Week 12 7:35 de la mañana Short Films / Documentaries
7:35 de la mañana. Nacho Vigalondo, 2003 7:35 de la Mañana Directed by
Nacho Vigalondo
Produced by
Eduardo Carneros
Written by
Nacho Vigalondo
Starring
Marta Belenguer Nacho Vigalondo
Music by
Fernando Velázquez
Cinematography
Jon Díez Domínguez
Editing by
Javier Diaz Vega
Release date(s)
2003
Running time
8 minutes
Country
Spain
Language
Spanish
The film is an eight-minute long black and white short that depicts a Spanish woman encountering a strange singing man in a coffee shop one morning. The strange man, who professes his love through the words of the song to a woman who turns up every day at 7:35 in the morning. The others in the cafe have prerecorded lines to say at points during the song and even a short dance routine. At the start of the film, the woman realizes that something is not right when sitting down; for one everyone is quiet and refusing to acknowledge her presence… Ignacio "Nacho" Vigalondo (born 06 April 1977 Cabezón de la Sal, Cantabria, Spain) is an Oscar-nominated Spanish filmmaker. In addition to receiving an Academy Award nomination and a Best Short Film Award nomination at the European Film Awards,
Vigalondo's 2003 short film 7:35 de la Mañana received the Bronze Moon of Valencia at the Cinema Jove - Valencia International Film Festival and the Prix UIP Drama at the Drama Short Film Festival. Vigalondo finished his first full length feature film, Los Cronocrímenes (English title: Timecrimes), in 2007 Sobre el corto Es una historia en la que, si no te convence el suspense, puedes reírte de los protagonistas, y si no te hacen gracia, puedes tararear la canción, y si no
te
gusta
la
canción,
puedes
alegrarte
recordando que sólo dura ocho minutos. Quise hacer un corto extremadamente divertido e inolvidable que, al menos a uno de cada diez espectadores, le hiciese pensar que nunca ha visto nada semejante. No me negarán que, como intención, no está nada mal. Sobre el rodaje Invertimos seis mil euros en un rodaje de dos noches y media. Con
todos
los
gastos
de
postproducción y copias hemos llegado a los dieciocho mil euros. Una locura absoluta teniendo en cuenta que era un rodaje con bastantes factores de riesgo. Por ejemplo, no quisimos simular una coreografía desastrosa, sino provocarla. La mayoría de los bailarines eran, efectivamente, conocidos no profesionales cuyo estado de confusión y nerviosismo era paralelo al de sus personajes en plano. Hicimos un par de cosas en el rodaje que no sabíamos si se habían hecho antes, si funcionarían o serían
un desastre, trucos bastante sutiles que, espero, ningún espectador se moleste en descubrir. Fue una locura. Cada vez que me acuerdo me vuelve el sudor frío. Recuerdo cómo en los momentos de mayor incertidumbre se me pasaba por la cabeza huir desesperado, volver al hogar materno... ¡Pero mi madre estaba también en el rodaje, cantando y bailando! About the Short Film This is a story, in which if you dont agree with the supense, you can just laught at the characters and if you don’t like the characters, you can sing the song and if you don’t like the song, you can celebrate that film is only 8 minutes long. I wanted to make a extremely funny and unforgetable short film, where at least one out of 10 viewers never will have seen something like that. You cant deny that, as I intented… the film… it is no so bad. About the shooting We spent 6000 euros and almost 3 days shooting. If we added the postproduction costs we spent 18.000 euros total. It was totally crazy, considering all the risk factors involved, this shooting was an absolute madness. For example, we didn’t want to simulate messy choreography yet rehearsed one. Most of the cast was not professionals but instead friends whose embarrasment and nervousness were at the same level as that of their characters. It was crazy. Every time I recall that shooting my body breaks out into a cold sweat. I remember how at times of the greatest uncertainty, I thought about running away returning to my mother’s house, but… my mother was also in the shooting, singing and dancing.
Short Films Short film is a technical description originally coined in the North American film industry in the early period of cinema. The description is now used almost interchangeably with short subject. Either term is often abbreviated to short (as a noun, e.g., "a short"). A trailer for a feature length film is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a "short" for the complete film. Although the North American definition generally refers to films between 20 and 40 minutes, the definition refers to much shorter films in Europe, Latin America and Australasia. In New Zealand, for instance, the description can be used to describe any film that has duration longer than one minute and shorter than 15 minutes. The North American definition also tends to focus much more on character whereas the European and Australasian forms tend to depend much more on visual drama and plot twists. In this way, the North American form can be understood to be a derivation of the feature film form, usually acting as a platform for aspirant Hollywood directors. Elsewhere, short films tend to work as showcases for cinematographers and commercial directors. Early period The term came to be applied in North America in the 1910s, when the majority of feature films began to be made in much longer-running editions. A typical film program came to be expected to include a feature preceded by one or more short subjects. Short subjects could be live action or animated. Comedy was particularly utilized and well-known comedians such as Laurel and Hardy, Charlie
Chaplin, Buster Keaton and others are known for their short films as well as their features. Animated cartoons likewise came principally as short subjects, as did newsreels. Less frequently, short subjects might be in the form of travelogues, human interest films or concert films. The form was so popular that virtually all major film production companies had fully-staffed special units assigned to develop and produce them, and many companies, especially in the silent and very early sound era, produced short subjects exclusively (e.g. Keystone Studios, Atlas Educational Film Co., E. W. Hammons's Educational Pictures). Short subjects/Film in the modern era Since the 1980s, the term "short subject" has come to be used interchangeably with "short film," an international, academic term used to mean
a
contemporary
non-commercial
motion picture that is substantially shorter than the average commercial feature film. There is no clear definition of the maximum length of a short film, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences classify it as 40 minutes, while the Internet Movie Database refer to any film lasting less than 45 minutes as a short subject. The short-film form is to the full-length film what the short story is to a full-fledged novel. Short films often focus on difficult topics which longer, more commercial films usually avoid. Filmmakers benefit from larger freedoms and can take higher risks, but they must rely on festival and art house exhibition to achieve public display. Film shorts are often a popular extra feature on a film's DVD. For instance, Pixar's DVD releases of its feature films typically includes not only a short that was
distributed with the feature film in its initial theatrical release but also an original creation featuring the characters from the feature itself. Likewise, Warner Brothers often includes selected animated shorts from its considerable archives on DVD releases of its family-oriented films that have a thematic relationship. Films such as S. Luciani's Dolls show how professional actors and crews still choose to create short films as alternative form of expression. Short films are often popular as first steps into the cinematic art among young filmmakers. They are cheaper and easier to make, usually don't take very long to produce, and their brevity makes shorts more likely to be watched by financial backers and others who want some demonstration of a filmmaker's ability (or, conversely, the format allows for more experimentation since most of them are unlikely to be seen by a wide audience). Short filmmaking is also growing in popularity among amateurs and enthusiasts, who are taking advantage of affordable equipment. "Prosumer" or semiprofessional cameras now cost under USD$3,000, and free or low-cost software is widely available that is capable of video editing, post-production work and DVD authoring. Very short films Very short films are sometimes considered as a category of their own. They are the film equivalent of microfiction, like the 60 Word Story. The International Festival of Very Shorts is a festival based in Paris which shows only films less than three minutes long. The format has various sub-categories: - Animated short - Documentary short subject - Experimental or abstract short films - Live action short - Musical short
- Soundies were an early version of the music video: three-minute musical films, produced in New York, Chicago, and Hollywood between 1940 and 1946, often including short dance sequences. - Sponsored: is film made by a particular sponsor for a specific purpose other than as a work of art: the films were designed to serve a specific pragmatic purpose for a limited time. The genre is composed of advertising films, educational films, industrial videos, police training films, social guidance films, and government-produced films. While some may borrow themes from wellknown film genres such as western film and comedies, what defines them is a sponsored rhetoric to achieve the sponsor's goals, rather than those of the creative artist - Travelogue: Travelogue films, a form of virtual tourism or travel documentary, have been providing information and entertainment about distant parts of the world since the late 19th century Short films can be classified based on storyline. There may be single, duo, triple or multi-version modes in picturizing a short film. Short films can be made to test new technologies and techniques.
DOCUMENTARIES The word documentary was first applied to films of this nature in a review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926 and written by "The Moviegoer" In the 1930s, Grierson further argues in his essay First Principles of Documentary that Moana had "documentary value." Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance,
though it presents philosophical questions about documentaries containing stagings and reenactments. In his essays, Dziga Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera). Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as "a factual film which is dramatic." Others further state that a documentary stands out from the other types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion, and a specific message, along with the facts it presents. Documentary Practice is the complex process of creating documentary projects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form, and production strategies in order to address the creative, ethical, and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentaries. There are clear connections in terms of practice with magazine and newspaper feature-writing and indeed to non-fiction literature. The filmmaker John Grierson used the term documentary in 1926 to refer to any nonfiction film medium, including travelogues and instructional films. The earliest "moving pictures" were, by definition, documentaries. They were singleshot moments captured on film: a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving work. Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. These short films were called "actuality" films. The term "documentary" was not coined until 1926. Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20th century. Some were known as "scenics". Scenics were among the most popular sort of films at the time. An important early film to move beyond the concept of the scenic was In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), which embraced primitivism and exoticism in a staged story presented as truthful reenactments of the life of Native Americans. With Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922,
documentary film embraced romanticism; Flaherty went on to film a number of heavily staged romantic films, usually showing how his subjects would have lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then. The continental, or realist, tradition focused on humans within human-made environments, and included the socalled "city symphony" films such as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a City (of which Grierson noted that Berlin represented what a documentary should not be), Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien Que les Heures, and Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera. These films tend to feature people as products of their environment, and lean towards the avant-garde. Cinéma-vérité or the closely related direct cinema was dependent on some technical advances in order to exist: light, quiet and reliable cameras, and portable sync sound. Cinéma vérité and similar documentary traditions can thus be seen, in a broader perspective, as a reaction against studio-based film production constraints. Shooting on location, with smaller crews, would also happen in the French New Wave, the filmmakers taking advantage of advances in technology allowing smaller, handheld cameras and synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfolded. Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are important differences between cinéma vérité (Jean Rouch) and the North American "Direct Cinema" (or more accurately "Cinéma direct", pioneered among others by Canadians Allan King, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault, Americans Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Frederick Wiseman and Albert and David Maysles). The directors of the movement take different viewpoints on their degree of involvement with their subjects. Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choose non-involvement (or at least no overt involvement), and Perrault, Rouch, Koenig,
and Kroitor favor direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary. The films Primary and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (both produced by Robert Drew), Harlan County, USA (directed by Barbara Kopple), Dont Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker), Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor), Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch) and Golden Gloves (Gilles Groulx) are all frequently deemed cinéma vérité films. The fundamentals of the style include following a person during a crisis with a moving, often handheld, camera to capture more personal reactions. There are no sit-down interviews, and the shooting ratio (the amount of film shot to the finished product) is very high, often reaching 80 to one. From there, editors find and sculpt the work into a film. The editors of the movement — such as Werner Nold, Charlotte Zwerin, Muffie Myers, Susan Froemke, and Ellen Hovde — are often overlooked, but their input to the films was so vital that they were often given co-director credits. Famous cinéma vérité/direct cinema films include Les Raquetteurs, Showman, Salesman, Near Death, The Children Were Watching, Primary, Behind a Presidential Crisis, and Grey Gardens. Political weapons In the 1960s and 1970s, documentary film was often conceived as a political weapon against neocolonialism and capitalism in general, especially in Latin America, but also in a changing Quebec society. La Hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, from 1968), directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas, influenced a whole generation of filmmakers.
Box office analysts have noted that
this
become
film
genre
has
increasingly
successful in theatrical release with films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, Earth, March of the Penguins, and An
Inconvenient
Truth
among the most prominent examples. Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which make them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable. The nature of documentary films has changed in the past 20 years from the cinema veritĂŠ tradition. Landmark films such as The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris incorporated stylized re-enactments, and Michael Moore's Roger & Me placed far more interpretive control with the director. Indeed, the commercial success of these documentaries may derive from this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries; critics sometimes refer to these works as "mondo films" or "docu-ganda." However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form. Although the increasing popularity of the documentary genre, and the advent of DVDs, has made documentaries financially more viable, funding for documentary film production remains elusive. Within the past decade the largest exhibition opportunities have emerged from within the broadcast market, making filmmakers beholden to the tastes and influences of the broadcasters who have become their largest funding source. Modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms, with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged. The making-of documentary shows how a movie or a computer game was produced. Usually made for
promotional purposes, it is closer to an advertisement than a classic documentary. Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment prices. The first film to take full advantage of this change was Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, where 150 DV cameras were sent to Iraq during the war and passed out to Iraqis to record themselves. GENRE Animated documentary Concert film Docudrama Docufiction Documentary mode Documentary Practice Ethnofiction Ethnographic film Mockumentary Mondo film Nature documentaryď€ Political Cinema Reality film Rockumentary Travel documentary Visual anthropology Women's Cinema‌