The Important Shorts

While my list of Important Short Films isn’t as certain as my lists in other categories, this will still give you an excellent place to start. For now, it is a list of six.

Le Voyage dans la lune “A Trip to the Moon” (1902)

Directed/Produced/Written by: Georges Méliès

For the genres and movements I write about, my picks for the important films have only included sound pictures. But the split between silent and sound is hardly existent for Shorts. Even now, a substantial percentage of Short Films are essentially silent, which lets me start a bit earlier in time for my list.

A Trip to the Moon is a fourteen minute short that begins the age of cinema. Sure, motion pictures were made before it. Louis and Auguste Lumiere made a series of short-shorts and displayed them to an audience in 1895 (thought to be the first public screening), but these weren’t stories—closer to staged vacation footage. There followed a great number of plotless, themeless, “films.” A year before The Great Train Robbery (which is often given credit as the first scripted film), A Trip to the Moon presented a reasonably coherent story, characters, and some amazing special effects. The last is no surprise as writer/producer/director Méliès was a magician. A Trip to the Moon also added to cinema the often repeated shot of the canon-fired rocket striking the moon in the eye. This is a film for anyone who wants to see how a new art form was created.

Un Chien Andalou “An Andalusian Dog” (1929)

Directed/Produced: Luis Buñuel Written by: Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí

More of a curiosity now, Un Chien Andalou marks the unsuccessful merging of surrealism with horror. Dalí’s painting may give the viewer a new way to look at reality, but Un Chien Andalou should not be thought to influence either perception or the intellect. Buñuel has repeatedly stated that the film has no meaning. No theme. No plot. No character development. What it does have is a group of unrelated, shocking images, at least for 1929. The film starts with an eye being sliced open, and goes on to give us dead mules and a piano, ants, and a woman being run over in the street. None of this is interesting, but then it wasn’t supposed to be. Unfortunately, most of it doesn’t engage the viewer in any way. The straight razor across the eye is still a powerful image, but it begins the film, leaving the rest mundane by comparison. Still, it can be called the beginning of shock cinema, and the ancestor of the films of David Lynch and ’70s Italian horror like Suspiria. (Suggested by: Scott Autrey)

The Music Box (1932)

Directed by: James Parrott Produced by Hal Roach Written by: H.M. Walker

From the first cranks of a camera, the most successful, non-animated Shorts have been slapstick comedies. Little changed with the advent of sound. These films relied (and still do) on sight-gags, contortion, and imagined pain. The question is which to choose for this list as I could have legitimately filled up 7 or 8 of the 10 slots with short, zany films. The development is easy to trace, from Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and The Keystone Kops through Laurel & Hardy to The Three Stooges, Abbott & Costello and beyond.

Keaton’s 1924 silent, Sherlock Jr. would be a good choice as would Chaplin’s 1917 Easy Street (with the famous fight between The Little Tramp and the Lout and the helpful streetlight). But I think THE film, if I am choosing just one, should be at the pinnacle instead of at the beginning, and that means Laurel and Hardy’s Academy Award winning The Music Box. There was nothing new here. In fact, it was based on the silent Laurel & Hardy film Hat’s Off. But it captures the form. Here is all of slapstick comedy in one picture. The story is simple: our two heroes must deliver a piano, first getting it up a particularly daunting staircase, and then getting it into the house. Do I need to mention that the piano comes down those stairs, more than once?

La Jetée “The Jetty” (1962)

Directed/Produced/Written by: Chris Marker

The 60s were a time of revolution and film was part of that. Chris Marker, a documentary filmmaker, decided to push the boundaries of film, backwards, and make a non-moving, moving picture. For 28 minutes, the viewer watches still images accompanied by a monotone narration. It was certainly different, and remembered. The story is standard time travel fare for those who read, but is fairly original for film. In a post-apocalyptic world, scientists determine time travel is the only hope for survival, but after a number of failures, decide to send to the past a man with an obsession on the events at an airport in his childhood. The man finds romance in the past, and possible salvation in the future, but one way or another, is always drawn back to that airport. Did the man travel in time or is it all in his mind? Terry Gilliam expanded the drama and romance (though actually shrunk the plot) for his feature Twelve Monkeys.

La Jetée marked a time period and gave us something different. But my God is it dull. Deathly dull. It limps along, telling a story that would have fit into 10 minutes. Creating an emotional attachment to the characters might have required those extra 18 minutes, but there is none of that in La Jetée. Additionally, the photographs are uninspired. They are neither beautiful nor evocative, but look more like what your little brother might have taken with a one-use camera. But the biggest problem is that the revolutionary concept becomes a gimmick long before the film is over. I couldn’t lose myself in the story as I was too busy noticing that I was looking at a bunch of photos. The technique calls attention to itself, which again, might have been OK in 10 minutes, but is irritating in 28. Was Marker trying to present the nature of memory with these still images? Maybe, but I was distracted halfway through that thought by the fact I was looking at a slide-show movie. The thing about experiments is that most fail. (Suggested by: David Schmidt)

Le Balloon Rouge “The Red Balloon” (1962)

Directed/Produced/Written by: Albert Lamorisse

A French film that everyone seems to have seen when it came out, but has disappeared in the last 30 years. I found it unpleasant to watch, both because it is so depressing and because it is overly sweet. However, I can’t argue with Mr. Marschalk about the importance of the film as it influenced a generation of children. Like many who saw it when young, it has burned itself into my brain, I’m just not happy about that fact. Le Balloon Rouge is a 34 minute surrealistic voyage with a lonely child and his friend, a balloon. Adult viewers will see metaphors galore. The balloon can be taken as the dreams of youth, or as a Christ figure (yes, the balloon suffers) and balloons in general are angels. The senseless cruelty of the other children (representing mankind) has stuck with me all these years, which may have been what Albert Lamorisse had in mind. (Suggested by: Jamie Marschalk)

Troops (1998)

Directed by: Kevin Rubio Written by: Steven Melching, David Hargrove, David McDermott, & Kevin Rubio Produced by: Shant Jordan, Patrick Pérez, Kevin Rubio

Spoofs have been around since the earliest days of film. Independent and studio made, short and feature length, it’s an old form that’s been presented in every way possible. But the 1990s did add a new twist, the internet. Suddenly, small scale fan-films could be distributed to the entire world. With a cheap way to show off one’s work, the number of parodies and fan-films (pretending to be parodies for legal reasons) took off with an energy that would exhaust the most power-mad accountant. Troops is the perfect example of these homemade movies. It is a takeoff of both Star Wars and the television show Cops. Not relying on the concept alone for humor, Troops has a clever script delivered with more believability than was managed by the “real” Star Wars. Its production values are surprisingly high, aided by the stormtroopers supplying their own Lucas Film quality costumes.