The Great Oscar Baiter

Full disclosure fellow Oscar Baiters- we got a weird one today. I'm talking weird weird. This might actually be the weirdest film we've looked at in our Year in Shorts. And we have looked at some weird films! But today's film, the 1973 Oscar-winning short Frank Film, might just be the height of surreal, experimental filmmaking. I haven’t the foggiest idea what it means. All I know is that I like it quite a bit. And I think you just might like it too! (via TV Tropes) Directed by Caroline and Frank Fouris (Frank, the titular Frank of Frank Film, also narrates the short), Frank Film is both fairly easy and incredibly difficult to summarize. There's no real plot to speak of her, with the core of the film being Frank reciting an autobiographical story while images from his magazine clippings collection provide some visual aid for what he's saying. ( Frank Film 's origins as a creative outlet for the director's random collection is one of the many things it ...

Ask any cinephile what the best decade for filmmaking was, and there’s a very good chance they’ll answer with the 1970s. And it’s not very hard to see why. The era of New Hollywood resulted in an unprecedented amount of creative freedom from studio projects, resulting in such classic films as The Godfather, Chinatown and Star Wars. But of course, just because great films were being released in those days doesn’t change the fact that they made a lot of crap, too. It’s just that the crap doesn’t get remembered. Case in point- the 1971 animated short, The Legend of John Henry. (via Film Affinity) Directed by Sam Weiss, The Legend of John Henry is not the first animated short to be made about its titular folk hero; it's not even the first to be nominated for an Oscar! But it is definitely the most 70s, for better or for (mostly) worse. Set to an original song performed by Roberta Flack, The Legend of John Henry uses limited animation and a funky beat to tell one of America's m...