A Shot Of Shorts

It's no secret to anyone with more than a passing familiarity with video-hosting sites like YouTube and TikTok that they're positively overrun with animated shorts, and many streaming services also carry a sizable number of them, often packaged together as anthologies. Shorts are a form of film arguably better suited to today's ever-shortening attention spans; and with the increasing availability and sophistication of image-generating AI, just about anyone with a computer and some time to spare can create one. Whether that's a positive or negative development is debatable, but there's no question that it's difficult to find gems amidst all the dross.

So, for this post I've collected a dozen of some of the most aesthetically exciting and creative animated shorts I could find. As there's only so much you can write about something only a few minutes long, I've tried to keep things concise.

There's no better place to start than the music video for the rock band Cruisr's breezy song "All Over," (2014) directed by Chris Carboni. (YouTube) Quite simply, it consists of bite-sized visual references to famous (mostly American) movies morphing into each other at a very rapid pace, usually involving iconic couples or pairings of characters. It's drawn in a flat, 2-D, somewhat caricaturist style with bold colors and minimal detail - just enough to make the characters identifiable. Despite only being about a decade old, it has a distinct late 1960s/early 70s feel, with a hind of psychedelia. Describing it hardly does justice to it; better to just watch it - and have fun seeing how many characters and scenes you can recognize.

Another innovative music video is "Gimme the Sweet and Lowdown" by the California punk rock band Social Distortion (2012), directed by Olya and Vera Ishchuk. (YouTube) In black-and-white and drawn in the style of classic tattoo art, the video and song are a sort of mini-biography of the band's vocalist/lead guitarist/primary songwriter/only constant member, Mike Ness, who experienced much of what is depicted in the video. The video pays homage to Ness's musical influences, from Hank Williams to Billie Holiday to Joey Ramone; aficianados of classic country, rock, and punk will see many of the genre's most prominent figures immortalized here. Again, part of the fun is simply watching the video to see who you can recognize.

An abrupt stylistic shift brings us to the more sedate Rain Town (2011), directed by Hiroyasu Ishida. (YouTube) Apparently created as a student film by a Japanese animator, it has no dialogue or narration, with unaccompanied piano as a score. It's a surreal, near-abstract story of a girl living in a perpetually-drenched derelict town who befriends what appears to be a semi-organic robot with a flowerpot-shaped head. The color palette is very subdued, mostly blues and greys, except for the brighter-colored human characters (and the ending, which I won't spoil). It's a melancholy, wistful and very ambient experience; but not depressing to watch, and very open to interpretation about what it all means.

From the quiet to frantic - the Polish short Paths Of Hate (2010) directed by Damian Nenow. (Kanopy, YouTube) This is rendered in cel-shaded CGI, giving it the look of a particularly smooth hand-drawn 2-D animation. A war film in the purest sense of the term, it consists of almost nothing but a vicious, one-on-one aerial dogfight between two unnamed pilots flying World War II-era piston-engine fighter planes over a stunning winter landscape. This short contains what is probably the best-animated dogfight I've ever seen, rivaled only by those in the 2008 anime feature The Sky Crawlers. The soundtrack is just as visceral; while it contains some instrumental heavy metal, it's comprised largely of roaring engines, rattling machine guns, and the pilots' ragged breathing. It veers into more surrealistic horror territory towards the end; I won't spoil what happens, but it can safely be said that no one wins.

Machinery also plays a starring role in The Lonely Orbit (2021), directed by Frederic Siegel and Benjamin Morard. (Kanopy, YouTube) This uses a (mostly) orange, blue, and white color palette with no outlines. It presents a unique visualization of the modern telecommunications network, in a rumination about the nature of digital connectiveness and the illusions of closeness that it provides - both to people and, as it turns out, to satellites. The short poses a pertinent question: What if one of the many satellites that modern people depend on for communication became lonely and wanted to meet the Earth? Flaming reentry and utter chaos, of course.

The flames also roar in Yellowstone 88: Song Of Fire (2021) directed by Jerry van de Beek and Betsy de Fries. (Kanopy, YouTube) This is a poetic dramatization about the destructive wildfires that burned much of Yellowstone National Park in 1988, beginning with the dry conditions that led to the fires and ending with the burgeoning forests in its aftermath. The poem that serves as the short's narration was written Betsy de Fries and is read by Peter Coyote. The short is animated in Flash-style 2-D CGI, with objects shaded and thickly layered to give a sense of depth. The background is comprised of silhouettes and heavily stylized landscapes, with animals drawn in a Native-American animated woodcut style. Though the short depicts an event that was widely considered a disaster, it doesn't present the fires as an irrecoverable apocalypse. As destructive as they were, the flames were only part of a cycle - many animals and plants survived them, and the forest rekindled itself afterwards, as it's done many times before.

A somewhat less hopeful outlook is presented in Framed (2020) directed by Marco Jemolo. (Kanopy, YouTube) (Please note: You probably shouldn't watch this if you're currently afflicted by paranoia or deep anxiety. I'm not joking.) This was created with classic Claymation-style stop-motion animation. The primary goal with stop-motion is always to imbue inanimate objects with the illusion of life. What, then, would it be life if a stop-motion figure really was alive - not in a fictional world, but in this one - and experienced every moment of their existence, from being cut out of a block of clay to being forced to pose for the camera, over and over and over again? Framed answers that question; suffice to say, it ain't pleasant. In fact, it's a Kafkaesque nightmare that ends in an emotional breakdown.

Particularly surreal nightmares might also come to mind when viewing Freeze Frame (2021), directed by Soetkin Verstegen. (Kanopy) Also stop-motion animated, it uses a strictly monochromatic color palette, with no dialogue or music. Beginning with traditional Scandinavian ice harvesting on a frozen lake, it turns into meditation about motion, transcendence, and the fragility of life - as well as the bleak and deadly beauty of subfreezing winter. It's animated with what appear to be ice cubes with small animal figurines frozen inside of them, interspersed with ice sculptures of bones and skeletons, all formatted as a combination slideshow/early 20th century silent film. In terms of aesthetics alone, it is truly unique; I've never seen anything else remotely like it. Think of it as the sequential photography of Edward Muybridge by way of Disney's Frozen, and you won't be too far off.

The bleak-yet-photogenic tone continues with Falling Down (2020) directed by Swann and Yoann Chesnel. (Kanopy) This is one of the few animated shorts I've seen that's formatted to look like a smartphone video, in a 9:18 aspect ratio - the better to evoke the verticality of the skyscrapers of Manhattan, where much of it is set. Accompanied by the song "A Photo" by Superpoze, it's a combination of photorealistic CGI, short clips of live-action film, and photo montages that flip by so quickly that they look animated, like a rapid-fire slideshow. As best as I can determine, the short is a statement about the social impact of the then-current Covid-19 pandemic and the world's concurrent societal and environmental ills. It manages to be quite poignant without being overly preachy, and reaches a remarkable crescendo in its 4-minute runtime.

Now, let's take a breather from the contemporary with An Optical Poem (1938) directed by Oskar Fischinger. (Kanopy, YouTube) Despite being about as uncommercial as a cartoon can be, this was officially released by MGM Studios - it's even preceded by the famous roaring lion logo! It's an abstract animation set to the energetic music of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt; more notably, it's the only animation I can think of that was created with mobiles - paper cutouts suspended with invisible wires. Multicolored solid shapes fly through space, spin, approach and retreat, and orbit as though Liszt's music has taken over gravity's job for the day. I was reminded of Fantasia's more abstract moments (like the sequence set to Bach's Tocatta and Fugue), but with more of a cutting-edge flair. This was incredible visual effects work for its time, and leaves the viewer wondering why more film effects didn't take cues from this, instead of using more difficult and expensive (and usually less convincing) techniques like optical compositing.

Somewhat less abstract, but arguably even more surreal, is Our Lady Of The Sphere (1969) directed by Lawrence Jordan. (Kanopy, YouTube) Possibly the hardest of all these shorts to describe, the closest equivalents that I can think of are Terry Gilliam's minimally-animated interludes in Monty Python's Flying Circus. The short is sort of an animated collage, produced from line engravings and cutouts, tinted in vivid red, green, and blue over a black background. The story (I'm guessing that one was intended) involves a boy, a deep-sea diver, a crystal ball-headed woman, and an awful lot of buzzing. If a person living in Victorian London had a fever dream after seeing too many Punch cartoons, it might well resemble this odd absurdity.

...And one last jump to the recent brings us to Concrete (2021) directed by Aira Joana, Luca Struchen, Nicolas Roth, and Pirmin Bieri. (Kanopy, YouTube) This is CGI, with the 3-D elements rendered in a very blocky, angular art style, with heavy use of textures. It depicts an encounter between a size-shifting 3-D man and a 2-D fox in a giant concrete structure, in an otherwise deserted landscape. The fox, being two-dimensional in a three-dimensional world, can only move along flat surfaces - slabs of concrete, in this case. Though the fox dwells in one plane of existence and the man in another, they can still interact to a limited degree, and seem to come to a kind of accommodation with each other. There's no dialogue, and appropriately eerie music. Concrete is another dreamlike short; things seem to have meanings and purposes, but it isn't immediately obvious what they are. Kinda like this blog that way!

Despite great strides made in recognition of its artistic merits over the past few decades, animation is still often dismissed by critics and audiences as "kid stuff," or as an art form occupying a lower and less lucrative tier than live-action film. It is neither; I would argue, based on this very small collection, that animation has potentialities that have only begun to be explored, and many of the world's most original and creative artists have worked, and are working, as animators. May they continue to do so, with or without the help of AI (and whatever technical innovations inevitably supersede it).

Mit Out Talk: Documentaries Without Narration

Take it from someone who's seen too many of them: It's very rare to come across a video documentary without narration. This is perhaps understandable; the purpose of a documentary is to document, to inform, and unless a viewer is already very knowledgeable about the depicted subject matter, they'll likely need some explanation for what they watch
in order to comprehend it. Narration allows a documentary to tie a disparate series of shots together; it's the glue that welds a pile of scraps into a moving collage.

However, narration is not without its problems. First and foremost, it breaks the flow of the moving image and interposes itself over the viewer, telling them what they're seeing instead of letting them interpret it for themselves. If the narration is badly written (and it often is), it can
actively detract from the experience and be as obnoxious as an unrelated advertisement playing in the background while you're trying to watch the film.  If the narration is poorly delivered (again, often is), it can make an otherwise credible documentary seem crass, unintentionally funny, or just pathetic.

So, how about documentaries without narration? There aren't too many of them, but in this post we're going to examine a few, and see if we can summarize in words what the films detailed in images.

First, and most atypical, is Homo Sapiens (2016), directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter. (JustWatch, Kanopy) It consists exclusively of static shots of locations built and since abandoned by humans. Its soundtrack is entirely environmental; while watching it, you'll hear only the same sounds that would grace your ears if you were at these places in person. Not only is there no narration, there is no music, there are no humans onscreen, named or otherwise; nor is there any camera movement of any kind. The only concession to holding the viewer's attention is to periodically switch shots from one location to another. Short of Andy Warhol's Empire, it's hard to imagine a more thorough repudiation of the conventions of modern film that still qualifies as a film.

Some of the locations in the film are conventionally picturesque, like a colorful mosaic mural overlooking an underground pool. Others are less so, such as a Japanese McDonalds abandoned after the Fukushima Daichii nuclear disaster. Through the lens of Homo Sapiens, all have a peculiar aesthetic attraction, a mystery and poignancy that would not be there if they were populated. Aurally, the film is very environmental; the most consistent sound throughout is the wind. Dripping water and chirping birds are also frequent, and every so often the listener will be greeted by the creaking of rusting metal, or the groan of decaying, overstressed wood. A viewer would be wise to watch it in the quietest situation possible for full effect.

Homo Sapiens is one of the few movies I can think of that extensively utilizes the concept of negative space - a section in a creative work in which there is nothing. A visual artist would recognize this as a gap between the subjects of the picture; a patch of blank canvas or unmarked paper, a void which, if used skillfully, can turn a potentially overdone picture
into an expansive, memorable composition. A musician might understand negative space as the lull between notes, a pause that may serve to release or heighten tension, quiet to accentuate the loud. The most obvious musical example would be the avant-garde composer John Cage's oft-misunderstood work 4'33", which consists entirely of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of an orchestra not playing their instruments. Cage's intent wasn't that listeners would hear complete, suffocating silence; rather, instead of hearing expected music, they would hear the unexpected music that an ordinary song or symphony would smother: whispering, shuffling, rustling, coughing. By stripping away conventions like narrative, characterization, and drama, and leaving only what in other films would be dismissed as "the background," Homo Sapiens draws the viewer into a liminal space where they are alone with their own senses. This documentary, by excluding humans entirely, says a great deal about them; their creativity, their wastefulness, their shortsightedness. About the person viewing it, and about the mysterious persons who once built and inhabited its locales. It invites the viewer not just to observe, but to think, speculate, hypothesize. Who built these places, and why? Where are they? Why are they abandoned? How long will they last? What lives there now? In the film, there are no answers; there are only the questions of the void.

Reactions to the film are almost entirely subjective; some may find it intriguing or fascinating, some may think that it's simply too boring to sit through more than a few minutes of it. But Homo Sapiens isn't so much critic-proof as critic-porous; attempts to praise or condemn it about anything other than its technical aspects must simply pass through it without effect, like a ship sailing through fog. To me, however, it's a unique and wholly original work that I've watched to completion several times...and, I admit, fallen asleep to at least once.

Second on the platter is Elementa (2020), directed by Richard Sidey with appropriately ambient music by Boreal Taiga. (JustWatch, Tubi) Elementa omits color instead of music; the entire movie (except the titles) is in black and white, and the white is so vivid at times that it's almost silver. This is one movie where having your screen's brightness and contrast adjusted properly is absolutely essential. It's also unusual in its extremely wide aspect ratio; approximately 3:1.1. This appears to mimic the the long-extinct Cinerama film format, which utilized three separate screens with an overall ratio of 2.89:1. Elementa notably expands upon the Cinerama concept; instead of using three screens and three projectors to produce one huge image, it often uses one screen to display three images. For instance, one sequence might include a distant shot of an animal, next to a close-up of the same animal, next to a landscape shot of the habitat that the animal inhabits. It could be thought of as comic book-style, with several different panels that can be viewed individually or all at once. It provides an interesting opportunity for the viewer to have a more involving visual experience by offering them the choice to focus on one panel, or all, without being overloaded with visual information.

The cinematography is semi-abstract, with an emphasis upon patterns and sharp contrasts. Most of the location shots appear to have been taken in Arctic and sub-Arctic areas, the better to contrast the white ice and snow with the black of water, rocks, and pine trees. Like Homo Sapiens, Elementa has no narrative; it does, however, have characters, in the form of the animals that wander across its frames. Birds, bears and whales simply go about their lives, quite unaware that they hold starring roles in a moving monochromatic artwork.

Elementa is an entirely angst-free film. It contains no violence, no jumpscares, no jarring edits; everything flows into everything else, and before you know it, its brief 45-minute runtime is over. My only real complaint about it is that I wish it was longer, and that's not something I can say about many recent films.

Certainly I wouldn't say it about Powaqqatsi (1988). (JustWatch)  Undoubtedly the most famous and widely watched of this post's movies, this is the second film in director Godfrey Reggio's "Qatsi Triology." All three films in that trilogy fit our criteria, having no narration or other dialogue, just images and music composed by Philip Glass. But, since the first film, Koyaanisqatsi, has already been analyzed to hell and back, and I simply don't like the third film, Naqoyqatsi, we'll cover this one. Powaqqatsi's title, from the Hopi language, translates roughly as "life-consuming sorcerer," and would be monstrously appropriate as an alternate name for the World Wide Web.

Powaqqatsi lets the viewer know right off the bat that it's a very different film from its predecessor. Whereas Koyaanisqatsi starts off with a shot of Native American rock paintings and a slow, somber dirge, Powaqqatsi begins with cheery, energetic music - over a sequence of exhausted mine workers hauling sacks of ore out of a mud pit.

Due in no small part to this opening scene, some viewers (and probably more non-viewers) have accused Powaqqatsi of being exploitative, of utilizing the photogenic poverty of Third World people to construct a story that has nothing to do with them. Personally, I don't think that the criticism fits. Aside from the simple fact that there is no narration or subtitling, so that it's up the viewer to interpret what they see, it's clear that many of the people documented in their daily activities in Powaqqatsi are not unhappy. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there are more on-screen smiles per capita in this movie than there are among the industrialized denizens of Koyaanisqatsi. The criticism could easily be reversed by stating that those who make it are foisting their own assumptions about materialism and prosperity onto people who probably couldn't care less, and have bigger concerns in any case.

The overwhelming majority of Powaqqatsi was shot outdoors; there are few shots taken inside buildings, and it appears that many of the people in the film are living not far above subsistence-level. Much of their onscreen activity is comprised of procuring and preparing food, be it by fishing, planting, stock-raising, harvesting, grinding, or cooking. The viewer visits locales and cultures throughout the world, mostly in (then) undeveloped countries in the Southern Hemisphere. After spending the first half of the film in rural areas and small villages, the film transitions to cities which are horrendously congested and polluted, yet still permeated with an air of exoticism. For viewers in North America and western Europe, Powaqqatsi lacks the sense of familiar-made-fantastic that permeated Koyaanisqatsi; it feels more like a travelogue than a thorough dissection of a single culture. Befitting a travelogue, it also depicts many local folk traditions, from parades to play-fighting; like everything else in the movie, they're entirely open to interpretation.

If Koyaanisqatsi was one of several logical conclusions to the 1970s Hollywood auteur movement in film, which encouraged directors to point their cameras at whatever they wished for as long as they liked, Powaqqatsi drags the auteur into the MTV era with the introduction of (relatively) rapid editing and cross-cutting. The "Video Dream" sequence, a montage of contemporary TV commercials and news broadcasts, could easily pass for a pastiche-based music video - compare Talk Talk's video for "It's My Life" - or a modern medley of reedited footage that one might find in the more creative corners of YouTube. The editing in Powwaqqatsi is considerably tighter than that in Koyaanisqatsi, though in my opinion there are still some shots that go on for too long. Powaqqatsi's music is also substantially better; certainly it's more varied and adventurous, with influences of musical traditions from the Middle East, South America, and India, among others.

For me, the film only has two significant weaknesses vis a vis its predecessor. First, it mostly lacks the context of the natural landscapes found in Koyaanisqatsi. It is very, very people- centric; while there are aerial shots of built-up areas, there's scarcely a scene in the entire movie that doesn't include either people or objects made by people. What animals there are in the film are almost entirely domestic. Perhaps the director was trying to make a (non-verbal) statement about explosive population growth and overcrowding in these parts of the world; I don't know. But I do think that the film might have been better if the viewer was given more room to breathe, instead of being confronted with people, people, people at every turn.

Second, while the film as a whole is technically superior to Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi to me lacks any real standout sequences. It doesn't have the aforementioned landscape shots of Koyaanisqatsi, nor the destructive energy of the "Pruitt Igoe" sequence, nor the mystical otherworldliness of "The Grid" sequence, nor even the somber fatalism of the final rocket launch and explosion. Personally, I thought that the most memorable shot was in the scene entitled "Mr. Suso #1," of a rusted-out car chassis sitting in the median of a superhighway, stolid and immovable as transparent traffic rushes around it and an Arab singer keens and wails. (But even that only lasts about a minute.) Powaqqatsi is less sensationalized, more grounded, perhaps more of a "real" documentary; but after the credits roll, it isn't as immediately memorable as Koyaanisqatsi. Which must be why Koyaanisqatsi is written about so much more often! All the same, I recommend seeing both of them; perhaps Powaqqatsi during the day, and Koyaanisqatsi the following night. (And Naqoyqatsi, the final entry in the trilogy...not at all. Sorry, it just ain't good.)

In closing, there are indeed silent documentaries worth watching out there; think of them as the film equivalent of ambient music - open to interpretation, not overbearing, yet often thought-provoking and unsettling. In a world where it often feels like you're listening to (or reading!) unwanted, irrelevant yammering with almost every waking moment, they provide an opportunity to simply sit back, gaze, and chill. Or do a little yammering yourself.

 

Scene 1 - Documenting the forgotten: Offbeat Documentaries

I can think of no better first (real) post for this blog than a presentation of a few offbeat documentaries. Unusual topics handled in an unconventional manner are precisely what Vilettante demands - so, let's get to it.



First in the docket is Carts Of Darkness (2008 JustWatch, Tubi), directed by Murray Siple, who was formerly a director of snowboard videos until a tragic accident left him a paraplegic. This was his first film in ten years.

Carts Of Darkness delves into the lives of a small circle of homeless men dwelling in Vancouver, British Columbia who make a living by collecting recyclables with the aid of shopping carts, trading them in for cash...and, when the opportunity arises, riding said shopping carts down Vancouver's many hills, at speeds approaching 40 mph (>60 kph). (If you didn't know a cart could roll that fast, I'll bet the engineers who designed them didn't, either.) One might be tempted to think of these sequences as a loose equivalent of the infamous American "bum fighting" videos of the 2000s, in which exploitation filmmakers with camcorders would pay homeless people small amounts of money to engage in Jackass-style dangerous stunts or simply beat each other up. The difference here is that the homeless men in Carts Of Darkness are riding their carts freely of their own volition, without anyone encouraging or ordering them to do it. And clearly having a good time on the roll, judging from all of their whooping and hollering.

Vancouver is prosperous, as North American cities go, and there isn't any one cause for the homelessness depicted in Carts. Some of the men in the film have severe legal problems, some are alcoholic or mentally ill, and some simply don't want to be part of society, don't see why they should obey its demands and accept its compromises. Carts is non-judgmental; it simply presents these people to the camera and viewer as they are, in their own words, without holier-than-thou criticism of their lives and without presenting well-meaning but ill-founded solutions to their situations. I was particularly struck by one man explaining why he preferred camping out in the woods to spending his nights in a shelter; as he put it, out in the woods, he only had to deal with his own problems, but in the shelter, he had to deal with the problems of everyone else there, too. As an introvert who usually prefers solitude, I can only applaud that statement. 

In his voiceover, the director expresses a certain admiration for these men and their willingness to live their lives by their own rules. As he becomes more involved with the cart-riders, he begins to see their DIY sport as a substitute for the snowboarding that he documented before he lost the use of his legs; a vicarious way to obtain the speed and adrenaline that he lost as a disabled person. He comes to inhabit their world, which had existed around his home in the city for years without him ever knowing. He wishes that he could participate with them, instead of merely driving his van downhill alongside them; but since rolling at that speed in a wheelchair and coming out unscathed is not practicable, he can't. ...That is, until the end of the film, when a solution is found and the director does participate in the cart racing. But I'm not going to spoil how that happens. 

Carts Of Darkness is one of the many documentaries on streaming services that I discovered purely by chance. I would never have thought to search for it, nor would I have even suspected that such a documentary even existed. It's about as unique a film as you're likely to ever see - though it'll surely have some competition on this blog.

 

The second of this post's docs is Mountain (2017, JustWatch, Tubi), directed by Jennifer Peedom, and with a pleasingly minimalist narration written by the director and Robert MacFarlane and well-delivered by Willem Dafoe, The mostly-classical soundtrack is performed by the Australia Chamber Orchestra, and includes selections of works by Vivaldi, Beethoven, and Chopin.

I strongly recommend watching this on the largest screen available; your phone simply can't do it justice. Mountain, surprisingly, is about mountains. More specifically, it's about mountains and humans, about the reactions that they provoke and the dreams that they inspire by the people who gaze at them, scale them, slide down them, and sometimes die on them. As the narration points out, the now-common desire to travel to and climb mountains is a recent innovation; prior to the advent of Alpinism (romanticism of the European Alps) in the 18th century, mountains in most of the world were more likely to be seen as forbidden or sacrosanct, the domains of gods and demons. Places to revered or dreaded, but always held far beyond arm's-length, and never entered.

The film includes many soaring shots of mountainscapes, and may be unnerving to watch for acrophobes. There are several extended sequences of Koyaanisqatsi-style time-lapse photography, including one stunning sequence of a ski resort that I could only describe as "The Grid" of mountain documentaries. Snippets of films of 20th century mountaineering expeditions as well as footage taken by modern mountaineers are included, but the undoubted climax of Mountain is an extended montage of a wide array of mountain extreme sports, including skiing and snowboarding, tightrope-walking, mountain biking, BASE jumping, wingsuiting, and parasailing. About all that's missing is zorbing!

The narration speaks of mountains as metaphors, symbols upon which are projected dreams, desires, and fears. With increasing industrialization and urbanization over the past couple of centuries, the adventures and dangers of everyday life have increasingly been replaced with routine and comfort. As Mountain posits it, the desire to travel to and climb mountains may then stem from the unfulfillment of dwelling in artificial, controlled places; the untamed danger of mountains is the stark opposite (or so we tell ourselves). In truth, there's been an increasing familiarity with even the highest mountains since the early 20th century, and particularly since the the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953, after which mountaineering vastly increased in popularity. This habituation of once-legendary mountains has resulted in, if not contempt, a certain lack of regard for the power of the peaks - notably for Everest, which hosts thousands of climbers every year. The narration likens managing these cramponed legions to crowd control; considering the footage of the crowded routes and base camps in the film, the analogy is quite accurate. It's also noted that climbers are often from wealthy countries, and the native peoples who assist them, such as the Sherpas of the Himalayas, take the most risks, yet receive the least recognition. But, despite all of this, mountains still have the capacity to humble the most prideful soul. Their indifference to the humans fascinated by them can exhilarate, challenge, wound (mentally and physically), or restore a sense of wonder.

While generally agreeing with the film's conclusions, I think the narration may have over-generalized the lack of interest in scaling peaks in pre-modern cultures. Long before Europeans arrived in the New World, some of the people dwelling in the Andes did climb their mountains, sometimes to altitudes that modern mountaineers normally wouldn't attempt without supplemental oxygen. The archaeological record of the area bears this out, and the lack of evidence for such early ascents elsewhere in the world may owe more to a dearth of study than to a dearth of ancient mountain climbers. Also, given the subject matter, I would've preferred a less anthropocentric approach. There are only a few shots of mountain wildlife in the film, and a naive viewer might come away from Mountain thinking that the world's high places are as barren as the deepest desert - which they (usually) aren't. Perhaps the filmmakers could've delved a little into, say, the complicated relationships of Ibex and Chamois with European Alpinists, or the reverence that many South American cultures had for the Andean Condor? Or pointed out that any plant and animal species that were formerly more widespread have now been forced into the refuge of mountains by human persecution - and, due to disturbance from many of the activities depicted in the film, may not persist even there?

Minor quibbles aside, Mountain is a joy to watch and listen to, and it challenges the viewer about their own conceptions and experiences of mountains - certainly it made me ponder some of mine. Think of it as an unusually long (and unusually well-written) IMAX special that provides just as much food for thought as visual spectacle.

 

Last up is Into Eternity (2010 JustWatch, Kanopy), directed by Michael Madsen. This film is an examination of Onkalo (approximate translation: "hiding place"), a nuclear waste storage repository currently being excavated in Finland. Upon completion, it will consist of a series of tunnels, shafts, and storage cells buried about 500 meters (1,640 ft) underground, to shield all surface life from the radiation of its contents. The entire construct is planned to be more than 4 kilometers (2.5 mi) long, all of it blasted and bored through solid rock. It is projected to be complete and full of radioactive waste to capacity in the early 22nd century, at which point its entrance will be plugged with concrete and paved over, allowing human and natural development to continue over it.

Most documentaries about an engineering topic like this would instruct about the how and why; the experiences and skills of the people involved, the techniques and tools that they use, and their expectations for the construct once it's complete. Whilst Into Eternity delves into some of this, it's more concerned with the present and future ramifications of Onkalo. What makes the film stand out is its philosophical, long-view approach, and the unavoidable temporal weight that the project and the people involved must carry. Most modern "permanent" buildings are designed to last for 40-50 years, perhaps a century. While it's a proverb that time fears the Egyptian pyramids, the truth is that just a few thousand years (and erosion, and the Egyptians themselves) have turned them into decrepit, decaying hulks that any self-respecting pharaoh would refuse to be entombed in. Onkalo, by its very purpose of safely storing waste that will remain radioactive and dangerous for tens of thousands of years, must remain intact and capable of securing storing its contents for at least 100,000 years. To put that into perspective, the designers of Onkalo have had to take the next projected ice age, perhaps 60,000 years from now, into account - and to do their best to ensure that it will remain intact for tens of millennia after the glaciers roll over it, and after they retreat again.

It hardly needs to be said that many people have strong opinions about nuclear power, the radioactive waste that it produces, and the dilemma of what should be done with this waste. Into Eternity isn't much concerned with those debates; it presents nuclear power and the waste that it inevitably produces as a fait accompli. Regardless of how one feels about it, it exists, and it isn't going away any time soon, particularly considering current attempts to phase out fossil fuels. The film is essentially calm and contemplative in its approach; though there are differing opinions about many aspects of the project, there are no real arguments. There isn't very much that even happens onscreen, aside from from some controlled blasting of Onkalo's underground tunnels. Yet Into Eternity is pervaded throughout with an eerie, unsettling tone; partly due to the danger inherent in its subject matter, partly because Onkalo is being excavated beneath an idyllic Scandinavian forest, but more particularly because of the uncertainty of it all. Involvement with a project like this could be compared to standing on the edge of an abyss, far too deep to see the bottom of, yet knowing that there are people, not much unlike you, inhabiting those depths. If presented with a pile of large rocks and ordered that you must drop them over the precipice, knowing that doing so might very well harm someone that you'll never meet, how would you feel? What precautions would you take? Would you lose any sleep over it?

The film includes portions of interviews with Finnish government officials, some of the scientists and engineers who conceptualized and designed Onkalo, and the workers who are building it. Many of their remarks, and the director's narration, are delivered as though addressing the inhabitants of the far future - specifically, people who have hypothetically discovered the site and are attempting to enter it, exposing themselves to the radiation of its contents. Such human intrusion is one of the biggest concerns about the facility, resulting in much discussion regarding how it can be avoided. Into Eternity studies a problem familiar to students of deep time: Just how is it possible to communicate even so rudimentary a concept as "DANGER" to people who won't be born until the far distant future, long after all current languages and other means of communication will have either vanished or evolved beyond recognition? Various methods of doing this are discussed, mainly involving stone slabs carved with warning messages and/or nonverbal threats, while a number of people involved in the project suggest that the best solution, once Onkalo is complete and full of waste, is to simply bury all traces of it and hope that it's never discovered again. The documentary leaves it to the viewer to decide whether it would be better to remember, to preserve the memory of the site for generations to come; or, in this case, to forget.

Well, that wraps up the first real post on Vilettante. I hope I've managed to interest readers in the works that I've discussed. Remember, we're just scratching the surface of what's available out there, and when parking yourself in front of a screen, you don't have to settle for whatever happens to be trending.

More to follow!

Scene Zero, Take One

 Thus begins Vilettante (pronounced vil-EH-taunt), the video blog that looks classy but is really trashy. And flippant, irreverent, and anti-trend.

This blog will mainly focus upon lesser-known and more obscure works. I don't have a hard-and-fast rule about not mentioning popular films, but you will not find any reviews or discussions of the latest blockbusters, or economic parsing of this or that movie's box-office performance.

I'm not interested in quantifying what I watch. When I write about a given work, it'll usually be obvious whether or not I liked it, but there will no ratings assigned, nor any paragraphs expended arguing that Tentacle Monster Film X is better than Tentacle Monster Film Y.

The focus here will be upon works available on streaming and physical home media like DVDs and Blu-rays. I stopped regularly seeing movies in theaters some years ago, partly due to low value for cost and partly because of audience misbehavior, and I have no intention of ever starting again.

There will be a particular emphasis here upon documentaries, especially nature/wildlife documentaries, which in my opinion are severely underappreciated and little discussed by professional critics (unless they have celebrity narrators, of course).

Whenever possible, I'll include links to the works that I write about, so that readers can see it for themselves and form their own opinions. Expect regular references to streaming guides like JustWatch, as well as free streaming services like Kanopy, Hoopla, and Tubi.

Until the next scene...stay vile.