Le Ballon rouge

1956, France, directed by Albert Lamorisse

My two-year-old son regularly asks us to switch on the TV in the evenings. Occasionally, we oblige and he sits still for all of three or four minutes in front of some children's programming and we switch the box off again. He's perfectly capable of devoting a significant amount of time to a single activity, but thus far TV is low on his priority list, and that's fine with me. Imagine my surprise, then, when he sat on my lap through the 35 minutes of Albert Lamorisse's beguiling film, entranced by balloons, dogs, buses, children, bakeries, staircases and all the rest. Perhaps without quite intending to do so, Lamorisse created one of those wonderful films that can be enjoyed equally by adults and children. On first viewing, the adventures of the little boy with the red balloon command the attention, but the film's documentary qualities, capturing so much of what has disappeared from Paris's streets, are ultimately just as captivating. Those adventures were surely among the inspirations for the Goscinny/Sempé Petit Nicolas tales, which began to appear a few years later.

La Boulangère de Monceau

1963, France, directed by Eric Rohmer

After Eric Rohmer's death earlier this week, I returned not quite to the beginning but to the first entry in his "Six Moral Tales" series, the sequence of films which first made his name. This initial entry is a short, just 22 minutes long, made at a time when Rohmer had difficulties raising funds for his projects as his first feature, Le signe du Lion, made in 1959, was a commercial failure. Although La Boulangère de Monceau is a relatively slight entry in the "Six Moral Tales" cycle, it displays many features of Rohmer's later cinema in nascent form, perhaps most notably his characters' taste for self-examination, with the narrator discussing, in voiceover form, his differing attractions to the eponymous baker and another eye-catching woman from his neighborhood. The narrator's commentary is notable for its careful self-justification, a cast of mind that Rohmer returned to time and again as his characters tried to navigate between conflicting desires and their own sense of right and wrong (a sense that is still developing in this student narrator).

Rohmer is careful to anchor his film in a very real Paris: the narration opens with a description of the exact locations of the film, and the camera frequently flashes to street signs so that we know exactly where we are on the map. We quickly gain the sense that the characters live in a very circumscribed portion of the city, such that the narrator can wander up and down the same section of street in search of the woman who is occupying his interest (the still above shows him pacing; Rohmer zooms in on him at one point, narrowing our field of vision just to the individual figure). The film also has considerable offscreen interest: the actors include Barbet Schroeder, an important figure in 1960s French cinema, not least as Rohmer's producer, and Michèle Girardon, recently returned from her stint on Howard Hawks's Hatari!

Possum

1997, New Zealand, directed by Brad McGann

Like many short films, Brad McGann's Possum bears little resemblance to his subsequent feature work, at least in terms of tone; there's almost no narrative, with instead a focus on intense atmospherics. Set in the New Zealand bush, at some indeterminate time in the past, McGann experiments with sepia-toned imagery and, especially, an intense and occasionally disturbing palette of sounds to evoke a backwoods nightmare, in which a disciplinarian father attempts to rule over his meagre kingdom, including a daughter who is closer to the animals that surround the hut than to her relatives. Although it's hard to grasp what McGann's ultimate purpose is - the narrative doesn't help much - the film insinuates itself into the mind, and the overall atmosphere of dread plays cleverly with audience expectations.

Keep It For Yourself

1991, US/France, directed by Claire Denis

A 40-minute "short", Keep It For Yourself was originally commissioned as an advertisement for the Nissan Figaro, a car that was scheduled for release in the US market but was ultimately never sold outside Japan. Denis was assigned to shoot her film in New York, with other films to be made in Paris and Tokyo, though I've no idea whether either was made, nor if Denis's film bears any resemblance to the original commission.

There's more than a hint of Jim Jarmusch in the film: shot in black and white, John Lurie is on the soundtrack, Jarmusch's brother Tom is involved behind the scenes, and the plot (very loose) recalls Stranger Than Paradise at times, as we follow a young Frenchwoman on her first visit to the US. We're in the New York of the early 1990s: rubbish-strewn, graffiti-scratched, and apparently crime-ridden, but Denis also portrays the city as a place of unexpected tenderness, humour, and care beneath the hard carapace. In a way, it's her Valentine to the city, and our first real sight of the place comes via a stunningly beautiful shot of a building-filled skyline, as the protagonist watches from a moving train.

(In case there's any doubt, the picture above is not from Keep It For Yourself - I couldn't find any stills - but rather of Claire Denis at work on, I think, L'Intrus; the photo appears all over the web, and I don't know to whom it is credited).

The Films of Len Lye

Free Radicals (1958)

As I've written previously, I was first drawn to the New Zealand-born experimental filmmaker Len Lye's work by Kristin Thompson's blog post earlier this year, with her subsequent update alerting me to a touring program that featured almost all of his films, from his first work, Tusalava (1929), to his final Particles in Space (1966).

Lye moved to London as a young man - he had planned to visit the Soviet Union, but stopped in England - and the first phase of his film work was completed there. Near the end of the Second World War, he moved to the US, and made five distinctly different films in that country, of which he became a naturalised citizen. Most of Lye's works are very brief, with the longest pieces around seven minutes in length; some are just a minute long. He worked in many other art forms, too, and was especially known for his kinetic sculptures.

Lye's first film, Tusalava, best illustrates his early interest in imagery from the South Pacific, with motifs based on Maori and Samoan iconography. It's a complex and sometimes humorous work that melds images from the natural world with sequences reminiscent of science fiction robots; many sections recall the pulsating intensity of small life-forms seen under a microscope.

Rainbow Dance (1936)

A few years later, Lye made his best-known film, A Colour Box, a vibrant direct-animation work (the images were painted directly onto strips of film, an extraordinarily painstaking process given the small scale of the endeavor). Like many of his 1930s films, A Colour Box was in fact a commercial, for the General Post Office in this case (it was specifically designed to promote new parcel-post rates). After the success of the film, Lye made a half dozen films - including the above Rainbow Dance - with an ostensible advertising purpose, for clients such as Shell Oil, the GPO and Imperial Airways.

The commercial messages are almost always subsidiary to Lye's experiments with colour, shapes and process, and are sometimes added at the conclusion as an apparent after-thought. Lye received much encouragement at this stage of his career from the great documentarian John Grierson as well as from Alberto Cavalcanti, an even more cosmopolitan filmmaker than Lye himself (born in Brazil, he had worked in France before coming to England); Grierson headed the GPO Film Unit, while Cavalcanti was a producer and technician.

Even where the starting point for some of the films is more conventional, such as in the post office advertising film N or NW, Lye quickly subverts the realist trappings, concocting a multi-layered film that plays with editing and voiceover while delivering an amusing message about the need to correctly address letters. That said, there's no doubting the period in which some of the films were made: Colour Flight drums up business for Imperial Airways' connections to the colonies, while Trade Tattoo celebrates the high water mark of Empire, with the slogan "The rhythm of trade is maintained by the mails" flashing across the screen over carefully transformed images of an industrious motherland.

After the Second World War and his move to the US, Lye's work takes a radically new turn. While his first postwar work, Color Cry, recalls the dazzling colours of his best-known British films, the images themselves are starker and less jaunty; his choice of music, too, is more downbeat, the Latin-influenced music of earlier films replaced by a plaintive blues song. His subsequent work is even more spare: colour disappears from films like Tal Farlow and the stunning Free Radicals, which feature intense sequences of lines and cross-hatches, and have a particular obsession with the vertical, foreshadowing Gerhard Richter's "Curtain" series of paintings. These later films are accompanied by insistently rhythmical musical works, including African drumming, and have a mesmerising power that is all the more intense for the films' brevity.

(As previously, I'm indebted to Roger Horrocks's work on Lye, and to Kristin Thompson for highlighting Lye's films and for prompting me to actually see the films).

A Colour Box

1935, UK, directed by Len Lye

I was unfamiliar with Len Lye until I read a fascinating piece by Kristin Thompson earlier this year, but was subsequently fortunate enough to see one of his better-known works (in a DVD transfer, but on a satisfyingly large wall-size projection screen), made for Britain's General Post Office Film Unit. In these days of "hard sell" advertising, it's hard to believe that the GPO thought that Lye's methods might be a useful part of their campaign to promote a new parcel post rate, but the film's surprising success cast the GPO in the most positive of lights (as noted in Roger Horrocks's Len Lye: A Biography). Lye's work at this time involved painting directly on, and scratching, pieces of film (a method he refined by using discards from Ealing Studios), and this short has wonderfully clever patterns in sometimes outlandish colour schemes; the work of painting the strips of film for A Colour Box apparently took just five days, which is remarkable given the complexity of what appears onscreen, not to mention the small scale on which Lye worked, given the size of film frames. Set to a piece of music from Martinique, it's an extremely witty piece of work, using the jaunty musical accompaniment as a template for wild experiments in shape and movement.

Two short films by Mahamat Saleh Haroun

Goï-goï, 1995, Chad

There's something of the films of Fanta Régina Nacro in this 1995 short, which evokes the terrible consequences of infidelity, as well as the matter-of-fact attitude of one woman in dealing with the aftermath. There's an extraordinary amount of action - and violence - in the film's brief running time, with Haroun making intelligent use of his limited resources (his methods of avoiding the need for extensive special effects are especially resourceful, while the impact of the deeds evoked is perhaps the greater for their indirect depiction). There's a tinge of Roald Dahl's short story Lamb to the Slaughter in the humorous ending, which Hitchcock might have appreciated.

B 400, 1997, France

Haroun's second short is both very brief and very slight, the tale - if it can be called that - of a young girl who locks herself out of her apartment building; the film seems to exist for its low-key punchline.

Everything Goes

2004, Australia, directed by Andrew Kotatko

Andrew Kotatko's work as a music director on a variety of (mostly) Australian films seems to have allowed him excellent networking opportunities that pay off with a fine cast for his first short, including most obviously Hugo Weaving and Abbie Cornish.

The film is an adaptation of the Raymond Carver story Why Don't You Dance?, and while Kotatko changes a few details, including particularly the time of day when the story begins, much of the dialogue is lifted word-for-word from Carver. Hugo Weaving is wonderfully rumpled as a man whose wife has just left, and who decides to put the entire contents of his home up for sale on the front lawn. Kotatko takes the idea of the house reconstituted outside and has much fun with it - more fun than Carver, in truth - while he also makes clever, understated use of computer effects in several shots (including the title shot, pictured here).

The film can be seen online here.

Un Certain matin

1991, Burkina Faso, directed by Fanta Régina Nacro

Fanta Régina Nacro's first short film is, by her own account, an amalgam of two of her major cinematic influences, Chaplin and Hitchcock, a combination of slapstick and tension that is more successful with regard to the former than the latter. The film's central gag is a clever visual joke that plays with our expectations of what a film from Africa will deliver; the punchline is set up with a scene that appears to be from a timeless, pre-colonial Africa, with events quickly going in unexpected directions. Nacro's film is a commentary, among other things, on the influence of filmmakers on African communities, and a plea for communication and understanding - as well as something of a love letter to the idea of cinema.

L'Ami y'a bon

2004, France, directed by Rachid Bouchareb

Rachid Bouchareb's short film serves as a fascinating complement to Ousmane Sembène's Camp de Thiaroye, telling the story of the including, crucially, their exploitation at every turn by the colonial authorities, who attempted to dispense with the African soldiers as soon as they had proved their worth in European campaigns. The film uses beautifully etched animated imagery, and almost no words, to succinctly narrate the reality of one soldier's experience, and the brutal shattering of his illusions about his relationship and worth to France. The black and white imagery - with occasional flashes of colour - has a remarkable power, and functions as a strikingly effective method of transmitting the misery and violence of the soldiers' existence (at times, it reminded me of Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, which also turns to drawings to convey the worst excesses of another colonial experience).

Credit where it is due: L'Ami y'a bon is available online at Tadrart Films, while I wouldn't have discovered it in the first place had it not been for acquarello's wonderful site on "landmark world cinema."

I Want to Be a Pilot

2006, Kenya/Mexico/Spain, directed by Diego Quemada-Diez

Filmed in the huge Kibera slum in Nairobi, I Want to Be a Pilot seemed to me to be filling in the gaps left by The Constant Gardener, in which, for all that film's strengths, the shanties are still not the main focus. My impression proved more correct than I expected, since the film was made by a technician on Fernando Meirelles's film. It's an intriguing short, which weaves comments from 50 children into a kind of poem that comes back constantly to the title refrain. The young character at the centre of the film, Omondi, is invisible even in his own slum - passers-by ignore this small boy as he crouches in an alleyway - never mind in the wider world, but the film gives him a voice and a means to convey his hopes, though the child who plays Omondi looks tragically aware of the reality of his situation and of the exceedingly thin thread by which those hopes hang (the film can be seen online).

The Saviour

2005, Australia, directed by Peter Templeman

Like many a narrative short , The Saviour has a structure that revolves around a last-minute joke that ties the action up; this film deserves its fun with a carefully plotted set-up. It's essentially a deadpan variation on the theme of revenge as a dish best served cold, in an unusual milieu: those earnest young men who go door to door to promote the way to truth and salvation (the lead character (played by Thom Campbell) is not quite sure of his calling and it's not hard to sympathize with this rather lovable loser). Writer-director Templeman has fun with the relationship between Malcolm and his American pastor (if you ever wondered what happened to Friedrich Von Trapp from The Sound of Music, actor Nicholas Hammond is alive and well in Australia), while he's already a skilled filmmaker, making clever use of editing to compress time and play with the viewer's expectations.