Five Film Exercises: Film 2-3 (1946)
Genre :
Runtime : 3M
Director : John Whitney Sr., James Whitney
Synopsis
Two short fragments resulting from experiments in controlling the mechanical development of the instrument.
A subversive experimental short against the ruling class.
Begins with a three beat announcement drawn out in time which thereafter serves as a figure to divide the four sections. Each return of this figure is more condensed, and finally used in reverse to conclude the film.
Street scene: Arch de Triumph.
Pedestrians, carts and trams traffic, on Whitehall Street in New York.
The inauguration of Radio Vaticana, with Pope Pius XI and Guglielmo Marconi.
A story about the fight for power told with the help of simple graphics. The huge building, the huge column hall, one chair around the chairman's board table is empty. We observe the fight for that chair: little men run and fight, all tricks are allowed.
A group of Macedonian women are shown hard at work.
A parody of Bonnie and Clyde leads into a 'how to drive safely' film. Not to be confused with another 1973 film with the same title.
An animated short film from Stan Vanderbeek.
Live-action footage of canaries and beachgoers overlaid with hand-painted effects.
When a housewife's girlfriends take her to a male strip club for her birthday, she brings back more than memories.
An animated short film created by the artist Jeff Scher.
Played on a distant television screen in the dark (with some additional zooms by Lawler), 'Runaway' mainly consists of looped footage of what looks like a Fleischer or Terry cartoon, in which a group of dogs, intrigued by surrounding sounds, run to the left of the screen, and then to the right, back and forth, while a frenzied, spiraling organ score plays over the top. The scene eventually begins to warp and disintegrate. The result is equal parts mind-numbing and hypnotic.
'Associations' sets language against itself by using the ambiguities inherent in the English language. Images from magazines and color supplements accompany a voice-over reading from the book 'Word Associations and Linguistic Theory' by academic linguistic Herbert H. Clark. Combining a wry sense of humor with word/visual games and puns, Smith explores the boundaries of cinematic montage by combining elements together and against each other in order to destroy and create multiple meanings at the same time.
1905 short film showing people walking down a Ljutomer street after mass.
16 mm, color, silent, 5:25 or 15 min. "Optically printed Pythagoreanism in four movements supported on squares, circles, grillwork, and triangles with an interlude concerning an experiment."
This scene is a part of the very first film shot produced by the Manaki Brothers. Despina, the Janaki and Milton Manaki's grandmother, was recorded weaving in one high-angle shot. For no apparent reason, the first shot made in Macedonia, in the Balkans in fact, made by these two cinematography pioneers, contains peculiar symbolics: at the moment when the grandmother Despina spins the weaving wheel, film starts rolling in our country.
New York, travelers descent of the Brooklyn Bridge
This two-color (green-blue and red) film was produced as a demonstration reel at the Paragon Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, under the direction of Kodak scientist John Capstaff. It features leading actresses, including Mae Murray, Hope Hampton, and Mary Eaton, posing and miming for the camera to showcase the capability of the complex Kodachrome process to capture their translucent movie star complexions and colorful, high-fashion clothing. (loc.gov)
