Some of you might recall the early pioneering days of cable television, when HBO was the one of a very few premium channel for which you needed to pay. HBO ran lots of short films as interludes between the feature films (having a limited number of features to run each month, and no original programming); shorts such as the “Power of Ten” discussed in this thread.
One short film that got heavy rotation was an art film, possibly a student film, that was basically a moving collage. The screen was filled with cut-out images that were rapidly shifting on the screen and being replaced by new images.
There were two simultaneous voiceovers (the same voice). The more prominent voiceover was the film-maker narrating his biography, telling salient facts about his life. The images that flashed on the screen all somehow corresponded to what was being told, and the onscreen images would change or be replaced in conjunction to what the film-maker was telling you at the moment. For example, the film-maker confesses to going through a period of being obsessed with pornography, and the screen becomes filled with a jumble of playboy centerfolds and porn stills.
The second voiceover (also the film-maker’s voice) represented his subconscious mind. It uttered a stream-of-conscious string of monosyllabic nonsequiturs.
I remember watching this short as a kid, and my parents & older siblings all remarking that they’d seen this before. It was apparently a fairly well-known work. But I haven’t seen or heard about it over two decades. Not even NYU film-school students I’ve talked to seem to know what I’m talking about. Does anybody else remember it?
