I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'Danse Macabre'

Death is a scary thought for most of us. Of course, there are those who believe in an afterlife. God bless them and all that. They ignore the science or use it to promote their creative designs, saying the 21 grams lost in death is our soul escaping and not our bloated egos letting go. Well, if our soul really is trying to escape, then director Pedro Pires filmed a powerful encounter with one in his short film Danse Macabre.

From suicide to the piping-hot demise of a body in a crematorium, we see the dance of death. However, this ballet reimagines the choreography without living hands, taking its cues from our bodies' natural idiosyncrasies. Although this is a dance film (see the title), the choreographer and main actress Anne Bruce Falconer only presents the most minimal of movements: her organs, blood, and last meal shifting in her stomach cause her to delicately spin on a noose, the muscle spasms following death scream out for one last encore of a slow prostrate bow, and a tear falls gently down her cheek. The power of her performance is unmistakable in her body’s arch, gestures, and torque. She, pun intended, makes the film alive.

The short is set to Maria Callas’s marvelous “Diva Casta” aria, juxtaposed against the cold detachment of autopsy processions. We see embalming fluid, water, blood, the protagonist’s heart and body “dance” their ways into their respective spaces. The images are haunting, but they should be, as Pedro used a real heart and a real dead body in the crematation scene. In life, we think of our bodies and our souls as precious pieces, but who really cares what’s done with them when we’re dead. We only think about certain things and glaze over the bad bits. Those bad bits are the real bits too, we all can’t romanticize ourselves or else we’d suck pretty badly. Not to sound annoying, but we’re only on this God-forsaken planet for a short time and we can’t spend every minute wondering if our body is going to get all banged up on the way to the morgue or what we should’ve said in our blah blah blah.

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So yeah, this film is beautiful and interesting and well-made. To learn more about it, watch the great interview with the director below, which explains how and why he made the film.

Pedro Pires directed Danse Macabre in 2009. It won him a bunch of awards including Best Canadian Short Film from Toronto International Film Festival and a Genie (the Canadian Oscar). The film played all over the world and led to him create his second festival favorite short film Hope in 2011. A few months ago saw the release of his first feature film Triptych at TIFF, which was co-directed with Robert Lepage. Robert actually conceived Danse Macabre for Pedro to direct and is himself one of the most renowned stage directors and multimedia artists in the Canadian avant garde today. The film was produced by PHI Films, which is one of the strongest and weirdest production companies out there championing artist-driven work. They also produced the fantastic short film Next Floor  by Denis Villeneuve. Check back next week for another short film!

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

@PRISMindex