Synopsis
Bits of found film and different types of animation illustrate a classic chase scene scenario: A woman is abducted and a man comes to her rescue, but during their escape they find themselves in the enemy's secret headquarters.
2003 Directed by Virgil Widrich
Bits of found film and different types of animation illustrate a classic chase scene scenario: A woman is abducted and a man comes to her rescue, but during their escape they find themselves in the enemy's secret headquarters.
Mia Grigori, Shedon, Tainia, Быстрый фильм, FAST FILM, Μία Γρήγορη, Σχεδόν, Ταινία
Easily the best Humphrey Bogart film I've ever seen (I'm not a fan of the man) and one hell of a reinvigorating use of the cinematic medium! Something like Guy Maddin's scrapbook I imagine...
Enjoyable and often brilliantly realised manipulation of classic movie clips, cleverly undermining, by emphasising, the tropes of mainstream cinema, revealing the monstrosity of macho men manning fast trains, planes and automobiles, with a preponderance of damsels in distress, just the way the monster men like ‘em.
Fast Film may be the first true example of the idea and inventiveness of cinematic collage. Collage being used literally here rather than to describe avant garde cinema that may manipulate old footage. It is visually made to look like a papier-mâché art piece rendered out of classic Hollywood footage and genre archetypes. This particular sort of manipulation where one literally bends, rips and folds imposed scenes like bits of paper honestly works in form enough to tell a vague sense of a story.
Who knew you could make a film with Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, etc. all together in this day and age. Well Virgil Widrich did. His vision seems endless to the…
Collage of classic films sliced up and shuffled together to form an archetypal Hollywood tale of heroes, villains, and damsels in distress.
Bogie kisses Bacall who transforms into Astor as the film shudders and crinkles and splits into a patchwork of train cars and tropes. Hero-embossed horses chase trains while Blofeld's cat and Frankenstein's monster watch Indiana Jones hop aboard the ark convoy in search of Leigh and Kelly and Hepburn. Will Connery win? Will the swamp monster be vanquished? Will Hedren be saved? And what are Stan and Ollie doing there?
It's a fun and creatively edited amalgamation of Hollywood history and narrow storytelling traditions.
Does a great job of editing moments from classic films together, but at times, I found myself more invested in recognizing the films the clips were from rather than actually enjoying it as its own thing.
Part of my effort to watch at least one short film per day. Here is the list I am currently working through, with a random number generator determining the film each day. I will take recommendations for everything that's 40 minutes max.
So relentlessly clever and inventive that it seems churlish and pedantic to complain about limitations in source fidelity and the mix of digital and physical animation techniques that I found slightly nagging, but hey, churlish and pedantic is kind of my brand. Still essential viewing and will have at least three moments per minute that will delight cinephiles, hard to get that kind of dopamine delivery anywhere else.
FAST FILM depicts mainstream first-world cinema (and implicitly the first-world psyche) as a train wreck of narcissistic patriarchal ambition and a fever dream of paranoid desperation fronted by interchangeable sexualised avatars -- knowingly doomed, stoically defiant, irredeemably lost.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to gather Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Buster Keaton, Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, and others to rescue Janet Leigh, Eva Marie Saint, Honor Blackman, Grace Kelly, Mary Astor from Godzilla, Frankenstein's monster, various Nazis, screaming skulls, etc., while being chased in trains, cars, planes, and on foot. You do get to kiss the woman at the end. You have 14 minutes, and there will be paper mache involved.
I totally wasn't expecting that first moment where film breaks out of its two dimensions. The rest of it was fun too but couldn't possibly live up to that moment. And dare I say it... too much Indiana Jones?
An animated short that does for Cinema what DJ Shadow did for Hip Hop.
It is hard to stay focused on the narrative when there are so many movies being referenced along the way.
That skeleton turned into a fighter jet, heck yeah!
An impossibly dense paper cutout animation, with dozens upon dozens of classic films literally crashing and ripping into each other. Nothing makes sense, everything is chaos, and that’s okay because it’s freaking awesome.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/ciqtORD7N78