🎬 #145 Narrative Experiments.

This week is a special week - with a little announcement. For the first time I’m recommending a film made by me. It’s a very, very, short short. Paired with this is one of my favourite Japanese filmmaker’s latest horror project - another form of narrative experiment that feels like the beginning of something much bigger.

Happy choosing, happy viewing

Bry

---

FILM ONE: CHIME

2024 Dir Kiyoshi Kurosawa
45 mins

Kiyoshi is a director whose films I’ve talked about before. He recently finished this 45 minute project that was used to launch a Japanese streaming service. It’s his first horror film in around 6 years or so and yet the horror descriptor doesn’t really apply to any of Kiyoshi’s ‘horrors’.

Like this other unsettling films, we’re witness to a world that feels blank and uncanny. A place that is normal and yet feels like a place where anything is possible. We’re disconnected, feeling the alienation that the characters in the story feel. His use of sound, the sound of equipment in the sterile spaces we call work and home, the sound of the urban environment that penetrates at every turn, make us feel like we’re just a piece in a much larger machine. And that oppressive sense of sound is all the more key in a film about an unheard sound that gets stuck in people’s minds and drives them to do unusual things.

I love his restrained approach to the darkest acts. The everyday feeling he applies to incredibly dramatic moments - together with an absence of score makes those moments stand out all the more. They’re shocking in their reality, in their normality. The usual tricks of cinematic storytelling are held back and we’re just sitting, looking at those things unfold before us with a cold, blank, numb stare.

TL;DR: Kiyoshi’s film accomplishes a lot in its short run time, it unsettles and disturbs with incredible restraint.

*Sadly the film was deleted from the link - I’ve tried searching for it but it doesn’t seem to be available anywhere as of yet, I’m hopeful it will be available soon and will update once I find it.

Fact: Chime premiered in the special presentation section of the Berlinale.

---

FILM TWO: DEVICITY

2024 Dir Me
35 seconds

One of the things I’m very grateful for is the motivation this newsletter has given me. It’s not something I expected when I started it, but the expectation of posting weekly has kept me to a very regular schedule right from the beginning. I wanted to apply the same thing to not just writing about films, but making them.

So from today, you can find the Video Shop companion YouTube channel. This is where I’ll post shorts, mids, and feature lengths. It’ll be a home to narrative experiments, a place to test out ideas. I hope you’ll check out this first film and hopefully it’ll give you a flavour for what to expect going forward.

I don’t want to talk much about the idea of the film or what it is because it’s so short - but it encapsulates a lot of thematic interests I have. Mainly the effect of technology on our lives and simple yet evocative imagery. Enjoy!

TL;DR: My short film looks at a world without us, only our devices.

*Available right here:

Fact: I shot this in a couple of early weekend mornings around London, no one was removed in post.