1903: The Great Train Robbery

I guess you ought to have seen it once. In the end, someone shoots at the screen. (5)

1921: Manhatta

This silent ten-minute documentary, if you want to call it that, portrays a day in the life of Manhattan. Watching completely silent films (without music) is an experience I'm only getting used to, but it helps to look at the film as a series of animated photographs. "Moving pictures", you might say. (7.5)

1920: The Neighbors

The best Keaton short I've seen so far, with lots of cool stunts. A bit like The General, only shorter and without trains. (7)

1909: A Corner in Wheat

Evil capitalist gains control of the wheat market, as a consequence of which poor people can't buy bread anymore in Griffith's early short which, despite running for a little over 14 minutes, is too long. A must-see if you're writing a history of anti-market films. (4)

1942: Listen to Britain

Mashup of sounds and moving pictures recorded in wartime Britain. Meant as uplifting in a patriotic way and considered a classic, but strikes me as pointless. (3.5)

1943: Meshes of the Afternoon

Mirrors, knives, waves - this experimental short has the whole psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. It's easy to see how someone could call this "meaningless experimental crap", but I quite like its Latin feel - the grainy b/w recording of the sunlight -, the music (not that I'd buy it on CD) and the crude surrealism. (7)

1954: Thursday's Children

Not only is Lindsay Anderson's documentary about a school for deaf children boring, it also has voice-over narration that alternates between the usual third-person view and taking the (inauthentic) voice of the children ("We are deaf."). Bonus: Contains the remarkable assertion that if you don't have words, you cannot think. (4)

1960: Charlotte et son Jules

Upon the return of his ex-girlfriend into his flat, a young man starts a ten-minute monologue until the film comes to a predictable "surprise" ending. Pointless twelve-minute early Godard. (4)

1959: Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (All the Boys Are Called Patrick)

Godard shot this short a in the year before he did À bout de souffle, but, working from a script by Eric Rohmer, he naturally couldn't produce anything resembling a masterpiece. The story features a couple of female flatmates who go out one day to be chatted up seperately by the same guy, tell about it each other in the evenings, and guess what happens at the end. Exactly the same story, with genders reversed, was made into the excrutiating rap song "Die da" by Die Fantastischen Vier about forty years later, the lyrics having the decisive advantage that it's unclear until the end that the two friends are talking about the same person. Well. (5)

1924: Paris qui dort (At 3:25)

René Clair's half-hour silent about a group of people who are the only ones awake and moving in a Paris that has otherwise come to a standstill is a mixture of the charming and the lengthy. (6)

1903: Alice in Wonderland

The fragment of the first-ever film version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (more info) is a bit weak in terms of overall narrative structure, the growth-shrink scene is too long and, worst of all, the cheshire cat is badly miscast! (5)

1920: Convict 13

Buster Keaton finds himself in a convict's uniform, and soon he's in a prison and about to be hanged. Rioting and lots of standard silent comedy jokes, in particular people falling down. Not the reason Keaton's famous. (5.5)

1897: Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer

I like it! (7.5)

1922: Daydreams

In this 22-minute fragment of a short, Buster Keaton writes home misleading letters to his sweetheart - when he writes about his success on Wall Street, it means he's actually cleaning it, etc. More than most old comedies this one suffers from its visual jokes having become not simply commonplace, but cliché. Reasonably entertaining nonetheless. (6)

2006 (?): The Easter Bunny Hates You

I may or may not have seen this before, but anyway Drek points me to this near-masterpiece just in time. Judge for yourself . . .



. . . I'm giving it 7.5 points, which puts it slightly above Citizen Kane.

1917: His Wedding Night

It is not quite clear what the general idea was when this Fatty Arbuckle vehicle was conceived, although in the end Buster Keaton is kidnapped while drunk and wearing a dress. Features an illustration of discriminative pricing and mental rotation deficiencies on the part of the filmmakers or the targeted audience. (5)

1962: Vive le Tour

Louis Malle's eighteen-minute documentary explaining the Tour de France is not particularly interesting. (5.5)

1917: The Rough House

A silent comic short featuring the usual silent comic short ado and the only film I can think of the trivia about which is more interesting than the film itself (6.0). From IMDb:

• Directorial debut of Buster Keaton.
• Buster Keaton hadn't yet solidified his "Great Stone Face" persona; he smiles, laughs, grimaces, and smirks.
• Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle performs a prototype of the "dancing dinner rolls" that Charles Chaplin used in The Gold Rush (1925). Until "The Rough House" - thought to be lost - was rediscovered, Chaplin was credited with creating the gag.

1917: The Butcher Boy

Buster Keaton debuts in a minor role while Fatty and Slim, rivals for the heart of the same girl, both cross-dress to sneak into her school. Features a dog, lots of violence, and an attempted kidnapping. (6.5)

2009: Logorama

The Oscar-nominated short, packed with as many corporate logos as would fit into a quarter of an hour, isn't just visually attractive in a brightly-coloured, in-your-face way, but also a nicely structured police-and-thieves story. Just overlook the sixth-graders style social criticizm. (7)