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This short is featured on the Animation Show Vol. 3 DVD.

Guilherme Marcondes’ experimental electronica-infused animated short mixes 2D computer animation with bunraku-style puppetry. From an amusement park on the edge of Sao Paulo, Brazil, a giant tiger emerges, controlled clearly by three shadowed puppeteers. As the striped beast stomps through the streets he creates a magical kind of chaos, transforming the humans into animals and spreading electrified vines and flowers across the modern landscape.

This ode to returning to nature has some fun with the transformations of its mindless humans. An office worker snaps into a slug. A family horking down dinner morphs into monkeys. A group of clubbers sprout feathers, becoming squawking toucans. Other inhabitants of the city are transformed as well. Cars snarled in traffic turn to slugs and a swipe with its paw at a helicopter bursts forth a flurry of birds. Marcondes mixes styles well, utilizing the tiger puppet — an older storytelling tool — as the transforming impetus in the modern world, which is animated through more high-tech means. Inspired by a poem from William Blake, the power of the beast is carried over into the short. While Blake wonders what kind of God would create the fearsome tiger, Marcondes’ film wonders what force would allow the creation of urban sprawl.

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This short is featured on the Animation Show Vol. 3 DVD.

Tony Comley’s ABIGAIL won a special distinction award at the Annecy Animation Festival, a pretty nice feat for a student film. It begins with an airplane falling from the sky with its engines on fire. The passengers in coach sing cheerily “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” as they plummet to their deaths. A man longing for a woman in a photograph leaves the chaos in coach for the more refined first class, where things really get weird.

The nightmarish tale mixes tones in an off-putting way. Haunting moments are followed by jokes. Clues to the meaning are casually littered about, but as the film progresses they seem more and more random. Comley gives us little to decipher his code, leaving us to fill in the blanks for ourselves. This isn’t intrinsically bad, but without hints the viewer gets to the point where they get lost as the story twists and turns. As for the animation, the rotoscope-style, similar to WAKING LIFE and A SCANNER DARKLY, is a bit stilted.

With a lot of experimental animation, one takes what they bring in. The more obscure the references, especially when no overall theme is clear, the smaller the audience becomes. Comley says the film is about how we deal with the things we cannot control. Using that idea, which isn’t clear in the film, gives the film a discernable through line, but even that theme breaks down in cynical personal quirks.

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This short is featured on the Animation Show Vol. 3 DVD.

The easiest way to anger the non-adventurous movie watcher is not to show them something shocking, but to show them experimental animation. They become belligerent with what seems to be nonsense and you can watch as the anger consumes them when someone tries to explain the meaning. This could be for many reasons, which I will get to later.

So why do I bring this universal statement up in the discussion of Max Hattler’s experimental short COLLISION? Because the film is a great example of the barrier between those who like experimental film and those who hate it. Hattler’s explosion of bright colors and shapes is timed to a firework-like soundtrack. His use of color and symbols make it fairly easy to read his meaning. They represent the various flags of the world as they mix and meld and explode into a celebration of multiculturalism. The message comes off fairly obvious… at least for me. Someone else might just see a kaleidoscope of pointlessness.

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Bob Dylan is an enigma, and that is exactly what one could call Todd Haynes’ film that contemplates the seemingly contradictory sides of the famed singer’s personality. Haynes has always been a filmmaker who takes risks from his unsettling SAFE to his pseudo-Bowie biopic VELVET GOLDMINE to his Douglas Sirk, 1950s melodrama-like FAR FROM HEAVEN. Now he contemplates the many aspects of Dylan, leaving the audience thinking (maybe even confused).

Six difference actors play six different Dylan-like characters. The various stories are woven together and a few even intersect. We begin with an 11-year-old African-American boy hitching a ride on a train calling himself Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin, TV’s LACKAWANNA BLUES). He’s traveling the country playing ’40s blues and acting like it isn’t 1959, avoiding the social turmoil of the times. Next we meet 19-year-old poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw, PERFUME) cagily avoiding definition during an interview. In a documentary-like segment, we learn about the career of influential folk singer Jack Rollins (Christian Bale, BATMAN BEGINS), who hasn’t done an interview in years since be converted to Christianity. Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN) is a womanizing actor who became famous playing Jack Rollins. We see him during two periods in his life — meeting abstract artist Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg, THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP) and then watching as their marriage falls apart as Vietnam ends. Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett, ELIZABETH) is an arrogant star that has turned his back on folk music and plugged in. During a tour in London with The Beatles, he challenges reporter Keenan Jones (Bruce Greenwood, CAPOTE) on his lack of caring about “finger-pointing” songs. Finally, in an almost dreamlike sequence, Billy the Kid (Richard Gere, CHICAGO) wonders the countryside trying to find freedom.

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Life and art intersect and blend and overlap and intrude in on each other in Ingmar Bergman’s challenging masterpiece, PERSONA. This is film as art. Like all artforms, there are pieces that are more accessible than others. It takes a fuller grasp of the artform and sometimes the artist to understand the complete scope of their work. A novice, or even causal, reader doesn’t start with Proust, they will start with easier classics from the likes of Twain. The same can be said about film. CITIZEN KANE’s accepted place as “the best movie ever made” has as much to do with its accessibility as it does its innovation and quality. From its experimental opening to its elusive ending, this film is what it is on the surface and it’s much more at the same time.

Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann, SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE) is a famed stage actor, who has stopped speaking. She has been profoundly struck by the fact that her entire life from her profession to her personal life is based on artifice. So in an effort to find some truth, she stops all verbal communication. A young nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson, THE SEVENTH SEAL) is assigned to care for the actress. At first she wonders if she is too young to handle such a strong willed woman, but once the two women travel to a seaside vacation home together, they begin to draw closer. Elisabet continues to not speak, only listening to the increasingly frank confessions of Alma, who tells the older woman of a brief sexual encounter that was exhilarating, but resulted in a great deal of regret. Soon the silence becomes too much for Alma, who cannot handle the quiet judgment of Elisabet. The battle of wills will break down and blur their identities and cross the line between reality and fantasy.

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The star rating system really fails when it comes to reviewing a film like this one. A person’s own personal beliefs on the subject of drugs come into play when watching and appreciating (or not appreciating which ever the case may be) what the film is trying to do. I guess the best place to start is to present what apparently the filmmakers were setting out to do. They wanted to make an objective look at one man’s trip on LSD.

Directed by Roger Corman (THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH) and written by Jack Nicholson, the film stars Peter Fonda (EASY RIDER) as Paul Groves, a commercial director who is getting a divorce from his wife Sally (Susan Strasberg, PICNIC). Paul wants to experience an enlightening trip on LSD, so he enlists his friend John (Bruce Dern, DIGGSTOWN) to watch over him while he’s tripping. They go to a lavish hippie hangout in the Hollywood Hills where they get the LSD from Max (Dennis Hopper, RIVER’S EDGE).

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KOYAANISQATSI is one of the most successful experimental film of all time. It’s the first film in a trilogy of films that deal with the conflict between modern man and nature. Director Godfrey Reggio believed that non-narrative films could reach a wider audience if they tackled important issues in a compelling way.

He also believes that film, as a collaborative art form, should be made with the director working as an equal with the cinematographer and composer. For the film, Reggio is the conductor working hand in hand with cinematographer Ron Fricke and composer Philip Glass, whose haunting score drives the film and becomes the star of the production.

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Luis Buñuel often dealt with the hypocrisy of society — especially the Catholic Church — in his films. This 45-minute film is an extremely subtle and surreal satire of religious piety.

St. Simon (Claudio Brook, THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL) lives in the 4th Century atop a pillar where he preaches to passers-by for six years, six months and six days. The story begins with a rich man giving Simon an even taller pillar to stand on. The townsfolk literally put him on a pedestal. Simon shames the priests’ piety with his devotion. From time to time, he has visions of the devil (Silvia Pinal, VIRIDIANA) as woman with a water jug, a tempting schoolgirl and an androgynous Greek with one breast bare and wearing a beard.

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Luis Buñuel’s EXTERMINATING ANGEL was completed in Mexico in 1962, but wasn’t released in the U.S. until August 1967, which was the same year that his most famous film, BELLE DE JOUR, was released. Buñuel is known for his surrealist cinema and EXTERMINATING ANGEL is his most surreal feature. This satire uses absurdity to uncover hypocrisy.

Edmundo Nobile (Enrique Rambal) is a wealthy elite who throws a party for the rich set in town. Buñuel is not worried about character here, but brings archetypical characters to his party. After dinner, the host and his guests move into the sitting room, where no one leaves — literally. Some unexplained force makes the guests unable to walk out of the room. Once you enter the room, you cannot leave. The guests camp out on the floor for the night and try to remain dignified. However, when days turn into weeks, niceties of decorum begin to fade and the “pure bloods” are savagely at each other’s throats.

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Made for $218 on an iMac, Jonathan Caouette transforms home videos and stills, amateur short films and interviews into a personal diary film that holds true power.

Caouette tells the story of his mother Renee Leblanc through home footage edited in an experimental way. Leblanc was a beauty and was modeling by age 12. However, a fall from the garage left her paralyzed. A neighbor of her parents Rosemary and Adolph told them the paralysis was in the girl’s mind. So Renee’s parents took her to a psychiatrist who advised Renee’s parents to give her shock therapy, which she received two times a week for years. Renee recovered from the paralysis, but sunk into a variety of mental illnesses. She married young and her husband Steve left before Jonathan was even born.

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