posters and more.
Here’s Justin:
I took a trip to Japan a few years ago and happened upon an exhibit celebrating practical special effects in Japanese monster movies. Among the props there was a small standing room only theater. I went in not knowing what to expect then…. this started. After it finished, I watched it 5 more times as I never thought I’d be able to track it down as they said it was made ONLY for the exhibit. Luckily, it’s online and you can check it out.
If you’re into GODZILLA, GAMERA, ULTRAMAN, PACIFIC RIM… any giant monster movies… please watch this. Although there probably is a little cgi in this (at the event they swore than 0% CGI was used), it’s a message to the world that practical effects can still be utilized effectively. The monsters felt there. They had weight. I miss that in most FX spectacles nowadays, but it’s amazing that in modern times someone felt the need to make this thing…. Studio Ghibli no less!
The bad news keeps on coming for lovers of celluloid. Technicolor and Deluxe’s joint film lab venture, Film Lab NY, just announced that it is closing its doors in December. It’s important to note that here that Film Lab NY was one of the few places that made film processing affordable for independent filmmakers. Due to being a part of these bigger corporations, they were able to offer more competitive prices for processing, making possible a number of low and micro-budged 16mm features in the past couple of years. Deluxe shuttered it’s last film processing lab in Hollywood in the spring. While Fotokem is still around, this doesn’t bode well. Will film processing for American indies all be done in Canada in the future?
From AFS Associate Artistic Director Holly Herrick: JEALOUSY comes to Austin next week with two screenings at the Marchesa (November 2nd and 3rd), and while Philippe Garrel continues to be considered as the almost satirical epitome of art house in the United States, his films demand a more thorough investigation by US cinephiles. This is especially true since JEALOUSY, with it’s easy humor and slim running time, might be the most accessible Garrel film in years, while still being completely brilliant (no hardcore Garrel fans will feel unsated).
Fortunately, we’ve got some great writers who have pinpointed what is so endlessly fascinating about Garrel’s work, important for the uninitiated who need that extra push. Over at Cinemascope, Blake Williams points out Garrel’s superlative romanticism, and highlights how Garrel is in a class all his own in terms of bold Freudian underpinnings (his actor son Louis Garrel has played the cinema-incarnated Philippe in every Garrel film for the past 10 years); and fearless autobiographical storytelling (witness the gory detail of being in love with a drug addict in I CAN NO LONGER HEAR THE GUITAR, based on Garrel’s relationship with Nico). Read the full essay here.
Here’s a sample: On the impossibility of submitting a list of Top 10 films of all time to Sight and Sound…
Diaz: This is the most abused exercise in cinema. Top 10 films, or, The Greatest 100 Films of All Time, or, 1000 Essential Films. And why do we do it still, ad infinitum, ad nauseum? Honestly, it just feeds the ego of the ones who do it, and, of course, of the ones mentioned. They will actually kill or die for it. It boggles the mind. But then it’s a valid exercise. And I respect people who do it, no matter how idiotic their choices/discourses sometimes are. I’ll even defend them. Yes, the canon, like it or not, is a necessary evil. Canon-making built so many sects and churches of cinema. Godard ran away from it, scared shitless upon realizing that Narcissus is staring at him in his favourite mirror, himself. But then he’s a god who created cinema, so he can’t destroy it, and we dread the day when he will finally leave cinema because he is infinitely a part of the Top 10 and The Greatest 100 Films of All Time and the 1000 Essential Films. In North Korea, the cinemaniac and late megalomaniac Kim Jong-il actually imposed a canon, all films starring himself, waving, smiling, visiting troops and factories, kissing babies, hugging the blind, praising uranium in thickly clogged shoes and propagating hairmania. And we know what happened and what is still happening in sad, sad North Korea. The wisdom and analogy is never, ever trust the canon. Keep an open mind but always keep Kim in mind. By keeping an open mind, we understand that the canon is part of the greater discourse of cinema; that’s short of saying that it’s still relevant. And I don’t think it’s elitist. Greater discourse always begs the proverbial question: “Do we really know the real Socrates?” or, putting it in a direct way: “Do we really know cinema?”
In our Selected Shorts series we’ve been asking some AFS Friends for their favorite short films and posting them here for all of you to enjoy.
Zack Carlson is an author (his Fantagraphics book DESTROY ALL MOVIES is the definitive reference work about punks on film), screenwriter, film producer, former programmer for Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas, he has been one of the producers of Fantastic Fest for years and is now also works with AFS on a variety of projects.
He chose the 2010 Short by Jim Hosking, RENEGADES.
“I choose RENEGADES because there’s really no other choice as far as I’m concerned. This ten-fisted masterpiece of sex, cake, self-loathing and hot dogs is absolutely and unquestionably my all-time favorite short film. Jim Hosking is not only a brilliant writer/director, but also has a supernatural knack for casting the most fascinating faces in the world. When I first stumbled across RENEGADES in 2010, I forced it on all three of my friends until I had no friends. It’s like no other movie, which is what all movies should strive to be like. The closing song will reverberate in your skeleton for decades. Watch it three times in a row or jump off a cliff. Either way, things will be much better.”
I think by now many of us have seen the legendary and amazing Charles Bronson aftershave commercials (directed by HAUSU maker Nobuhiko Obayashi). Just in case you haven’t, or are having a Low-T day. It follows:
I also think we’re pretty well aware that American (and European) stars travel to Japan all the time and make unspeakably bizarre commercials a la LOST IN TRANSLATION. As we live in an internet age now, many of those commercials have made it to us and it’s hard to imagine that any celebrities would believe the old “no one in America will ever see this” but back in the ’70s, such assurances carried weight and the following commercials were made by A-listers, B-listers and Why-are-they-on-any-listers, none of whom would have had any idea that they would follow them across the world and down through the decades.
Most are just weird. Like these instant coffee commercials with Kirk Douglas. In the first he is teamed with James Bond composer John Barry (why, why, why?) and in the second with a sedate looking John Frankenheimer. Tagline: “Good coffee. It refreshes my spirits.”
In this (perfume?) commercial, Anthony Perkins, whom we justifiably perceive a sinister figure thanks to his role in PSYCHO, does something weird, probably illegal and maybe (depending on what he wants the bird for) genuinely sick. But it’s all fun because it’s Japan. Tagline: “Kanebo: For Beautiful Human Life.”
Here are a couple featuring Sean Connery in an apparently mediterranean locale. In the first one he sweats a lot (the sweat looks fake) then he pees on a Mercedes (unless something else is happening here but that’s what it looks like). In the second one he drives his large, elegant antique car past a different large elegant antique car, driven by an old guy who looks like the doorman in the Mandom commercial. The old man has a shaggy dog who looks like he is freaking out. Much significance seems to attend this seemingly mundane transaction. Tagline: “Dynamic Elegance.”
Here, Alain Delon walks down a flight of marble steps to his car as the rain falls. Before he gets in he turns and regards a wet, miserable-looking dog for kind of a long time. Then he gets into his Mazda and drives off, leaving the dog there for some other sap. Anyone know where I can buy a Mazda at this time of day?
Now it’s Francis Ford Coppola’s turn to cradle an audiocassette like an entranced shaman trying to suck all the mojo out of a sacred figurine while Ray Charles croons “Georgia”. Coppola then states his brief theory about good sound. I’m sure Fuji sold a lot of tapes that year anyway.
