Week 5 (Tutorial)

This lesson we needed to find three short films with a maximum duration of ten minutes.

The first one I found was on YouTube. Entitled: 'The Strangers', it's a foreign film which has won a few awards and has proven to be quite succesful on YouTube, having over 600,000 views which is an impressive feat. The general outline for the short film is a man who boards the subway and finds himself sitting across from a Jewish man. He himself is Jewish, which strikes a problem when a group of Neo-Nazis come over and sit down next to them. In the end the two of them escape the subway and part ways. This short thriller has no dialogue, but still manages to employ an effective and suspenseful storyline:



The second short film is entitled: 'Black Button'. Also popular on YouTube, having been viewed over 1,000,000 times, this film has also received awards. It's a short film, with one word to describe it: disturbing. A man is sent to purgatory with a choice: either, he pushes the black button and receives ten million dollars, but in turn, kills an innocent person. Or he takes the key and leaves the room immediately. Little does the man know until he decided to push the black button that it will condemn him to hell based on his decision of greed and selfishness, as opposed to the key which would lead him to salvation, in other words, 'heaven'. Heavy stuff, but a clever and insightful short film:



For the third short film, also found on YouTube, it's called: 'Killing Time'. Not as popular as the other two short films, but still successful nonetheless. Basically, it's a man who destroys about ten pocket watches against the wall and then the whole short film is played backwards to that all the clocks are restored to their normal state. I'm not entirely sure about the point of this film but if i had to take a guess it would be an example of taking the metaphor of 'killing time' literally. Interesting I suppose, but a little wierd:



The reason why I chose these films, apart from the fact that they were easy to find was that they were all very abstract and clever. They are very insightful and not pointless, they have values and morals embedded which is always important.