A festive child for Las Posadas

“Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.”

– Joseph Cornell

Children of all ages are entertained by a menagerie of dancers, acrobats, talented fauna and bobbing apples in this exhilarating found-footage party. Part of The Children's Trilogy, together with Cotillion (c. 1938/1969) and The Midnight Party (c. 1938/1969).

A [favourite] Boris Karloff film*

“Well, as I said before, I say again, here's… Here's to a son… to the house of Frankenstein.”

– Baron Frankenstein

Zulueta's mycotoxic fever dream of Whale's Frankenstein.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

[Favourite] psychological horror*

“A premonition of a horror film”

– tagline

Real horror is not found in broken dinner plates or corpuscular masses of light. It's in what the mind does with that input, in how those lux morph into human-like shapes. In how gusts of wind becomes larynx-touched voices. Cut up the neatly filed research papers and be left with the whispers of the mind.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

Celebrating Dia de Los Muertos [on November 1 and 2, of course]: a cemetery, coffin, or dead person*

“When we began to compare the typically American, typically European, and typically Russian films, we noticed that they were distinctly different from one another in their construction. We noticed that in a particular sequence of a Russian film there were, say, ten to fifteen splices, ten to fifteen different set-ups. In the European film there might be twenty to thirty such set-ups (one must not forget that this description pertains to the year 1916), while in the American film there would be from eighty, sometimes upward to a hundred, separate shots. The American films took first place in eliciting reactions from the audience; European films took second; and the Russian films, third. We became particularly intrigued by this, but in the beginning we did not understand it.”

– Lev Kuleshov, The Principles of Montage, from The Practice of Film Direction (pp. 183-195) (source)

Director Lev Kuleshov explains what happens when a scene is followed by a reaction shot. Depending on the preceding image, the viewer projects an emotion onto the performer's facial expression. In his most famous montage, made up of existing footage – because property is theft, we see matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine “react” to a bowl of soup, a little girl in a coffin, and a woman sprawled out on a divan.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for August is not date-related but lists, for the most part, the colours of the rainbow.

A World War I film: a day in recognition of the forced deportations and genocide in Armenia, 1915 — 1923.

“Parfois ils disent que nos images sont esthétiques, mais nous disons que les images esthétiques sont des images hautement étiques. Pour nous éthique et esthétique marchent ensemble. Re-filmer signifie re-signifier.”

– Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi in conversation with Daniele Dottorini, 2007 (via)

Re-purposed propaganda reels show citizens – displaced, dehumanised – turned into prisoners of war, and finally into corpses.

January 21 redux: a film from 1984 on the date Orwell died (1950).

“The film is about observing, about glances that see without being seen, a dubious art of light and visibility.”

– Michael Klier, via

According to Harun Farocki, Der Riese was the first narrative film completely compiled out of surveillance footage.