Legendary African-American #vaudeville performer Johnny Hudgins – in historically correct Blackface – plays an African explorer who descends onto 2028 Paris to learn about the primitive ways of the white natives. Soon, he discovers the Charleston.

“I have finally discovered my ancestors' traditional dance.”

– Johnny Hudgins

A fantastic Afrofuturist short, made a decade before Sun Ra's trip to Saturn.

“People should fall in love with their eyes closed.”

– Andy Warhol

Filmed at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

“Now, we'll just let nature take its course.”

– researcher

A fascinating overlap with The Savage Eye (1959), a film #Godard must have been familiar with in 1962.

“Maybe I'll get into the movies.”

– Nana

Filmed on location in New York City, with still photography by Arthur “Weegee” Fellig and others. Weegee was a press photographer known for his stark black-and-white crime scene #photography in the city's seedy underbelly.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

– narrator

23 actresses and one person in drag play the part of Québécois waitress Françoise Durocher in seven monologues.

“One grilled cheese, two slices of toast, two coffees. One pepper steak no chili and a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Two glasses of milk. One plate of spare ribs. A chicken in a basket with three cups of honey. One lean smoked meat sandwich with pickles and mustard. One two-cream coffee and two club sandwiches. Two clubs.”

– Françoise Durocher

Watch the short on the NFB website.

Twelve-year-old Edmund – the oldest kid to survive – works to support his whole family including his sick bedridden father while the remains of what was a thousand-year empire lies in rubbles around them.

– I don't go to school anymore.

– Why not? You don't like the new teachers?

– I have to work now.

Following Roma città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1946) of #Rossellini's unofficial war trilogy.

In mere hours, a disaster involving a bus and a truck is bound to happen. The story meanders from the bus passengers to the truck drivers, while the road stretches out before them.

In the small East Flemish villages inhabited by non-actors, where the story takes place, one day, a vagrant shows up. The villagers say he has the evil eye. Mills burned and harvest cursed, they say. The man is cursed, by a deep sense of guilt, over something from the past that slowed down time.

De tweede politieagent: “Jean, hebt ge ze?” [het spel vertraagt]

– Herman Teirlinck, De vertraagde film (1922)

Het kwade oog occupies that small frozen moment between sound and silence. With an acute sense of what's possible in cinema, even more than in literature and theatre, Dekeukeleire applies what he had Eisenstein seen do to with his interpretation of Brecht's episches Theater (“epic theatre”).