Lilith. - My Top 10 Greatest Short Films.

My Top 10 Greatest Short Films.

Let listmania continue on! It occurred to me that in my posts regarding my Top 30 Greatest Films (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) I had promised to put together a list of my top short films. Since there are so many, I’ve truncated it down to ten films.

I had written some time ago on the importance of short films, and why we need to continue making them. It is without a doubt that the short film is one of the ideal forums for experimentation. I derive tremendous inspiration from shorts - they expand the narrative by working with less, they are often visually stunning because energies and resources are committed to a shorter time span. They can be the gateway to further career success - the Academy Awards for Best Short Film is a reality for many.

I find it interesting though that so many of my short film choices are animated films. I find that animation thrives in the short film format. Again this may be due to expense - it’s better to produce high-quality animation for ten minutes than stretch that out to 90 minutes at a mediocre quality level. But in the end it boils down to the story, which has to always capture the imagination. These are the films which have enthralled me the most, and to which I return over and over again.

Most of the films are presented in their entirety on this page. Take your time to view them. Watching them all will probably take an hour or so, so think of it as a free feature film.

10) La Jetée, Chris Marker, France, 1962.

As you might tell from my previous feature films I’ve loved, I really shine to films that are able to execute high concepts through low budgets, applying the tools of screenwriting, performance and in-camera effects. Perhaps the king of this methodology is Chris Marker’s La Jetée (The Jetty), which famously was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s wonderful 12 Monkeys. Marker tackles time-travel and future dystopia through the use of photo-roman, which is a fancy way of saying he used still photographs set over a narration. I was so inspired by this method that I used it in my thesis film, Abstract Origins, where I used still photographs of a lonely man wandering the barren streets of New York City. It is a technique that is startlingly effective, and I’m shocked why more filmmakers don’t use it more often.

The entire film can be watched here.

9) Wasp, Andrea Arnold, UK, 2003.

Andrea Arnold has inherited the throne of British socio-realism from Ken Loach, and has emerged as one of the UK’s most bold and daring filmmakers. Her films - Red Road, Fish Tank, and the upcoming Wuthering Heights - have already been given the title of a “canon,” and her subjects all universally revolve around young women trying to find meaning and liberation (both spiritual, sexual and financial) from the dregs.

All of these roots can be found in her Academy Award-winning short, Wasp. Brutal and unflinching, this is Arnold at her most raw and angry, and the double-edged title mirrors the scathing sociological criticism and environmental horror of the British tenement. Ferociously performed and effortlessly photographed, the film is about as subtle as a baseball bat to the neck.

The entire film can be watched here.

8) Mothlight, Stan Brakhage, USA, 1963.

I’ve written about Mothight before, and it was the first film I dissected when I was in undergrad, where I was fortunate enough to learn and be mentored under the late Stan Brakhage, widely considered one of the greatest avant-garde filmmakers of all time. Brakhage was an amazing teacher but he was also a stubborn, curmudgeonly old shit, and perhaps it his his defiance and bitterness with the norm that led him to create such astoundingly original and groundbreaking works of art. Mothlight was the first time I had ever heard of the concept of making a film without a camera - Brakhage assembled the remains of actual moths and sandwiched them inbetween two pieces of perforated tape, which was then run through a projector. The film is a marvel not only in its engineering, but in also its commentary on cinema and art - the living creature sacrificed in its attraction to light, literal death/ suffering for art. It is a remarkable milestone in our understanding of film as a medium, and is relentlessly beautiful.

7) Rubber Johnny, Chris Cunningham, UK, 2005.

A long-form music video (music videos are shorts, in my books) set to a delirious Aphex Twin track, Chris Cunningham’s short is a retina-searing explosion of body horror. Assaulting us with mutilated flesh and sexual vulgarity, the film is repulsively gorgeous, pushing us away with fetid grossness, and yet drawing us in with fascinating details of the human body. The film is the dangling carrot to Cunningham’s career - after a stunning collection of music videos and commercials, capped by Rubber Johnny, the world awaits his feature debut, which has been in the on-and-off works for more than a decade. I suspect when it does happen, it will be well worth the wait.

6) Paris Je t’aime, 14 Arrondissement, Alexander Payne, USA, 2006.

In the wildly uneven collection of shorts Paris, Je T’Aime, Alexander Payne’s contribution is the one that stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, a film that is deserving of its own feature greater than being in the one it is a part of. Payne has long been the king of the miserable and rudderless, but in this portrait of Carol, a mail-carrier holidaying in Paris, Payne perhaps gives us his most enigmatic character since Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick in his brilliant Election.

Carol, who speaks in a nauseating American-inflected French, narrates her emotional experience of being in Paris, presumably to a French class or club. Her droll enthusiasm captures perfectly what it means to be an American abroad - delightfully embarrassing and yet endearingly complete and authentic. Payne shows the love affair between a mind discovering itself and the environment that catalyzed such a profound event. The film is dichotomous in multiple layers - it is shot simplistically and yet its compositions are highly calculated, its delivery is banal and yet its content is esoteric and complex, and the character of Carol is on the surface the epitome of mediocrity, and yet her grasp of the French language and her own psychological awakening suggests a woman of tremendous depth, compassion and curiosity. An absolute gem, and one of my favorite characters in all of cinema.

5) Ryan, Chris Landreth, Canada, 2004.

Canada is the gold-mine for the animated short. The Canadian Film Board’s progressive program of developing home-grown animators of limitless imagination and artistry is legendary. From classics like The Cat Came Back to modern marvels like Madame Tutli-Putli, there is simply no shortage of great animated shorts from Canada, two of which made this list. The first is Chris Landreth’s Ryan, an animated documetary that combines live interview with CGI and archived cell animation. Ryan is the real-life story of Ryan Larkin, a down-on-his luck animator who was nominated for an Oscar in 1969 for his CFB film En Marchant. Larkin, interviewed by Landreth, has been beset with chemical addictions that have rotted and fractured his brilliant mind, a condition that is literally etched into the faces and bodies of the CGI characters. The film is a fascinating exposition on addiction, celebrity, and the desires of the artist to be both anonymous and recognized. Heartbreaking and perfectly executed, Ryan ironically won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short.

4) When the Day Breaks, Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, Canada, 1999.

The other animated Canadian short to make my list, When the Day Breaks was nominated for an Oscar in 1999. It is a true work of fine art, as each frame of the film was meticulously hand-painted. Pause on any frame and you will see a painting worth hanging in any fine art gallery. The film takes on an Orwellian-tone with its allusion to Animal Farm, but rather than a political omniscience, the film emphasizes the connections that all creatures share, bound by events and phenomena both mundane and galactic. A gorgeous meditation on mortality and happiness.

3) An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Robert Enrico, USA, 1962.

“Lynchian” before David Lynch even got into film, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is perhaps the most chilling and macabre short film I’ve ever seen. Plastered faces with permagrin smiles, tortured and manipulated audio, and a dream logic that served to plant the seeds for future classics like Carnival of Souls, The Others and even The Sixth Sense.

Based on a short story by Ambrose Pierce, the film begins on the lynching of a civilian spy by the Confederate Army off a bridge suspended over a river. The man is pushed off the bridge, the noose firmly around his neck. What happens thereafter is a journey through the surreal, particularly a chilly and horrifyingly odd reunion between the man and his regal wife. The scene still haunts me to this date, and I don’t think anything creepier has ever been captured on film. The film won an Oscar in 1962, and was later featured on on both The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

2) everything will be ok, Don Hertzfeldt, USA, 2006.

Don Hertzfeldt is the Walt Disney of his generation, except that he’s not a Nazi-sympathizing asshole. He’s in fact one of the notoriously most soft-spoken and kindest filmmakers working today, and his short film everything will be ok embodies his sensitivity, humor and candor perfectly. While one might think that animating a bunch of stick figures would be a piece of cake, closer examination of Hertzfeldt’s technique reveals an insane meticulousness. There are minuscule movements in the characters that take them from being simple caricatures to almost life-like people, and it is in this link to humanity where Hertzfeldt’s genius resides. The story, like so many other films in this list is a meditation upon mortality, but Hertzfeldt’s wry humor - based primarily through observation of small insouciant details of humanity’s fuck-ups and perplexities - is what separates this work from the rest. There is an endearing sense of humility in this film and the rest of Hertzfelt’s work, something which has become exceedingly rare for any film made in the aughts. Of note too is the film’s gorgeous use of music, especially in the ending. A special, beautiful film.

1) The Street of Crocodiles, The Brothers Quay, USA, 1987.

I’ve written extensively on The Street of Crocodiles and it, along with La Haine, remains as the most influential film in my life, and not just in my career. In this film I discovered my taste and aesthetic, and it was one of those moments when several different ideas, schools of thought, and conflicting moral choices comes to a beautiful amalgamation and forms a cohesive whole. I was thirteen when I saw this film, and at the time I was processing Sartre and Camus (yes, I was a nerd), my love of Gothic and industrial music, the sexualization and contextualization of random objects and substances, and my leanings towards artists like Goya, Munch, Egon Schiele and Marcel Duchamp. There are elements of the Brothers Quay in everything that I do, and it is highly prevalent in Lilith. A classic that spawned a million imitators, and truly one-of-a-kind, never to be captured again.