Commissioned by the #PanAfrican literary magazine Présence Africaine to make a short film about African art, Chris Marker and his collaborator Alain Resnais – the latter still emboldened by his Van Gogh (1948) – were struck that unlike the Dutch painter's work, this #art was not on display in the Louvre or a similar cultural temple, but in the ethnological Musée de l'Homme.

“An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears. And when we disappear, our objects will be confined to the place where we send black things: to the museum.”

– narrator

These works of “Negro” art that embody such a deep cultural and artistic significance for the creators and the people they are part of, were, within the boundaries of Western civilisation, merely things. The editing (Alain Resnais), photography (Ghislain Cloquet) and dialogue (Chris Marker) bring life to these works. Through these voices they speak to the viewer, escaping the institutes' walls.

This voice was enough for the CNC to censor Les statues meurent aussi; only the first third of the film, the segment that's not blatantly #AntiColonial, was to be watched. And to this day, the documentary still has not seen a restored, digital release.

They say, the house always wins. In You the Better, the House is an unseen character. The other character – a constantly changing team of athletes wearing blue uniforms and caps and coached by artist Ashley Bickerton – play a baffling hybrid of craps, dodgeball, and roulette while arcade game noises and Brooke Halpin's catchy chants accompany the players. While You the Better suggests repetitiveness, a theme of winning, losing, and competitiveness reveals itself.

“HANDS UP PUT YOUR HANDS UP GIMME MORE GIMME GIMME MORE BETTER GIMME MORE”

– recurring chant

You the Better is part of Beckman's The Super-8 Trilogy, a multimedia art project that explores play in Western society.

Japanese author Yukio Mishima was, besides an aesthete, a fierce proponent of Japanese nationalism. In 憂國, based on his short 1960 story, Mishima plays palace guard Lt. Shinji Takeyama. Despite being one of the instigators of an ultra-nationalist coup, Takeyama decides he cannot overthrow the government as it would mean having to kill his friends and be disloyal to the Emperor. Returning home, he and his bride Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka) perform #切腹 (#seppuku / #HaraKiri), as in line with Takeyama's #samurai heritage.

Yūkoku is a #SilentFilm that plays out like #Noh #theatre, with an extreme emphasis on the beauty and love of death and loyalty respectively.

After Mishima's own seppuku in 1970, his widow ordered all copies of Yūkoku to be destroyed. In 2005, in Mishima's house, a pristine copy was uncovered in a tea box.

Dr. Tube (Séverin-Mars) invents a powder that distorts reality and promptly tests it out on some oblivious test subjects, who quickly can no longer recognise the world around them. The brilliance of La folie du Docteur Tube is its use of practical in-camera effects that makes us, the viewer, experience the hallucinogen.

This little folly by the great Abel Gance features Albert Dieudonné in a small part, who later would again work with Gance in his Napoleon (1927), as Napoléon Bonaparte.

This is one of the few (French) comedies from the time that I'm aware of with a Black character who is not a horrible racist stereotype or a white person in blackface. If you have any idea of who the professor's assistant is, please reach out on Mastodon.

Stressed?‽ Who's got time to be stressed when there's a business to be run!!? Tom Palazzolo's Jerry’s Deli is a great character study of not only a character, but a whole time period inhabited by characters. The titular Jerry is Jerry Meyer, owner and proprietor of a Chicagoan deli that happened to be right next to Palazzolo's film lab. You wanna eat? Now, eat! Wanna order? Whaddaya waiting for?? Order!! Roast beef on rye please.

“On RYE!?!”

– Jerry Meyer

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. Or a girl with a glue gun. Or skip the girl, get yourself a piece of cardboard, some foam latex, and a six pack of beer. Frank Grow's Red & Rosy is the embodiment of a special staple of #DIY culture that appears to be long-lost. Really kids, you don't need much of a budget. Or tomorrows latest equipment. The hottest Hollywood hotshot? Forget about it, ask your drunk uncle to yell at the camera for 10 minutes. You want authenticity? Tape some random medical footage straight from your teevee. Need a shot of adrenal juice?

Well, just watch this.

Science fiction may be one of those genres that's forever linked to the future and, depending on which side of 2000 you are at, either in a dystopian of utopian fashion.

An #Eiffel Tower watchman wakes up to find the world around him asleep. The few ones still awake – the bright, pretty, carefree things – explore, live and loot.

There's a handful of notable amateur films in the National Film Registry. One of them is the Zapruder film, another Sid Laverents' Multiple SIDosis.

“In terms of sheer entertainment value, I think that it demonstrated that one eccentric genius alone in his garage can rival the best of the Hollywood studios””

– Ross Lipman, UCLA Film & Television Archive restorationist

Sid Laverents was an airplane engineer and former one-man band vaudevillian who in his fifties joined the #SanDiego Amateur Moviemakers Club. One of his best-known outputs, Multiple SIDosis, took him and his 16 mm #Bolex four years and 1,900 feet of celluloid to make. In it, Sid – and a musical troupe made up of many overdubbed versions of himself – performs the popular and insanely catchy tune Nola.

Catch it here.