Copy Shop

it is difficult to say why. but it is it - a fascinating movie. for story and for technical manner to make it. for references to the early history of cinema and to Franz Kafka literary universe. for the brilliant music and for the admirable idea. for acting and for the great effort to create a parable about the essence of film, society and ordinary fears. it could have many interpretations. but important is its simplicity. and the wise way to transform in a film who impress in deep sense. because it has the art to become yours story. a warning. a trip in memories and black utopia. to remind the vulnerability front to technique. or to remind the stereotypes who are bones and muscles and skin of our lives. it is easy to define it as masterpiece. for reasons who are not from artistic area.

Stylistically akin to the likes of Guy Maddin, David Lynch, and Bill Morrison being shoved into a blender, 'Copy Shop' is a joy to watch. The visual flourishes are not only charming and fun, but also really help add to the overall surreal, creepy, yet funny atmosphere the short is going for. On a technical level, pretty much everything here is great. I've already mentioned the glorious visuals, and it is essential I also praise the wonderful background score! It helps add to the bizarre dreariness of the entire depicted situation, it heightens the madness of the Kafkaesque chaos unravelling before us, and it is just fantastic music in its own right. Any fan of weirder, more avant garde type filmmaking should seek this one out soon, it's readily available on the internet and in great quality.

I've never seen any Austrian movie before and I would have thanked God to have made me tape this short movie if I believed in God!!! This is an excellent experimental movie which develops a very interesting idea and clever new technics which consist in animating photocopies of pictures. Moreover Virgil Widrich wrote the right story to stick with the technics. And the result is amazing: the aesthetics are very good and the special effects well-done. But it's not all: Zlamal's music is very moving and Johannes Silberschneider performs his several roles with majesty! At the end I felt very strange and wondered a lot of things but above all I thought about problems of cloning humans! Generally I thought about the dangers of homogeneity: can we become all fools?... But I won't tell you more because suspense is so important in cinema!

A man who works in a copy shop decides to take a picture of his hand. As he muses over it, we realize that the copier he uses has a supernatural ability to reproduce this man. Copies are produced in geometric progressions until the city is filled with copies of this guy. As much as the plot is interesting is the speculation about what happens to all these copies at the end. A really interesting concept.

Interesting films are copies of life (or something related to life) that enclose and acknowledge themselves.

I call this "folding," where the film does something and them does something with itself, usually the same "something." That's the idea in many, many films. It is a hot topic in some films schools and many script labs.

And that's what this veteran of film intellectual circles addresses (even though he is from a historically daft area cinematic ally).

Nominally, this is about a man who copies his own reality and encounters the copies. What makes it interesting viewing is how the "copying" is woven into the actual making of the film: what we see was "filmed," then each frame made into a photocopy (with many artifacts of paper) and then filmed. So we get two layers of paper and two layers of film interwoven. Only the paper artifacts are acknowledged.

Very clever. It is only an essay compared to a real folded film like "Moulin Rouge," but a fun film school exercise in real folding.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.