By Nathan Kouri
Inspired by the social and curatorial magic of Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Française, the Bijou Blog Youtube ciné-club is a regular series gathering moving images marvels from across the internet, available for free, 10 minutes or less.
First Edition / MUST WATCH END!! (Edition Porcine)
In the inaugural edition of Bijou's YouTube ciné-club, we explore the connections between viral videos and early cinema recreations of vaudeville acts, between dropping your camera and dropping a lemon, between a camera stretching its mechanical limits and an audiovisual assault stretching the perceptual limits of the audience. With pigs. Two viral videos, a silent, a short Palme d'Or winner, and a music video. Program running time: 18.5 minutes.
When the Day Breaks (Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, 1999)
From the National Film Board of Canada, an anthropomorphic urban drama animated in painterly images, yet constantly in motion with rotoscoped camera movements and Impressionistic shudder, featuring a song by Martha Wainwright.
Sleeping Pig Wakes Up for a Cookie! (prissyandbomber, 2013)
Sleeping pig wakes up for a cookie.
Le cochon danseur / The Dancing Pig (Pathé Frères, 1907)
A bizarre early short recreating a vaudeville routine with an intricate mechanicalpig costume. You've never seen anything like this horrifying, technically impressive combination of funny, weird, creepy, and cute.
Camera falls from airplane and lands in pig pen--MUST WATCH END!! (2014)
Uploaded to YouTube on February 9, 2014 with the caption:
Camera falls from a sky diving airplane and lands on my property in my pig pen. I found the camera 8 months later and viewed the video.
This authorless(?) three-part video raises questions about physics, perception, digital cameras, and the mechanical reproduction of cinema in a flurry of gorgeous, mind-bending images. This distorted documentary is funny and gee-whiz enough to have gone viral as an internet curio.
Pigs (Black Dice, 2012)