Staring at the DVD Shelf, issue #2

As I sit at stare at the DVD shelf, I realize how lucky and important this digital medium is for short film makers. Outside countless film festivals, DVD has been playing an important role in having some of these great works seen. Yeah, I know about Youtube, but I'm talking about real short film makers, not cell phone camera frat boys.

In an age, which many films and film editors, try to keep our short attention span, through ultra fast edits and hype visual style, you'd think a short film would be ideal for our current fast paced lives and ADD culture. A short film usually ranges from as long as 45mins to down as short as a minute.

Leading the way in getting short films seen, is Magnolia Home Entertainment, who has begun producing a collection of the year's Academy Award nominated short films. Here's an amazing chance to see these shorts and support a dying craft, or atleast in the Academy's eyes. If you watched the Oscar's this year, the winners of the three categories-live action, animation, and documentary-gave rousing speeches on the importance of short films. The Academy has threatened to rid itself of those three categories from the Oscars. So leading the charge to save short films is, Magnolia Home Entertainment. Thier newest disc, which came out on May 1st, is a collection from the 2006 Oscar nominated short films. A nice selection. They couldn't get three of the Animated nominated shorts, due to rights issues since they were produced by major studios, but you can find them on DVD anyway. This year's selction is rather mixed, but a must buy is A Collection of 2005 Academy Award Nominated Short Films which features some really outstanding short subjects like Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, Badgered, Six Shooter, but this year's disc features some great Sundance hyped shorts like One Rat Short and A Gentlemen's Duel.

Another important disc to cop, especially if sci-fi or horror is your thing is Synapse's Small Gauge Trauma. This disc celebrates the ever popular Fantasia Film Festival in Toronto, CA 10 year anniversary with some of those 10 year's best shorts to grace the fest's screens. I'll See You In My Dreams is a riot. In a small Spanish town, one man fights to save the population from zombies. doesn't sound to inventive, but the cinematography, the pacing, and the FX are top notch, with sly in jokes for fans of the zombie genre. The Separation is a beautifully stop motion animated short about the horrors of losing your closest kin, Love from Mother Only is perhaps the scariest and creepiest short here, featuring gore and possesion, and Tea Break feature a rather clever one note joke at the end. There's a lot of other great shorts here too: Miss Greeny (the shortest film is the funniest and stupidiest); Ruta Destroy (a bizzare musical); Chambre Juana (a beautiful Argento rip off), and Flat-n-Fluffy (a preverse animated, drugged out short). They're planning a sequel disc and I can't wait. It's a collection of artists around the world and features off beat, wierd, and horror films. A must see. Unlike the Magnolia disc, this does have extra material like audio commentaries, deleted scenes, and interviews.

If horror is your thing, then seek out Unearthed's Aftermath/Genesis, a collection of three shorts by an up and comer named Nacho Cerda. Aftermath is a highly controversial short that features no dialogue, beautiful camera work, and ultra realistic gore. It's a study of human emotions about death. What's worse than death? It's a ahlf an hour long, but as brutal and scary as any 90 mintue film I've ever seen. A girl dies and is taken to the coroner's room. That's all I'm saying about it. It's really incredible but borderlines what is acceptable to show and does it mean more than it shows? Its controversial and will include many arguements on people who see it. Genesis is sorta a sequel to it, but isn't as gorey. It's still highly inventive and gorgeously shot. The dvd has hours of extras, good extras that help further the understanding of what the director was trying to do and accomplish.

Kino has been a short film supporter for awhile now with great discs like Avant Garde Cinema from 1915-1945, which has uber rare shorts from Dali, Orson Welles, and others, Phantom Museums a powerhouse collection of the Brothers Quay stop motion epics featureing all their key shorts, and the Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer, a wonderful animator who rivals Harryhausen in craft and skill.

Other great short film dvds are: Short films of David Lynch, Dramalical: Web Shorts of David Lynch (a wonderful look into Lynch's mind), Fangoria's BloodDrive II (a great collection of newbie short horror films), and the 75th Annual Academy Award Nominated Short films (that features the Chubchubs! and how to get your short seen by the Academy).

There are many other great shorts not on dvd or are on other dvds that feature a movie and have the short as a bonus. To see George Lucas student short Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138:4EB you'll need to get the 2 disc special edition of THX-1138, his first movie, in case you didn't know. Or to see David Crinenberg's remorseful short Camera, you have to get the Criterion Collection's version of Videodrome.

There's so many shorts, and I haven't even covered or ranted about the lack of support fro documentary short subject not getting seen. If the Academy cuts those three categories, its their own fault. DVDs help survive shorts, but instead of bulldozing us with Coke comercails and other nonsense before a movie at the theatre, how about showing us a short film?

Until next time, press play.