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Narrative
see all genres ›As short story is to novel, the narrative short is to the fiction feature: a storytelling miniature that can deliver maximum potency and detail within a minimalist expanse.
Discover Narrative Films
Genres / Short / Narrative
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At the Photographer's
In the early days of photography, it was necessary to remain perfectly still. Unfortunately, the protagonist of this film cannot seem to stop moving (much to the disappointment of the photographer). How much trouble can you create in only a minute? Enough.Start your free trial to watch
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Attention! Wolves!
With shades of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER, this unusual Soviet animation blends symbolic allegory and documentary photographs to warn against the persistent threat of fascism. A feral boy is found in the woods the same day that the Nuremberg Trials’ death sentences are carried out....Start your free trial to watch
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Automated Hat-Maker and Sausage-Grinder
Filmmaker Alice Guy creates something of an oddity with this one-minute comedy. An inventor and his assistant create a machine that, true to its title, makes hats and grinds sausages! The absurdity of the device is beside the point. Or, rather, it is the point.Start your free trial to watch
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The Automatic Moving Company
Historian Donald Crafton credits this 1911 Pathé Frères film THE AUTOMATIC MOVING COMPANY to Romeo Bosetti; it too is an imitation of an earlier work, Emile Cohl's MOBILIER FIDELE, made in 1910 for Pathe's rival, Gaumont. However, Cohl also worked for Pathe in 1911 and the two artists sometimes...Start your free trial to watch
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Ave Maria
Ivan Ivanov-Vano’s condemnation of the American war in Vietnam trades in some of the crude images one associates with Soviet propaganda: a soldier gunning down a child; clamoring capitalists superimposed over the killing fields. And yet its animation style is surprisingly subtle and its tone more elegiac than one might...Start your free trial to watch
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Away We Go
Bobby Vernon was a talented comic actor during the silent era, who became a writer and comedy supervisor at Paramount for W.C. Fields and Bing Crosby, when the sound era arrived. Here Vernon stars with Duane Thompson, Lila Leslie and Victor Rodman in a 1924 classic originally released as RENO OR BUST.Start your free trial to watch
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Babuba
Rock Ross described this breezy, frenetic work as "an original mambo-rap creation myth of chaos of vacation." Indeed, the film begins with the bold, declarative text, "In the beginning there was only Chaos." Nocturnal grown-up party scenes alternate with children posing, play-acting and frolicking on a beach. The chaos of...Start your free trial to watch
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The Back of Her Head
Josh Safdie made this assured comedy in and around his apartment building when he was still a film student at Boston University. The dioramic setup plays like a vertical REAR WINDOW: a shy daydreamer (played by Safdie) lives above an older Hindi man who lives above a reckless Brit who lives above a girl...Start your free trial to watch
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A Ballad About Green Wood
Split logs dance in sunlight as soon as the axe has cleared away. Czech folk music and time-lapse photography focus animistic energy upon clouds streaming across the sky, rivers raging with melted snow and the earth bursting with raw life. A mythic being born of wood and a crow flies through winter and...Start your free trial to watch
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Balloonland
Balloonland has appeared in many video collections, often under its 16mm home-movie title THE PINCUSHION MAN. Blackhawk Films Collection holds the original nitrate red/blue Cinecolor negatives, and this astonishing film is presented here with restored pictures and prepared in collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television...Start your free trial to watch
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The Bangville Police
Those bumbling Keystone Kops fly under the banner of the Bangville police force in this early Keystone comedy directed by journeyman Henry Lehrman. The film gleefully parodies the crosscutting structure pioneered by D.W. Griffith in films like THE LONELY VILLA (1909). In this case, the race to the rescue...Start your free trial to watch
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The Barnyard Brat
Disobedient donkey Spunky's pranks create havoc amongst the sheep, geese and chicks until he's publicly decried; a barnyard bully is not more appreciated than a schoolyard one. But when the livestock go a little overboard with retaliation, they invite the wrath of mommy mule. One of several Hunky and...Start your free trial to watch
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Baron Münchausen’s Dream
The legendary Baron Münchausen (an actual German aristocrat well-known for his exaggerated stories) has been portrayed many times in dozens of films over the years. In this telling by the equally remarkable Georges Méliès, Münchausen has spent an evening dining with his friends. He retires for the night...Start your free trial to watch
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The Battle
Unlike many of D.W. Griffith’s early Civil War melodramas, THE BATTLE focuses on actual combat. A Union soldier panics during his first fight and flees to his girlfriend's house. She bullies him back into harm's way as the balance of war begins to shift. Dynamic battle scenes jammed with uniformed extras anticipate Griffith's...Start your free trial to watch
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The Battle at Elderbush Gulch
Lillian Gish stars as a young wife-with-child, traveling by stagecoach, in this legendary D.W. Griffith short. When her group is attacked by Native Americans, things go from bad to worse as puppies go missing, children get kidnapped and the calvary comes to the rescue.Start your free trial to watch