Very short Jem Cohen film online

I saw Jem Cohen's feature Chain, a few years ago, and the film has stayed with me. I keep finding myself describing it to people, trying to convey the queasy horror of being trapped in architectural hells like food courts and retail arcades. Sadly, the film still doesn't have distribution, so when I say "You should definitely watch Chain," you can't obey me.

Still, I stumbled across some of his short work on YouTube. Let's have a look at "Free", a commission by Renew Media.



I enjoy the music and the street photography - figuring out which people stand out to me as they walk by. If you like Elliott Smith, you can also watch Cohen's short film with live performances, Lucky Three. It's about 11 minutes long, well worth it.

In everything I've seen so far, a few words come consistently to mind: intimate, immediate, "gritty" - these feel like huge cliches, but the guy is not employing a team of makeup artists and stylists to manufacture a slick image. He is shooting ordinary people in ordinary light, and the way they interact with the rooms and streets and buildings around them in ordinary time. He makes you want to keep watching them, and feel something about them and the places they are in. The simplicity is deceptive.

Madeleine Peyroux - Between The Bars

This music video was shot with a Canon Elph. In the race for more resolution/more pixels/making video look like film, we sometimes forget how well-chosen video images have their own beauty. The key is to use video for what it captures best - low light situations, motion, non-literal images, extreme long shots that take advantage of the depth of field. And when you have beautiful video images like this, don't clean them up to try to make them look like film - degrade them further, allow them to vignette and pixelate.

Choir of Ex-Girlfriends

Michel Gondry + Flight of the Conchords = Awesome. I love the homemade feeling of rear projection. Via Pamie.com

More Music-Themed Recs from EthanZ

My good friend Ethan Z. encouraged me to start this site, and he recommended two music videos that he loves:

• Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt, which makes me think about the beauty of old people who come by it honestly and made me cry the first few times I saw it years ago. I love the way it mixes archival footage of young Cash with current footage. His voice has never been more direct and honest.
  
• Dennis Wheatley's Lost In A Moment is one of those "simple solutions can be the most beautiful" films. See life from the point of view of a piece of sushi traveling on a conveyor belt.

Now I will destroy all credibility

A high school friend and I reconnected recently, and we're both filmmakers now. We were lamenting the fact that we didn't have video cameras to document our small, weird New England town when we were teenagers - imagine the films we could have made about the guy who keeps a Revolutionary War cannon on his front lawn and puts small woodland creatures in Trick-or-Treat bags!

But we were connected to and by videos - it was the 80s, and we were riveted to this crazy new art form that put images to song lyrics. I didn't have cable, so I had to glean what I could from Friday Night Videos or stolen glimpses of MTV at sleepovers. And when I was twelve, this was the cutting edge. I still think some of the images are beautiful, like the silhouetted people who look like a Rorshach inkblot test, but I start laughing every time he sings "I drive off in my car" and then...drives off. In his car.

Thank you, Peter Gabriel, for crawling inside my imagination when I was a kid and for prompting me to stencil the word "Biko" on every piece of denim I owned. And for making extremely literal music videos with candy hearts that drop from the sky when you say the word "love."

Welcome to Short and Beautiful

I spend a lot of time making short films and teaching students to make short films. This blog is a place for me to organize my thoughts about making shorts and for collecting beautiful, inspiring, and entertaining short film and video work from around the Web. I will be looking for music videos, comedy, dramatic pieces, animation, cause-oriented work, documentaries, experimental films - the only criteria are:

1. Do I like it?
2. Is it short?
3. Can it be watched online?

There is so much content being made and posted every day, but it is hard to weed through it all for the things I want to watch over and over again. If this works like I want it to, it will be like curating an ongoing film festival...in my brain.

Something I'm loving today: The video for Oren LaVie's Her Morning Elegance. A beautiful, simple, well-executed idea using stop motion in a creative way. It's a pretty song, too.