Andrew Reichel

Andrew Reichel is a film archivist, programmer, and writer based in New York City.

Andrew Reichel participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Andrew Reichel’s submission:

My own general policy has always been that 40 minutes is the dividing line between short and feature, and I chose to keep that policy here—I simply cannot view Sherlock Jr. as a short film when it’s so much substantially longer than any other Keaton that’s shorter than it, and many an experimental filmmaker has used that running time as the benchmark to separate a relative sprawler from a miniature. Something like Twice a Man being considered a shorter film is too alien to me. So, a brief apology to all the borderline contenders: the two aforementioned films, Flaming Creatures, S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED, Wavelength, From the Notebook of…, and many others in that running time window. It also feels ridiculous to leave off Brakhage in general, but including anything else would just be a stand-in for the ineligible Dog Star Man.

— Andrew Reichel

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
79 Springs 79 Primaveras	Santiago Álvarez	Cuba	1969	25’
This era gave birth to a new heart, but the future is still in jeopardy.
Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia	Hollis Frampton	USA	1971	36’
One of those cases where an established classic feels so intensely personal to my experiences that I sometimes wonder what everyone else is seeing in it. How many other people grew up with a father who was a bullying control freak about his constant family photos?
On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?	Owen Land	USA	1977	18’
Land’s study of how one thing can become another entirely rivals the best of Godard for scabrous wit and volume of ideas. Sex dreams mutate with the subconscious, jokes shift on their punchlines or lack thereof, pandas pander, structural film gets deconstructed, Christianity locks horns with Freud, marketing double talk turns into a prediction of The Vapors.
Outer Space	Peter Tscherkassky	Austria	1999	11’
In my opinion we’re well overdue for someone to ask Barbara Hershey for her thoughts on this (it’s probably the last experimental short to have some mainstream cache!), but Tscherkassky told me “let sleeping dogs lie…” on that matter, so make your own judgment calls on who is right.
Report	Bruce Conner	USA	1967	13’
The most angry and mournful of Bruce Conner’s deconstructions of how the American soul has been replaced by a television set.
Scorpio Rising	Kenneth Anger	USA	1964	27’
Has any other film managed to make the Brill Building sound like a particularly thrilling prison musical? The one experimental film that’s probably made a boatload of money, for being the most pleasurable to watch on top of its thrillingly sordid amplification of masculinity.
The Secret Garden	Phil Solomon	USA	1988	18’
Turn the light on and try not to blink.
Sodom	Luther Price	USA	1989	16’
Is it a raw wound, a vortex, or an orifice to be fucked? You won’t come out the same no matter which, but you might die of pleasure.
Variations	Nathaniel Dorsky	USA	1998	24’
One generally responds to Dorsky films based on the strength of the imagery and how it interlocks, and this imagery originally being intended as nothing but some spare material for the also-excellent Triste boggles the mind. Apple veins explode with eroticism, rainy car windows turn into a prism, and there’s a shot of a plastic bag that you may have heard a thing or two about.
Watersmith	Will Hindle	USA	1969	32’
The West Coast scene generally benefited from a bit of sprawl to encompass all their techniques and technical trickery, which is probably why my favorite films by Bruce Baillie, Robert Nelson, and Pat O’Neill weren’t eligible for this. Will Hindle’s lengthiest film is a relatively trim half hour, but its updates and expansions upon the technical whizzery of Jean Vigo’s Taris for the Aquarian Age provide enough rippling colors and bubbling tape music to make most other films look positively skimpy.