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Flix for Short is Flixist’s way of showing off awesome short films we find around the web. Do you have a favorite short you saw? Why not tell us about it in our Cblogs? We’d love to see what short films you can make and find!
Jem Cohen‘s 1996 film Lost Book Found follows the film’s narrator as he recounts his day-to-day life as a hot dog vendor on the streets of 1990’s New York city. The narrator eventually comes into contact with a man who makes a living by “fishing” for items (coins, jewelry) through sewer grates. The fisher-guy lets the narrator borrow a book that he has full of strange lists, “page after page of places, objects, incidence” all of which have something to do with the city . . . The film itself is described as a portrait of New York as inspired by Walter Benjamin, a 20th century philosopher who wrote such famous works as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“.
I love this film. I saw it about a year ago and haven’t ever forgotten about it. I personally am always obsessing over details in environments or trying to solve completely fictitious mysteries in my mind. So if I ever came into contact with a book like the one in this film, well let’s just say I’d be pretty intrigued. I also just love how the film takes this simple event – the finding of a book – and turns it into a transcendental journey of social commentary.
[via Youtube]The above video is actually a ten minute excerpt from the 35 minute long film. (35 minutes is still considered a short film.) While I would always encourage people to view things in their uninterrupted entirety, this is probably the best ten minutes to clip, because you really get every nuance of the longer film in this short version.