Has anyone heard of these discs? 2 discs, 16 short films from a pretty impressive range of European directors–not new stuff, but culled from bignames’ prior efforts. Just finished disc 1, which had a bleak and funny bit of corrosive stoic fury very much like the the director’s longer Songs from the Second Floor (Sweden’s Roy Andersson), the excellent Wasp by Andrea Arnold and equally fantastic Gasman by Lynne Ramsay, a very entertaining New-Wave parody by Toby Macdonald (who?), an old Svankmajer short, and then some stuff veering from forgettable whimsy to utter crap (Christopher Nolan’s ridiculous little Doodlebug). Disc 2 has films by Ridley Scott and Anders Thomas Jensen that I want to see, as well as the previously-discussed and excellent Six Shooter.
The second disc is mostly rewarding, too. It has one GREAT little film that I can’t say much about without revealing its subtle, effective pleasures — a Hungarian short called Before Dawn, which opens in dim light over a field of waving grass, each stalk of which you can see lazily swinging in a light breeze, and in one glorious yet no-showboating tracking shot reveals its story. Don’t know the director (Balint Kenyeres), but I’m keen to see his first feature.
I also really enjoyed Anders Thomas Jensen’s Election Night; I’ve mentioned his very good Adam’s Apples before. Ridley Scott and Lars von Trier offer up decent but unspectacular little avant-garde noodlings, and we’ve talked before about McDonagh’s film. There’s an involving eerie cartoon called Rabbit, a sly slight satirical slice-of-life about showing films in Italy by Nanni Moretti, and a cool twilight-zoney bit of fx-driven anxiety called Copy Shop.
I gather that there are other Cinema 16 collections, for different nations/regions, but I can’t (alas) find ’em on Netflix. But there ought to be more access to such good anthologies of shorts (and Wholphin’s a little too hit-and-miss for my tastes).
There used to be a regularly released DVD of short films – called Short I think. Some of them were good and they featured a nice mix of big name and lesser known filmmakers. But it went away quickly. You may like them, but there doesn’t seem to be any market for them.