Short Film Crash Course
I suspect there’s very little in the way of forum for the cinematically curious with respect to short films and experimental filmmaking. Presumably, there are still college courses offered. Otherwise, short subject filmmaking is something that has to be sought out, largely on the internet. It won’t just come to you. It’s regarded as a niche for esoteric circles. Lamentably, this attitude may have less to do with prevailing tastes than with the dictates of commercial concern that inform them. These commercial entities have set ideas about the running times of movies as things with narratives, people and concrete settings. For the most part, short films don’t play in theaters and people don’t actively seek them out on major streaming platforms. They tend to be more experimental in nature, eschewing linear storylines and brandishing a freewheeling license to traffic in less common ways of conceiving imagery.
Because today’s film industry won’t risk the potential alienation of viewership with too much unmoored ambiguity, there is no engine for promoting short-form and experimental filmmaking in the mainstream outside of the Oscar nominated programs (half of these being dull, pristine computer animations for adult children) to be found in theaters for a few weeks each year and within academia - suspect itself for other reasons. This is one reason I would advocate for proper film canons. If film is a language, it’s one that film lovers must all learn to speak in a rudimentary sense, if only to form the basis for a common discourse that can create its own active communities.
the most famous image in Un Chien Andalou, Luis Buñuel, 1929
Of course, I couldn’t tell you what the communities fostered by this discourse will look like or what their values will be. All I know is that it will be easier for individuals and artists to communicate, advance common interests and foster exciting, diverse new work if we have such a discourse. We don’t have one now. Much of what we do have is dedicated mostly to the promotion of new and expensive, committee-approved products and it’s hard not to be cynical about the motivations for the proliferation of these voices. So in the interest of tilling the soil to create a more fertile ground so that perhaps a truly egalitarian sense of film history can sprout, I’ve decided to post - in honor of this being the 20th article I’ve done for this site - a list of twenty short films I feel are essential for laying this groundwork.
It’s not that I think these are essentially, “The Greatest Short Films Of All Time”. I wouldn’t presume to be able to write such a piece. This list is merely a basis for starting a deeper dive. It’s a signpost, not a manifesto. It can be rejected or quibbled with in any capacity. The titles I’ve selected - some are highly esteemed and are screened and discussed in academic circles worthy of the name. Others are personal favorites, selected because I felt they had something important to teach about the medium or the era in which they were made. For many of these titles, I could have just as easily selected at least a half dozen others by the same director.
Why did I choose this one and not that one? Because again, this is simply a crash course. If you’ve not watched a lot of shorts and experimental films, this will get you in on the basement level. For most of the selections, you can watch the film immediately with a provided Youtube link (sadly not the ideal way to watch many of these films). I apologize ahead of time for presenting what are likely in all cases, not the ideal versions of these films. They deserve better. You’ll have luck with a number of them if you’re a subscriber to cinephile-friendly streaming services like Mubi or Criterion Channel, where you’ll be seeing something much closer to what the filmmaker intended. Maybe this demonstrable scarcity only helps illustrate my original point.
Titles are listed in chronological order, starting with:
1. Un Chien Andalou
Luis Buñuel, France, 1929, 21 min
There are more striking short subjects (and better surrealist ones) than Buñuel’s infamous debut film. But I include it here to give the reader a sense of what short films entail. They’re not bound by story, logic or notions of continuity. They speak to the nature of film as an imagistic medium. This is what it offers that music and literature do not - its raw material. Buñuel’s and Salvador Dali’s collaboration is something every film nut gets to sooner or later. It makes no sense, except perhaps in the free-associative realm of dream logic. But I don’t think interpretation is essential to its relatability to an audience. It’s the most famous short film ever made and I include it here so viewers know what kinds of experiences they’re in for. Where the goal of filmmakers before surrealism was to entertain audiences, Buñuel and Dali sought to alienate and antagonize as many of them as possible. This film was made to be thrown in the face of a society its creators despised. Again, I think this is good as a curtain-raiser, despite the fact that it's the most outlandish and off-putting title on this list. This is not to say if you didn’t like it, you won’t like anything else listed here. I post Un Chien Andalou to convey a sample of the language that shorts and experimental films tend to speak. The razor slashing the eyeball is the image that everyone remembers. My favorite is the man dragging the grand piano that has priests and dead monkeys on it.
2. Blood of a Poet
Jean Cocteau, France, 1930, 51 min.
You’ll find the complete version on The Criterion Channel. Linked above is one scene from the first of what’s called Jean Cocteau’s “Orphic Trilogy,” which explores the plight of the artist and the mystery of inspiration as a divine power. An artistic polymath, Cocteau could have taken or left filmmaking and he saw film differently from so many of his contemporaries in this early period. To him, “The Seventh Art,” was a pliable, plastic artform, into which other disciplines could be assimilated. Blood of a Poet feels like cinema’s first grand experiment with the form. Almost every scene has a groundbreaking technique driving it forward. Cocteau played with jump cuts, shadows, overdubbing, reversing the film stock, and radical changes in perspective. He was one of the great magicians of film. Any artist who believes in the connection between art and dreams should probably try their hand at filmmaking.
3. At Land
Maya Deren, US, 1944, 15 min.
Experimental dancer-performer-filmmaker-theorist Maya Deren was perhaps the first major figure in the American avant-garde cinema. I like her second film, At Land, even more than her Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), though all of her film work is extremely rewarding. She’s essential viewing, as far as I’m concerned. Shot in 16mm, this was another work that abandoned established temporal and spatial notions. Like Meshes, At Land plays with subjectivity within a given environment, with the main figure (Deren herself) as a kind of modern version of a beached mermaid moving amorphously between environments. Some of her movements are animalistic or flamboyant - playing to Deren’s dancer-like physical abilities. Others are restrained and conditioned. They’re mounted from a distinctively female sense of subjectivity, which carries more weight when one considers both the disproportionate physical and behavioral constraints societies place on women and the fact that this was 1944. The feminist roots of these themes are strongly grounded within conscious, unconscious or subconscious explorations of subjective movement. The work is fittingly silent and this is the version I’ve linked above - I’ve not seen an upload yet where the music someone decided to add contributed anything to the already bracing, energizing experience of Deren’s supreme talent.
4. Neighbors
Norman McLaren, Canada, 1952, 8 min.
The insanity of this having been released in 1952 is apparent when one notices that everything it has to say about status chasing, Capitalism, materialism, environmental disregard and suburban one-upmanship seems to have barely aged. McLaren was a brilliant technician with an immense filmography consisting of both live action and animated short films. The Oscar-winning Neighbors could be called a synthesis of both disciplines; a live action film with stop-motion techniques here ingeniously employed to depict two stubborn male homeowners fighting over a flower growing on the line that separates their respective properties, illustrating what monsters our empty proprietary values make of us all. The music sounds like something that wouldn’t be invented for another thirty years. McLaren’s catalog contains many striking works but he held Neighbors in high regard for its lasting resonance: "If all my films were to be destroyed except one, I would want that one to be Neighbors because I feel it has a permanent message about human nature."
5. Night And Fog
Alain Resnais, France, 1955, 32 min
Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol scripted Alain Resnais’ stark and harrowing piece about the horrors of concentration camps. Its juxtaposition of archival clips and newly shot footage of what remains of the camps connects the past to the present. The use of narration is both explanatory and poetic. The raw power of the imagery (hideous piles of cut hair or confiscated shoes reaching the ceiling are the ones that stayed with me). I’m honestly hesitant to describe Night and Fog using words. It’ll be too much for some viewers, though it should be seen by everyone. Watching this again, I was struck by how untribal it is. It doesn’t mention Jews, or any other cross section of Holocaust victims. It makes an effort to understand the scale of what went on in the camps, while alluding to the impossibility of this task, empirically as well as spiritually. I recommend watching it as a means for priming oneself for Claude Lanzmann’s magisterial Shoah (1985). Both are essential viewing, demonstrating noble uses of the medium.
6. The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film
Richard Lester, UK, 1959, 11 min.
A wonderfully British sense of absurdism comes through in a piece that tries to recreate the feel of silent comedy. Director Richard Lester displays many of the techniques he would later sharpen in filming the youthful exuberance of The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night: speeding up the film stock (to a frames-per-second rate more suited to manic silent comedy), various tricks with perspective, foregrounding, continuity and sound. We’re looking at something that could have been a vehicle for Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, though it uses a modern jazz soundtrack, overlaid with constant, piercing sounds of birds chirping. Peter Sellers (who also wrote and developed the story) stars and the various elements of this wordless farce, despite their slapdash, low-budget ambiance (it reportedly cost about seventy pounds to make) snagged an Oscar nomination. They were fresh, new techniques, which injected life and spirit into pop art. Their application to a film made by Lester five years later about four mop-headed lads who played in the most popular rock band in the world would make for a perfectly suited visual style that could be produced cheaply and easily, and felt up to date in every pulsing moment.
7. La Jetee
Chris Marker, France, 1962, 28 min.
Chris Marker’s films could be called essays (as opposed to documentaries) on the intersections between history, photography and memory. His only fictional feature is something I would call one of the greatest works of science fiction in cinema and the BEST film ever made involving time travel. The story is told almost entirely with still photographs. The form the film takes, its style and subject matter are all interconnected in purpose, serving to reinforce one another. I won’t try to unscramble the labyrinthine story or its implications here. But it’s more than a simple mindfuck. The lyrical script has a major psychological and literary pedigree and so many popular newer films (from 12 Monkeys to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) owe a great deal to this, whether their makers know it or not.
8. Mothlight
Stan Brakhage, US, 1963, 3 min
A film made without a camera. Legs, wings and other parts of butterflies were glued directly onto the filmstrip. Leaves and other bits of fauna were also used. At the same time Brakhage is playing with the perforations of a filmstrip as the film rolls (Youtube does not do this justice - it was meant to be seen projected through celluloid), the sounds of the film unspooling mimic the fluttering of insect wings. It may appear thrown together but you can make out patterns, and a sense of texture and movement. Like the actual movement of insects, it’s a fleeting beauty. Complete form is seen only in very short bursts. This is Film imitating Nature. Imitating life. Brakhage built on this technique of directly painting filmstrips for his longer and more involved Dog Star Man (1961-1964). I don’t have the space here to describe the many technical and stylistic innovations of Brakhage’s Earth-shattering filmography. They’re all so different from each other. But this brief piece, robbed of the contextualizing aural cues as it is, should give you an idea of the boundless approach taken to assemblage by the filmmaker. It’s ambitious, evocative and dreamy. It helped steer audiences away from the idea of a film as a thing only for telling human stories.
9. The House Is Black
Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, 1963, 21 min.
I’ve returned to this film numerous times in my life, like a habitual prayer. It’s a personal favorite, near the top if not at the top. The director is the legendary Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad, who made no other films and died in a car accident at 32. The humanism of this cinematic poem shot inside a leper colony is radical in its implications. It has no cinematic precedent that I'm aware of. It represents the most complete fusion of film with poetry that seems possible. It’s the consciousness of a lyrical poem that’s suggested here - not events but illustrative meditations on events, each stretch representing lines or stanzas of poetry. Alternating between direct and added sound, images and scenes are overlaid in voiceover both with factual information about leprosy and evocative prose (from Farrokhzad) that connects thematically to the subject. Though limited on their own, both the image and speech produce a kind of rhyming effect. These techniques create a deep emotional register with a powerful social message, all the while blurring the line between staged fiction and documentary. For me, the multiple and highly subjective renderings of time, place, faith and human beauty carry extraordinary power in the way they marry the best elements of filmed art and written literature. Why would anyone want to watch a black & white Irani film made in the 60’s about lepers? Because the film is lessons one through one hundred on how the most humane, articulate cinema in the world comes from Iran, one of the world’s most hated nations. It’s a shame the quality of the version linked here doesn’t match the one to be found on The Criterion Channel.
10. Scorpio Rising
Kenneth Anger, US, 1964, 28 min.
I debated endlessly with myself about which film from the burgeoning American “underground” movement of the 60’s - because I could only allow for one - to include on this list. It could have just as easily been Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) or Andy Warhol’s Vinyl (1965). Perhaps I chose this particular Kenneth Anger film because despite defying many of the same taboos as the others, it’s a such a stunning visual smorgasbord of subverted American iconographies and their proximity to homoerotic mania and drug-addled counterculture. Anger’s work turned conventional filmmaking and film watching upside down. His tracing of queer male culture to Rock & Roll culture and biker culture, with their inclinations towards fascist symbols and bodies bedecked in leather clothing and metal jewelry, paint one of the most palpable portraits of an American subculture I can think of. The way in which all these disparate totems and rituals form a single aesthetic is fascinating in the unique way that America itself can be fascinating. Anger’s impact on Hollywood moviemaking should be undeniable after seeing this. It’s pop art at its most fetishistic, glimmering and illustrious. Anger’s wild stories about the filming of this are the stuff of legend.
11. The Hand
Jiri Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1966, 18 min.
In this writer’s opinion, the Czech New Wave of the 60’s and the equally fertile periods for filmmaking in countries like Hungary and Poland produced pictures as rich and daring and stylish and innovative as anything coming out of the French New Wave, which didn’t bother much with animation. Incendiary, beautiful and shattering, not one thing this film has to say about power, the authoritarian state, nationalism, fascism, religion, conformity, propaganda and individuality is irrelevant to our lives today. The effect is accomplished with stop-motion using a marionette. Unsurprisingly, puppetry is apropos for relating the story of a carefree little man being bullied and brainwashed by The State (represented by a huge hand). It’s an angry film for angry citizens. It communicates powerfully and simply what countless bloated productions wasting obscene amounts of money and precious hours of one's life fail to even approach. The Soviet authorities who would clamp down on Czechoslovakia in 1968 hated Trnka, and his career prospects would dry up in the following years. It’s a miracle that we have this.
12. Wavelength
Michael Snow, Canada, 1967, 43 min.
The ramifications about the perceptual and philosophical functions and mysteries of cinema explored by this film, which has been called the most consequential zoom shot in the history of cinema, are still being studied and discussed to this day. A slow zoom on a set of vertical loft windows, perched from about halfway up to a tall ceiling. The shot is overlaid with the sound of a sine wave that begins at its lowest tone and graduates to its highest tone as the camera zooms in on one of a set of photographs hanging on a wall - that of a beach scene (waves on waves). A few people enter and there are minor events within the space. We’re in mystery solving mode. As we zoom in on the photograph, it begins to assume the dimensions of the screen. Canada’s Michael Snow plays with other offscreen sounds and splashes of color, along with the human interruptions. A functional interrogation with rigorous internal logic. Snow is one of the most important film artists you’ve never heard of. His incredible filmography is a laundry list of adventures into the possibilities of an open-ended idea of what constitutes cinematic subject matter.
13. You Are Not I
Sara Driver, US, 1981, 48 min.
Taken from a story by Paul Bowles, this film has been likened to Edgar Allen Poe and it’s an apt comparison when one considers the degree to which Driver (one of American cinema’s sadly many, many overlooked female architects) goes to put us in the mind of a mentally unstable individual. Just the disorientation of the opening sequence - which gives us a basis for readingthe film - seems to announce a new film era, when a certain ambiguity about first person narration and storytelling will inform how we view the main character and her internal world. It would be reductive to tag this opus as a lesson about schizophrenia, but the subjective way the main character’s reality is depicted on screen points to great attention to detail Driver took to realizing her vision. The viewer is adrift, trying to piece together the story from the highly suspect point of view of a young woman who escaped a mental care facility because of an auto accident and is taken in by her sister. What she comes to understand or plot, or imagine plotting (it’s gorgeously ambiguous) is one large exploration into what constitutes “insanity” and “normalcy”. Watching this, I became aware of film as the best artistic means for immersing viewers into the experience of a conscious subject. Trying to summarize this here is not fair to it. Staggering, transgressive, confounding and radical.
14. When It Rains
Charles Burnett, US, 1995, 12 min.
A beautiful work about the capacity for music, specifically jazz music, to find common cultural and communal roots. It was shot in Watts, where five days of race riots took place in 1965 and the lasting effect of those events make the city a poignant and sobering choice as a setting for this story exactly thirty years later. It’s a film whose narrative mimics the improvisational nature of jazz and its relation to the idea of what it means to live in a community. The narrator is a kind of poet bandleader. Each person he visits in his quest to raise money to save his neighbor from eviction is like a solo in a grand jazz performance, this one complete with human instruments. Film construction is revealed as just another form of musical composition in this sense and music, in its composition, consumption and performance, defines what it means to be part of a community. Director Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, To Sleep With Anger) is, for my money, the most undervalued American filmmaker alive. His more recent stuff - like an episode of The Blues or Oprah’s The Wedding, just doesn't do justice to the technique and the empathetic handling of character in his earlier works. It used to be far too hard to see this 12-minute gem. It’s now available on the DVD set released in 2007 containing Burnett’s earlier films. I cannot stress enough what rewarding experiences I find Burnett’s films to be. It’s not on Youtube, but you’ll be glad you sought it out.
15. Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy
Martin Arnold, Austria, 1998, 14 min.
Of all the films listed here, this one might be the hardest to describe. Austrian artist Martin Arnold took clips from the Andy Hardy film series that started its run in the 30’s. It was a coming-of-age franchise that starred Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and Arnold more or less remixed it. Sort of. Imagine a DJ spinning a record on a turntable and the words and tones warping as it’s scratched up and down. Now imagine that effect applied to these domestically set images from musical melodramas of a bygone era. They take on a kind of creepy subconscious significance. We’re talking about maybe a single second’s worth of footage playing forwards and then reversing and then playing forwards again a few dozen times, the cycle occasionally speeding up or slowing down. Actions become horrific, isolated skeletal caricatures of themselves. This technique has the effect of subverting not only the literal meanings of individual actions but the whole sociological construct of the Andy Hardy films themselves. It paints a picture of a private world of pain and anguish underneath the sunny world of appearances and the repressive or oppressive forces that must make that world possible. Say, for instance, the action of Andy kissing his mother on the neck from behind is recast with Arnold’s technique of abruptly shuttling back and forth across the action. Could we be meant to see him then as a bloodsucking animal draining her lifeforce the way it must seem children do to some parents? Or could the new, more intimate charge of this repeated action suggest an Oedipal undercurrent in the household?
16. Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
Mark Leckey, UK, 1999, 15 min.
One of the most immersive short films I’ve ever seen. Every time I return to Mark Leckey’s makeshift video collage, I’m impressed by how little of its impact and its sense of melancholy has diminished. It feels haunted. Sure, there’s a sense of reverie in the nostalgia for various subcultures beginning with Northern soul in 1973-74 all the way up to the early hardcore rave scene in 1991-93. Casual meetup parties based around soccer as well as weekend shindigs revolving around funk or soul or jazz seen in snapshots and cut together. The ingenious sound design is, like so many of the tunes at these parties, heavily sampled from hardscrabble materials, as are the video clips. This was assembled in the early days of the internet, meaning that archived material was rarely just a few clicks away. Laudable detective work involved in finding the footage has formed the basis for something the filmmaker has never been able to let go of. Sound and image don’t always match. This makes for a ruminative experience that could be about memory or the mutation of artistic forms or really anything relating to the slipperiness of the past. Leckey is one of the more fascinating figures in cinema history and Mitch Speed’s 2020 book on the film places its resurgence in the context of a society overtaken by Neoliberal Capitalism: “A certain imperfect political potential must reside in Fiorucci’s evocation of this situation through its shape-shifting moments of release.”
17. The Heart of the World
Guy Maddin, Canada, 2000, 6 min
Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is one of the most innovative filmmakers around and for all of his dastardly forays into appropriating and rethinking silent film technique, this six-minute short still manages to make my hair stand on end. He knows how to take multiple aspects of silent cinema from different eras and artistic styles - German expressionism, Soviet montage, sets and props that could have come from George Méliès - and make them into something that never feels unapproachable or cheaply derivative. I can’t claim to know what people will and won’t like. But I firmly believe one doesn’t need a scholar’s understanding of silent film to enjoy or appreciate what Maddin is doing here, which as I see it, is nothing less than sounding a call to save cinema from assembly line Capitalism. His seemingly endless invention, powered by a boundless energy and aided here by a thundering, mesmerizing orchestral score that would make Danny Elfman faint, packs such a wallop that I would say this not only warrants, but demands repeat viewings, if only to note all of the details poured over by the mad genius that made it. Highly recommended.
18. Play
Anthony Minghella, UK, 2001, 15 min.
Part of a series done for an excellent British DVD release called
Beckett on Film. These were well-budgeted, sleek-looking film adaptations of Samuel Beckett plays: scenes and monologues employing established directors and starring professional screen and stage actors. Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain) retains some of the essential elements in Beckett’s terse, three-headed tennis match: actors standing in massive jugs with their heads sticking out, breathlessly reciting monologues at lightning speed, utterly devoid of affectation with the sharpest cutoffs you’ve ever seen. What puts this into sublime territory for me is in the way Minghella buttresses the verbal acuity of Beckett’s text with his own visual acuity, rendering his experiment in ultra-sharp, high-contrast photography that adds an extraordinary vibrant sheen to the turquoise, gray and black palette of his gorgeous expressionist set. Instead of spotlights on the actor’s faces the moment they begin speaking, Minghella uses whiplash cuts and pans (complete with simulated noises of the camera), dramatic focal shifts, jump cuts, dizzying overhead zooms and even fourth wall effects like bursts of scratched or scribbled-on film stock interrupting the proceedings. Alan Rickman, Kristen Scott Thomas and Juliet Stevenson are well utilized in what could be called a dazzling and fluent translation of one of the greatest of all playwrights to a distinctly different artistic format that feels like it was always part of film territory.
19. Somebody
Miranda July, US, 2014, 10 min
A series of short films was commissioned in 2014 by the Italian fashion line, Miu Miu. Female filmmakers from around the world submitted short works with only the stipulation being that the characters wear Miu Miu clothing. A suspect corporate conceit with dubious intentions perhaps, but it yielded interesting results from Ava DuVernay, Agnes Varda, Lucretia Martel, Chloë Sevigny, Lynne Ramsey, Alice Rohrwacher, Mati Diop and many others. My favorite of the Miu Miu shorts comes from artist and performer, Miranda July with her gift for illustrating awkward human emotions. Here she adds tech angst to the mix and the cheerfully absurdist spin makes for something surprisingly poignant. It’s tinged with a bit of sadness at the decrepit state of communication in today’s world, highlighted by the failure of a peer-to-peer economy to alleviate the sense of detachment and isolation driving that sadness. It’s funny and surreal, but the dry humor never feels far from a sense of loss one would imagine grappling with in an emotional dystopia.
20. This House Has People In It
Alan Resnick, US, 2016, 12 min,
Part of a series of short films made by Adult Swim following the success of its sitcom spoof, Too Many Cooks, Resnick’s film could be put up for competition against any official festival submission for its shattering and terrifying revelations regarding (among other things) the pathology of parental neglect and crisis response. It’s conveyed entirely as a montage of drab, tonally muted overhead surveillance footage, seemingly taken without the knowledge of inhabitants of the house. The afflicted family are made to seem like guinea pigs in a devious sociological experiment. There’s a lot of food for thought about how human beings respond (or fail to respond) to catastrophe, and how much modern parenting as a practice of sticking one’s head in the sand (a position I share) exacerbates catastrophe. This seemingly objective framing device for the story as a kind of isolated home video feed, as if the house were a terrarium, serves in keeping a meditative distance from the ugly subject matter that encourages viewers to judge for themselves. The actors do commendable work in carrying the shocking and horrifying implications of the material all the way through to the conclusion. It’s a shockingand splendid puzzle. I have my own ideas about what’s going on in this film and what it means. But I wouldn’t dream of sharing them here.
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