Jefferson Crawford

Peter Nestler’s films are so enigmatically simple; straddling a border between ethnographic documentary and materialist experimentation, his sense of physical space and the ‘camera-eye’ is exquisite and hypnotic. “Am Siel” swaddles you in the dark night and swirling mists of the mud flats; at one time I was watching this film every night before bed.

Peter Nestler was an acolyte of the indomitable Jean-Marie Straub and his partner Daniele Huillet, whose films pushed the materialist cinema into new terrains of political and philosophical thought. Straub’s films after the death of Daniele in 2006 are brusque, shot digitally, and forcefully inventive. “La Guerre d’Algerie” fashions a tense narrative from a single frame, a single pose of a man with a gun in the style of D.W. Griffith’s “Biograph" shorts. Using only three shots (this posed theatrical moment, a black frame, and the cover of a book on psychotherapy), the film weaves a cataclysm of colonial repercussions.

Joseph Cornell is most famous for his delicate found object boxes, which are dioramas of fantasy and dream, but his films, many of which are also “found,” are perhaps more mythical. “Rose Hobart” is ostensibly a “fan edit,” made from shots of the eponymous actress pulled from her film “East of Borneo” and set to a selection of nondescript “exotica” music—Cornell would drop the needle himself during screenings—but the effect is something like lucid dreaming. Another film that I watch before bedtime, to get ahead of my own dreaming.

Peter Greenaway’s early shorts are formal experiments disguised as short documentaries, made while he cut his teeth at the BBC. Seen as a collection they show his developing style, which translated Eisensteinian montage into verbose, quixotic, indexical narratives. “Vertical Features Remake” is perhaps the most accomplished—both formally and conceptually—of his early films, but “Water Wrackets” sticks most in my mind. On its surface it is a simple nature documentary, but through the narration and a blind faith in myth making, it slyly becomes a surreal, Borges inspired history of an alternate world.

Peter Kubelka’s entire filmography could be considered a short film, coming in around 58 minutes. Though “Arnulf Rainer” is most discussed, “Adebar” is perhaps the “most” perfect of his films; constructed on mathematical and materialist principles, “Adebar” is a metonymic Greek temple constructed out of celluloid.

Part performance piece, part psycho-sexual documentation of bohemian New York, part filmic tapestry woven from brilliant celluloid blues and caressing crossfades, “Chumlum” is easily one of the most visually pleasing films ever made.

A number of Ralph Steiner’s films arguably belong on this list, whether it be the poetically scientific “H20,” or the avant-garde industrial film “Mechanical Principles.” But for me his later work strikes even more of a balance between the quasi-newsreel form he’d developed with NYkino, and the quiet, transcendental observations he imbued with his camera-eye. “Look Park” is an extremely simple seeming film, but the photography of the shimmering river water would have been painstaking, and the rhythmic structuring of the whole has a certain metrical purpose.

Joyce Wieland is one of the most overlooked of avant-garde filmmakers. Her “Reason without Passion” is one of the greatest experimental features, and it has similar techniques and formal approaches that mark “Solidarity” as unique. The camera here feels like a cast off eye, prowling along the ground as voices of protest are raised all around. Yet the film stands side by side with the striking workers, joining them in its own way. One of the most unusual, and yet effective, of labor films.

For the purposes of this list I have excluded many seminal early films, such as the Biograph masterpieces of D.W. Griffith (“Musketeers of Pig Alley,” “A Corner in Wheat”), or the two-reel comedies of Buster Keaton. I did so only out of a desire to highlight later films that were more or less fringe ventures, films that were short because of content, purpose of form, or exclusion from Hollywood, etc. “The Life and Death of 9413” is a perfect joining of these realms, however, and stands-in as an indicator of the cross-influence of major film directors and avant-garde pioneers. Robert Florey would go on to direct films such as “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” while “9413” would inspire filmmakers like James Sibley and Maya Deren. It brilliantly dramatizes the precarity of a rapidly accelerating film business and does so with incredible attention to form and style.

It seems impossible to leave Stan Brakhage off of a list of the greatest short films. He is perhaps the single most influential American filmmaker, for having defined and redefined what the American avant-garde could be, but also for resetting our cinema’s eyes. Even Martin Scorsese has cited him as an influence. Of his roughly four-hundred films, “Anticipation of the Night” is one of my very favorites. It is the longest film on this list, and even only at 42 minutes, in my mind it is a feature film. Without words, without sound and hardly without a fully representational image, it captures the narrative of an entire life—of life and death as ideas. Made almost entirely in-camera, with no added effects—unlike other masterpieces like “Dog Star Man”—“Anticipation of the Night” is an astounding lesson in the elasticity of cinema.