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Short Cinema Journal 1:3 - Authority |
List Price: $14.98
Your Price: $13.48 |
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Reviews |
Features:
- Color
- Black & White
- Widescreen
- Dolby
Description:
Short 3: Authority, the Warner Bros.-revised reissue of PolyGram's digital magazine, is a tenuously linked but rich collection of classic and contemporary short films. Apart from Performance McKean, a slight little piece with Michael McKean doing a subdued Denis Leary-esque riff, nothing really anchors the theme of "authority," but Alain Resnais's powerful and moving 1955 documentary Night and Fog gives the collection both class and heft. It was the first film to confront the issues of the Holocaust, and the horrifying black-and-white archival footage has lost none of its terrifying power. Historian David Shepard provides illuminating background to the production and insight to Resnais's approach in a commentary track that runs for half of the program's 30 minutes. Jane Campion's A Girl's Own Story, an offbeat and unusually haunting remembrance of growing up in the '60s, is about a schoolgirl who lives for the Beatles and escapes into fantasy as her parents' marriage breaks up before her eyes. Other highlights include the frenetic animated piece Dada, a satire of the frustrations of a new father whose son doesn't meet social expectations, Sasha Wolf's Joe, the quietly observed story of a man holding on to his precarious sense of identity in a mental hospital, and the experimental comic piece The Whites, which uses stop-motion techniques to create a jittery parody of the everyday social rituals of a middle-class family. Each of these includes optional commentary by the filmmakers. The disc is rounded out by Flying Over Mother, a Russian-language but New Zealand-made piece about a cosmonaut reminiscing about his childhood, and the Brazilian Os Camaradas, a Kafka-esque satire about food, identity, and bureaucracy. --Sean Axmaker
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