Cashback (2004)

Sean Ellis narrates a sedate and surreal story of broken love and reborn.
The protagonist is a reflective man, who works in a supermaket and struggles against the tyranny of time.
Ben Willis is an art student who works the night shift several times a week at the Whitechapel Sainsbury's. Heart broken and tortured by insomnia Ben explains his view and experience of female beauty.



The movie is about love, art and supermarket co-workers and shows an interesting view of time and time stopping. The most obvious artistic quality in the movie might be that of drawing, capturing beauty, but the red thread in the story is the path between one lost relation and the passionate flames of new love and the feelings it conquers.
Cashback was nominated for the 2006 Academy Award for Live Action Short Film. It was expanded into a full-length feature of the same name which was released by Gaumont in late 2006. It had its North American premiere on September 10, 2006, at the Toronto International Film Festival and has been screened at a number of other international festivals.
You can buy Cashback.

Éramos pocos (2005)

After his wife leaves him, Joaquín brings his mother-in-law back home to look after him and his son.



Borja Cobeaga makes a simple, but neat short. There's a strange humour in Eramos poco you'll surely enjoy!

J'attendrai le suivant... (2002)

Philippe Orreindy directed I'll Wait for the Next One, a short which sets itself up as a cute little comedy skit, and it delivers on that premise but also surprises you with an incredibly moving finale.



Lasting only four minutes, the film takes place almost entirely on a metro train.
On a subway train, a man announces that he's looking for someone who might be interested in him; the usual dating methods have not worked, though there's nothing wrong with him. He explains that any interested woman can just get off at the next stop. One woman looks interested...

Kleingeld (1999)

Herr Hoffman parks his late-model car in a lot across from his corner office on the top floor. Each day, he puts a coin in the cup of a beggar who stands in front of the building. One day, Hoffman looks out his window and notices the beggar washing his car. That evening, when he gives the beggar a coin, Hoffmann tells him not the wash it. But the next day, it happens again...

Kleingeld was inspired by The Philanthropist, a play which was performed in Berlin by a student theater group. In the play a character tells a story about something that happened to him, but in the film, it's a different character, it's a different setting.
Marc-Andreas Bochert makes a short which is exceptionally well thought through, visually.
The cinematic space that articulates this story is made up of a series of repetitions, this space is shown with many variations.
Marc-Andreas Bochert also worked very carefully with the music. These are the dynamics from which Kleingeld can profit.

One Weekend, A Month (Sundance 2005)

Meg's Monday morning routine is turned upside down when the phone rings. The caller delivers some news that turns her life, and lives of her children, upside down.
This is a tale of sacrifice, loss of faith, and redemption set in the land of diminishing returns



Eric Escobar choose to film the scene in basically the same area, the kitchen. The raw emotions portrayed by Renee O'Connor sensed her character's desperation but felt it as well.

This Is for Betsy Hall (Sundance 2000)

A daughter's personal story recounting her mother's lifelong battle with Bulimia.

An impressionistic montage of stills, projected video, underwater footage and an intimate phone conversation, this deeply personal film was crafted as a gift for the Hope Hall's mother.

Titler (Sundance 2000)

Filmed with effective black-and-white visuals and disintegrating locations of abandoned Met State hospital which evoke a bombed-out post-war Berlin, Gregory Roman energizes the screen with a performance of brilliant comedic nuances and mannerisms that evoke the lonesome glamour of Marlene Dietrich.
It's an entertaining, hilarious and shocking film.



This short performs eight numbers as Titler, a cross-dressing man with a woman's figure and the hair and mustache of the Fuhrer's. An absurd superimposition of two brands of charisma featuring Adolf Hitler!
What wonderful portrait of the Führer in drag belting out sexually reassigned show tunes!
Greg Roman has also created Titler web site that further evolves the character and tone established in the film.

Visas and virtue (Academy Award 1998)

Inspired by the true story of a Holocaust rescuer, Visas and Virtue is a dramatic rencostruction that explores the moral and professional dilemmas that Japanese Consul General Chiune Sempo Sugihara faced in making a life or death decision: defy his own government's direct orders and risk his career by issuing lifesaving transit visas or obey orders and turn his back on humanity.



Although he is not as well known as Schindler, his heroic efforts resulted in one of the largest rescues of Jews during the Holocaust.
Chris Tashima shows us that it's possible narrate a true story without making a documentary.

Trevor (Oscar 1994)

This short is a tender and humorous tale of a gay teenager’s struggle with his sexual orientation and his attempted suicide.



Set as a sequence of diary entries, the film tells the story of bright, funny, and exuberant thirteen year old Trevor, who learns to deal with the fact that he is gay. He falls for another young boy, his friend, and his true feelings are revealed. He attempts suicide, but in the end his strong will and determination help him get through this tough time.



Peggy Rajski and Randy Stone created The Trevor Project, too.
You can buy Trevor.

Intolerance (1916)

This is one of the milestones and landmarks in cinematic history.
The film consists of four distinct but parallel stories that demonstrate mankind's intolerance during four different ages in world history. It was made in response to critics who protested against Griffith's previous film, The Birth of a Nation, for its overt racist content, characterizing racism as people's "intolerance" of other people's views.
Films were poised between an emphasis upon visual pleasure, 'the cinema of attractions', and story-telling, 'the cinema of narrative integration' but conventions for constructing internally coherent narratives had not yet been established. In the transitional years, between 1907-8 and 1917, the formal elements of film-making all became subsidiary to the narrative, as lighting, composition, editing were all increasingly designed to help the audience follow a story. Integral to these stories are psychologically credible characters, created through performance style, editing, and dialogue intertitles, whose motivations and actions seem realistic and help to link together the film's disparate shots and scenes.



The increased use of editing and the decreased distance between camera and actors most obviously distinguish the films of the transitional period from their predecessors.
Intollerance displays a more consistent construction of internally coherent narratives and credible individualized characters through editing, acting, and intertitles than do any of the other genres.
However, the basic elements of the earlier films remained unchanged- credible individual characters still served to link together the disparate scenes and shots, the difference being that character motivation and plausibility became yet more important as the films grew longer and the number of important characters increased.
You can buy Intolerance.

Le Voyage Dans la Lune (1902)

This early silent film is repeatedly declared to be the first science fiction film and is revered as the greatest achievement of stage magician and film pioneer Georges Méliès. Lubin Manufacturing Company released another take on A Trip to the Moon in 1914, written e directed by Vincent Whitman, a work of silent animation which alas did not survive.
With a mix of stage tricks, camera tricks and several types of animation, Méliès crafts a surreal fantastic vision of the Moon with great artistic sensibility and the care of a painter. It's almost as though a painting comes to life.
Georges Méliès aimed in the film to "invert the hierarchal values of modern French society and hold them up to ridicule in a riot of the carnivalesque." (Alison McMahan).





"A Trip to the Moon" is loosely based on the books "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne and "The First Men in the Moon" by H. G. Wells, as if this whimsical fantasy really focuses on an astronomer' s dream. A group of men travel to the moon by being shot in a capsule from a giant cannon. They are captured by moon-men, escape and return to the earth.
The plot is very well-written and still captures the imagination with its wonderfully crafted visuals and its charming comedy, although it still displays a primitive understanding of narrative film technique. The editing is purely functional: the concept of showing an action twice in different ways was experimented again by Porter in his film, Life of an American Fireman, released roughly a year after A Trip to the Moon.
He used overlapping action, as a result of his desire to preserve the pro-filmic space and to emphasize important action by essentially showing it twice.
You can buy the dvds Georges Melies: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) and Melies the Magician and the book Georges Melies.

The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903)

This film is significant as a precursor to Porter's groundbreaking classic The Great Train Robbery, which combined state of the art editing techniques to tell a 12 minute narrative story and is notable for its early use of matched shot editing, with a close-up of a female customer's ankle and a longer establishing shot used in combination with each other. This close-up insert is an example not only of the visual pleasure afforded by the 'cinema of attractions' but of the early cinema's voyeuristic treatment of the female body. Despite the fact that their primary purpose is not to emphasize narrative developments, these shots' attribution to a character in the film distinguishes them from the totally unmotivated close-up we viewed in The Great Train Robbery.



The pre- 1907 'cinema of attractions' were primarily designed to enhance visual pleasure rather than to tell a coherent, linear narrative. But many of these films did tell simple stories and audiences undoubtedly derived narrative, as well as visual, pleasure: a shoeshop assistant flirts with his female customer.
You can buy Treasures from American Film Archives.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

The Great Train Robbery, often lauded as one of the first movies to include a linear narrative within its running time, came out of the Edison company over a hundred years ago, following their experiments in the previous decades with shorter topical pieces such as cockfighting, dancers and other limited scenarios.
This short is the most popular and commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era and established the notion that film could be a commercially-viable medium.
In the film's fourteen scenes, a narrative story with multiple plot lines tells the story of a train holdup with six-shooters. The steam locomotive always provides a point of reference from different filming perspectives.
The precursor to the western film genre is based on an 1896 story by Scott Marble. The plot was inspired by a true event that occurred on August 29, 1900, when four members of George Leroy Parker's (Butch Cassidy) 'Hole in the Wall' gang halted the No. 3 train on the Union Pacific Railroad tracks toward Table Rock, Wyoming. The bandits forced the conductor to uncouple the passenger cars from the rest of the train and then blew up the safe in the mail car to escape with about $5,000 in cash.

The clerk at the train station is assaulted and left tied by four men, who then rob the train, threaten the operator, take all the money and shoot a passenger while trying to escape. A little girl discovers the clerk tied and gives notice to the sheriff, who at once goes along with his men hunting the bandits.
The action of each scene is told with only one shot. Almost every shot is a static, long shot, confining the action to the perspective of the camera at eye level. Edwin S. Porter used a number of innovative techniques, many of them for the first time, including parallel editing, minor camera movement, location shooting and less stage-bound camera placement. Jump-cuts or cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique, showing two separate lines of action or events happening continuously at identical times but in different places. Tension and excitement is achieved by moving the players, rather than moving the camera angles.
Even shots that approximate the point of view of a character within the fiction and which are now associated with the externalization of thoughts and emotions, are there more to provide visual pleasure than narrative information.
You can read the script.
You can buy Great Train Robbery - 100th Anniversay.

The Bangville Police (1913)

The Keystone Cops was a series of silent film comedies very slapstick-like, relying on speed and numbers to achieve their comedy, rather than sophisticated wit.
They feature a totally incompetent group of policemen produced by Mack Sennett for his Keystone Film Company between 1912 and 1917. Mack Sennett continued to use the Cops intermittently through the 1920s. By the time sound movies arrived, the Keystone Cops were an anachronism; symbolic of dated, lowbrow humor.
The idea came from Hank Mann, who also played police chief Tehiezel in the first film before being replaced by Ford Sterling.


Their first film was Hoffmeyer's Legacy (1912) but their popularity stemmed from the 1913 short The Bangville Police starring Mabel Normand.
This short, directed by Henry Lehrman, is notable for being regarded as the seminal Keystone Cops short.
At a farm near Bangville, the farmer's young daughter sees a group of local individuals in their barn. Fearful, she quickly rushes to the house and calls the police. The keystone crew in a haphazard rush across the countryside to get there in time.
This short is a visual comedy, with notable elements of slapstick.

You can buy Bangville Police (1913).

The Music Box (1932)

The Music Box was directed by James Parrott, produced by Hal Roach and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and it's one of the longer shorts for its time. 

The film is a partial remake of their 1927 silent short Hats Off, which was filmed at the same location and is today considered a lost film. Hats Off was itself remade in the same location in a film called It's Your Move starring Edgar Kennedy in 1945. But the inspiration to build a comedy around those steps apparently came to producer Hal Roach even before Hats Off. 

Although The Music Box won the first Academy Award for Live Action Short Film (Comedy) in 1932. This little classic is generally regarded as the Stan&Ollie's best film. 

The Laurel & Hardy Moving Co. have a challenging job: hauling a player piano up a monumental flight of stairs to Prof. von Schwarzenhoffen's house. Their task is complicated not only by a sassy nursemaid and the impatient Prof. von Schwarzenhoffen himself, but also by the force of gravity, which repeatedly pulls the piano back down to the bottom of the stairs. 

What could have been one joke repeated over and over to the point of monotony, became, instead, a comic fugue with innovative variations. Stan and Ollie labor with a mighty effort but obtain minimal results: the beauty lies in watching the team work out one hilarious routine after another. 

This film is slapstick of a very high level, born of the utmost frustration. 

You can buy Laurel & Hardy (Sons of the Desert/The Music Box/Another Fine Mess/Busy Bodies/County Hospital).

Alice in Wonderland (1903)

Alice in Wonderland is a 1903 silent film directed by Cecil Hepworth and starring May Clark in this more twisted version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Parts of the movie are lost; there is only one known copy of this film remaining so the British Film Institute are unable to restore the missing parts.
Alice in Wonderland was made just five years after Dodgson's death. Barely nine minutes long, this movie necessarily shows only a few fragments of the novel. Hepworth was insistent that the images stay faithful to the drawings of Sir John Tenniel, the original illustrator of Lewis Carroll's story, so it's strange that the central character looks nothing at all like Tenniel's Alice.

Hepworth has been a vitally important figure in Britain's early cinema. Alice in Wonderland was the longest film yet produced in Britain, originally running about 12 minutes.
The film was made on the small wooden stage in the garden of the villa housing Hepworth's company, with exteriors shot in the lavish gardens of Mount Felix. There were no professional actors at the studio, so all of the staff pitched in and played parts.
Some of the special effects are achieved through simple jump cuts, much less flamboyant than what Georges Melies was doing in France at this time. Like in Melies' film, in this film, too, there are linking shots through dissolves. The film required an unusual amount of planning for its day. Alice in Wonderland was an extremely ambitious undertaking for its time and it achieves nearly all of what it set out to accomplish.

Cold Mountain (2003)

Directed by Anthony Minghella, this Civil War saga addresses romance, friendship and the ravages of war. Based on the Charles Frazier novel, this is a tale of hope and redemption. Cold Mountain captures the horrors of war for both those fighting it and for those left behind.
It tells the story of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman (Jude Law) who struggles on a perilous journey to get back home to Cold Mountain, N.C. as well as to Ada (Nicole Kidman), the woman he left behind before going off to fight in the Civil War. We watch as the characters begin to unravel their internal tortures and their need to subdue their isolation, to face their regrets and hope for the future. We can also observe the stages of emotional changes in the characters.
The symbolisms, throughout the film, are plentiful and brilliantly ascribed, allowing the audience to connect the dots to the destiny of the couple. Even crows, clearly suggesting doom and destruction, never fail to demonstrate the dark instincts that trouble a man's soul.

On the way home, Imman meets a long line of interesting and colorful characters, while back at home, Ada is learning the ropes of managing her deceased father's farm with Ruby (Renee Zellweger), a scrappy drifter who assists and teaches Ada along the way.
Cold Mountain is beautifully crafted, assembled and absolutely mesmerizing in all aspects of filmmaking techniques and style and the mountains of the movie title are so amazingly and magnificently captured at different camera angles, from scene to scene.
The film was considered a contender for the Best Picture Academy Award for the year 2003, but failed to garner a nomination, although it did earn the nomination for Best Motion Picture Drama at the Golden Globes. Despite not being nominated for the Best Picture award, the film did manage to pick up seven nominations, and one win for Zellweger as Best Supporting Actress.
If you watch this movie, you'll watch cinema in its purest form!
You can buy Cold Mountain (Two-Disc Collector's Edition).

Russian Ark (Русский ковчег, 2002)

Russian Ark opens with a black screen and the voice of an unnamed man explaining that he's just regaining consciousness after some mysterious accident. Unseen by the audience and voiced by the director, he wanders through the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

In each room, he encounters various real and fictional people from various time periods in the city's three-hundred-year history. He is accompanied by a companion, "the European", who represents the nineteenth-century traveller the Marquis de Custine and who is visible to the audience. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken and re-erected; at times the narrator-director and the companion interact freely with the other performers and at other times, they go completely unnoticed.

The film contains Aleksander Sokurov's visual meditations on the history of the Russian people and the lives of their descendants today, an amazing voyage through war, revolution and social upheaval, which has left in its wake all the landmarks of a great culture. Like the biblical Ark, the Hermitage (Winter Palace) has steered a difficult course through the adverse currents of time and tide. A treasure-house of life and art, it is also a testament to the buoyancy of the human spirit.
The Hermitage is to be seen in a new and revealing light in a forthcoming film. In the popular imagination the Hermitage is a living entity, a fabric that breathes Russian history and culture. Generations of the Romanov family actually lived, loved and, in some cases, died in a place they called 'home' for all its rare splendour.
The film was recorded in uncompressed high definition video using a Sony HDW-F900. The information was not recorded and compressed to tape as usual, but uncompressed onto a hard disk which could hold 100 minutes. Four attempts were made to complete the shot; the first three had to be interrupted due to technical faults, but the fourth attempt was completed successfully.
Russian Art is a purely cinematic movie which allows us to take a trip throughout the museum and throughout the history of Russia's last three hundred years.
You can buy Russian Ark: The Masterworks Edition.

L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895)

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat shows a steam train arriving at a station and moving towards the camera.
It has passed into film folklore for the incident that occurred at its world premiere, when the audience, unfamiliar with the cinema thought the train was really coming right at them and panicked!

This short film is generally considered to be the "first motion picture" in modern history because the illusion of reality was achieved without much difficulty and the dramatic resources of depth of field are exploited. The train thrusts itself towards the camera creating a dynamic close-up.
The development of mass spectatorship was the main factor in the growing popularity of film. This not only allowed for the development of a profitable business but also moved the centre of attention from the artistic value of the film as conceived by the director to the need to fulfil the spectator's expectations.
You can buy The Lumiere Brothers' First Films.

Un Homme de tetes (1898)

The earliest of Melies's early films were only one to three minutes long each & made every effort to make their entire point in the shortest amount of time possible.
Widely regarded as a miniature masterpiece of the silent era, Un homme de têtes is a short comic film which bubbles with wit and energy; this short demonstrats already Georges Méliès’ extraordinary talent as both a performer and filmmaker.
The skill of Méliès’ performance and technical wizardry are pure cinematic magic.

Less than two minutes long, in Un Homme de tetes Georges Melies appears before the audience, with his head in its proper place. He then removes his head and throwing it in the air, it appears on the table opposite another head and both detached heads sing in unison. The conjurer then removes it a third time. You then see all three of his heads, which are exact duplicates, upon the table at one time, while the conjurer again stands before the audience with his head perfectly intact, singing in unison with the three heads upon the table. He closes the picture by bowing himself from the stage.
You can buy the dvds Georges Melies: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) and Melies the Magician and the book Georges Melies.