The short films you HAVE to see

La Jetee

Matthew Smith explores the world of an often ignore movie genre, the short film, and discovers a few gems everyone should see…

Often overlooked by audiences, difficult to find and reduced to a foot note at the Academy awards, short films have the capacity to cram more ingenuity and creativity into forty minutes or less than most features manage in 120. Here are three that any self respecting film fan should search out and see for themselves…

A Wonderful Love – Fabrice Du Welz – 1999 – 20 Minutes

From the director of “The Ordeal“, a film that included an inbred barn dance, bestiality, forced cross dressing and male rape comes a movie about love and relationships. Well, kind of. A socially inept woman played brilliantly by Edith La Merdy hires a male stripper for a non existent birthday party before killing him and keeping the corpse in her bed. She then proceeds to advertise for an adventurous couple to join them in a foursome. Fabrice Du Welz’s brand of horror, whilst shocking, grubby and unflinching, never slips into Hostel and the Hills Have Eyes style exploitation. A dark sense of humour underpins the film keeping the gory weirdness palatable and there is a real sense that, whilst the content might be horrific, the director remains interested in the personal struggles of his disturbed and lonely protagonist. Shot with typical care and attention by long time Du Welz collaborator Benoit Debie, who also acted as director of photography on the equally challenging Irreversible and most recently The Runaways. A Wonderful Love has been described as an episode of your favourite soap, directed by Mike Leigh and written by Eli Roth. Not one for the faint hearted but well worth a watch for all horror fans. Can be found as a bonus feature on The DVD release of The Ordeal.

La Jetee – Chris Marker – 1962 – 28 Minutes

Set in an apocalyptic Paris, in the aftermath of World War Three, a prisoner of war (Davos Hanich) is forced by scientists to travel through time to the future and the past in the hope of rescuing the present. A film that defies explanation. Chris Markers La Jetee or The Pier influenced a generation of science fiction cinema and has acted as the aesthetic and thematic foundation for pretty much every time travel movie since. Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys is particularly indebted, borrowing its central premise directly from Markers film. Apart from one moment of motion the film uses only black and white still images, non-diegetic sound and a singular narrative voice over. Whilst La Jetee is formerly experimental it manages to keep a simple story of lost love at its heart, with the prisoner using his journeys through time as an opportunity to meet a woman he doesn’t know but recognises from his memories. However the film is most successful when it asks questions about the medium of film itself, discussing filmic and narrative time, memory, temporality and motion. Even questioning how we as an audience process and understand the images we see. La Jetee shows that while a film may be short in length it does not have to be slight or low on ideas. La Jetee was released on a double disc in 2011 combined with another Marker masterpiece, Sans Soleil.

Rays Male Heterosexual Dance Hall – Brian Gordon – 1987 – 18 Minutes

Bryan Gordon’s film won the Oscar for Best Short Feature in 1987 and follows the story of Sam Logan, an unemployed business man, waiting to be interviewed for a new job. He bumps into a former colleague who explains the secret to business success – spending your lunch hours at Rays Male Heterosexual Dance Hall. Tangoing, both in the literal and metaphorical sense, with your peers whilst talking in a non committal manner about “Business”, all the while hoping to be asked to strut your stuff in the limelight with one of the clubs big players. A meditation of the manoeuvrings of the corporate world in the 1980’s, the film satirises the lifestyles of the ostensible successful in a nation obsessed with Gordon Gecko style business moguls. Full of brilliant lines that highlight the ridiculous nature of the board room and its meaningless double talk, “I have a new Job, It’s the same money but a more desirable geography”, all delivered whilst middle aged men in suits dance hand in hand. Gordon has gone on to direct episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office but thanks to the wonders of the internet it’s possible to view his only film project in full on YouTube. It also features a cameo from Fred Willard if you needed further convincing to go and watch it immediately. .