The Wide World of Shorts: Tango (1980, dir. Zbigniew Rybczyński, Poland)
by Matt Olsen
Short films are odd birds. They have an enormous amount of freedom in that, as long as the piece comes in under an hour, it can be almost anything – a succinct story with fully realized characters and narratives, unbridled experimentalism, a music video, proof of concept, or even a dirty joke. But nearly the only chance most people have to see a short in a theater is as part of compilation packages which are, in my experience, dispiritingly inconsistent in quality. The boundary-less world of streaming seems like the perfect venue to house shorts and there are hundreds (if not thousands) available to see across all the usual sites but they haven’t managed to find much of an audience there either. Even amongst rampant cinephiles, very rarely does a short film come up in conversation. I include myself in that category. So, they’re difficult to see, seldom discussed, and yet there are thousands of them. Seems like the perfect subject for a new weekly series. Over the next couple of months, I’ll highlight some which I think are worthy of your attention – should you be able to find them.
The first short film that I remember understanding as a standalone piece of cinema was the 1982 Academy Award winning Best Animated Short Film, Tango, from Polish director, Zbigniew Rybczyński. Though, “animated” is a bit misleading. The eight-and-a-half-minute fixed camera film takes place in a single room with three doors, an open window, a crib, bed, table and chairs, a wardrobe, and twenty-six tightly choreographed, recursive visitors.
Storyboard for Tango
It begins with an empty room. A ball, tossed through the window, lands on the floor. A boy pops his head up into the window’s frame, looks around, climbs over the sill, reclaims the ball, and climbs back out. Immediately, the ball is tossed through the window again and the sequence repeats itself. A woman enters carrying an infant, sits at a table, nurses the child for a moment, places the baby in the crib, and exits. And then, she reenters. The two sequences overlap each other but are perfectly timed such that the characters never occupy the exact same space at the exact same moment. Eventually, the room fills up to a total of twenty-six unique, coinciding but not communicating animations as scored to an increasingly chaotic soundtrack.
Even after reading a thorough explanation, my understanding of the technical practicalities of Tango’s creation remains limited to a best guess. The short appears to be constructed of cut-out prints of film-frame sequences. Think of it as a form of stop-motion animation but with flat photographs instead of three-dimensional figures. Like overlaid flipbooks. The composition has a beautifully analog imperfection with visible outlines, color changes, and occasional jitters that would never exist in a digital rendering. The flaws ground the film in reality to underscore just how incredible the construction was – according to the director, he worked for seven months, sixteen hours a day! Which is so much more difficult than seeking out one of the not absolutely great but still eminently watchable transfers currently on YouTube or Vimeo.
Matt Olsen is a largely unemployed part-time writer and even more part-time commercial actor living once again in Seattle after escaping from Los Angeles like Kurt Russell in that movie about the guy who escapes from Los Angeles.