70's Foreign Horror Shorts

LA CABINA
(1972)
Dir - Antonio Mercero
Overall: GOOD

This Spanish production directed and co-written by Antonio Mercero first aired in December of 1972 in its native country, later getting rebroadcast by the BBC during the 80s.  La cabina, (The Telephone Box), is rather ingenious in design.  Full of what could be seen as anti-Fascist and degrowth symbolism, the film very cleverly skews such things while at the same time slowly morphing between one genre to another as it goes on.  The barren structure is a bit tedious at times, (there is very little that actually happens and one could argue that it is perhaps just a few minutes too long), but the deliberate way Mercero escalates dread as he begins to step away from the humorous start is quite engaging to say the least.  Played out almost in real time, once it is clear what the fate of our protagonist is, we realize it the moment he does and this becomes appropriately puzzling and terrifying.

LA FEMME QUI SE POUDRE

(1972)

Dir - Patrick Bokanowski

Overall: GOOD

 

The debut from French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski, La femme qui se poudre, (The Woman Who Powders Herself), is impenetrably surreal.  An endlessly flowing stream of deliberately obscured visuals which mix live action and both conventional and stop-motion animation, the shots are difficult enough to decipher on a purely visual level let alone a contemplative one.  The soundtrack is void of dialog, but the score by Bokanowski's wife Michèle plays a pivotal role in establishing the quite menacing and strange tone.  Since there is no narrative cohesion or structure, it is a purely cinematic endeavor and there are some marvelously stark, captivating, and eerie images and sounds to take in.  Bokanowski's experimental work would continue in such challenging directions and though his initial offering here is frustrating in many respects, it is all the same admirable in its boldness and disturbed beauty.

A CHILD'S VOICE
(1978)
Dir - Kieran Hickey
Overall: GOOD

Though this is remarkably akin to the numerous BBC ghost stories that were regularly aired throughout the 60s and 70s, A Child's Voice was actually produced by a film studio in Dublin Ireland, BAC Films.  Since it fits so utterly perfectly with such things as England's A Ghost Story for Christmas entries, this also means that it is quite superb.  As the directorial debut, (and only short), from Irish born Kieran Hickey, it is also narrated by Valentine Dyall, the "British Vincent Price", a voice actor who was made famous for portraying the Man in Black on radio in the 1940s.  This is another one where no incidental music is used and it tells a very simple, open-ended, predictable, and highly spooky story that is made all the more chilling by the low-key manner in which it is presented.  It is really all in the delivery where these types of things are concerned and the perfect, very subtly foreboding mood effortlessly sells it here.

HARPYA
(1979)
Dir - Raoul Servais
Overall: GOOD

Belgium filmmaker/animator Raoul Servais' most celebrated short, Harpya is an amusing and interestingly made work.  It would win the Palme d'Or at Cannes that year and be the last short that he would make for nearly two decades.  Servais shot his actors in front of a velvet black backdrop and used multiplane film to then animate them in a deliberately jerky fashion, an understandably painstaking process that nevertheless comes off remarkably well.  Meanwhile, the backgrounds or "sets" are sparse and stylized in an equally half-photograph, half-cartoon manor.  Harpya is anything but scary, though it is eerie from a visual standpoint which qualifies it enough to be included in the horror camp.  The story uses the mythological harpy creature as an annoying and sinister "pet" who is relentlessly hungry and it plays out pretty funny without the use of any dialog.  Nothing to keep you up at night, but a pretty fun, creative outing to be sure.