1961-01-01
N/A
7 min
Arthur Lipsett's first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice." The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.
This is quite a feat of editing as it pulls together a fairly quick-fired montage of still images of faces and places coupled with some very short snippets of video tape to illustrate an urban landscape that consists of all forms of humanity. Happy, sad, young, old, joyous and loads and loads of yawning. It's peppered with seemingly random sound bites but by the end you might get a sense of it's purpose? Are we all now just pre-occupied with convenience and our own small world? Like a society of ants only not remotely collaborative? It's not really a film, more a photographic exhibition with a point - but it's still worth a watch.
