Very Nice, Very Nice

This film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short. It's a rather strange choice, as the film is much more an odd avant garde sort of thing than a film you'd think would get nominated for such a prestigious award. Perhaps it was just a very, very, very slow year.

The film consists of tons and tons and tons of black & white photos that are flashed on the screen--accompanied by music (often martial music) and dialog from a variety of sources. It all seems amazingly random-- and sometimes the pictures and narration seem to have little to do with each other.

The bottom line is that this film has practically no commercial appeal whatsoever. Folks sitting in coffee houses in the early 1960s might have enjoyed it, but I just cannot see it having appeal to 99.9% of the viewers today. Tedious and difficult to enjoy--even for an art film.

Arthur Lipsett's Very Nice, Very Nice is 7 minutes of visual and audio intensity tightly wrapped in violent editing . It commands your attention, demands you experience it, not interpret it, is over in no time and leaves your head spinning. It is a dark and disturbing world of indifference and nuclear threat, crass advertizing and choking environment Lipsett presents accompanied by an abstract soundtrack of non-sequitor and urban everyday that jolts and jars along the way to its desultory sign off by a voice over a cachaphonus crowd and some hot jazz optimistically prophesizing "warmth and brightness will return and the renewal of hopes of men."

A powerhouse experimental short in its day displaying nearly the same anxieties we face today. The form is seamless and its influence on filmmakers evident since its release. A gracefully harsh work by one man band Arthur Lipsett.

This is quite a feat of editing as it pulls together a fairly quick-fired montage of still images of faces and places coupled with some very short snippets of video tape to illustrate an urban landscape that consists of all forms of humanity. Happy, sad, young, old, joyous and loads and loads of yawning. It's peppered with seemingly random sound bites but by the end you might get a sense of it's purpose? Are we all now just pre-occupied with convenience and our own small world? Like a society of ants only not remotely collaborative? It's not really a film, more a photographic exhibition with a point - but it's still worth a watch.

Arthur Lipsett's "Very Nice, Very Nice" is a litany of random narration and images. Watching it, I saw it as a sort of precursor to "Koyaanisqatsi", as the various photos show the modern world, posing the question of what it means to live in this modern world. It was easy to think that all the modern conveniences made life better than it had ever been, but what did the status quo mean beyond that? "Very Nice, Very Nice" received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Live Action Short Film, and also received praise from Stanley Kubrick. It's not a great movie, but an interesting use of artistry. It's worth seeing, if only once.

Available on the National Film Board of Canada's website.