The Commercial DVD

MUTE

IN 1980, the Residents released four films, each one minute in length. The One Minute Movies, as they're known, were created to promote their new record, The Commercial Album, which consisted of 40 60-second songs.

The films were funny, disturbing exercises, filled with images of strange rituals, hand puppets, sad old men and the anonymous, eyeball-headed Residents. They were so unlike anything anyone had seen before that MoMA added them to their permanent collection.

Now, a quarter-century later, the Residents, together with an international array of filmmakers, have released The Commercial DVD-a collection of 56 one-minute movies-one, and sometimes more, for each of the songs on the album. Along with the original four clips, the Residents themselves created 10 new videos, and the other 40-odd contributors-artists like Leigh Barbier, Steve Cerio and the late Jim Ludtke-divided up the rest.

As you can imagine, with this many people working independently on this many films, the styles and tones cover the spectrum (and when dealing with the Residents, that spectrum includes X-rays, gamma rays and ultraviolet as well). There's stop-motion and computer animation, claymation, marionettes, live action and combinations thereof. They're randomly funny, grim, absolutely baffling, colorful, dark, narrative and imagist. A few might make your head hurt. While some make clear reference to the song and the Residents, others seem to have been made in a lonely vacuum somewhere. A couple even include nudity!

And, as might also be expected, some are more interesting than others (my favorite of the non-Resident shorts remains the dancing fat man of "Amber"; that's an image that'll stick with you for a while). The neat thing is, with each film only a minute long, if you don't like one, you know the next one's going to be along in a jiffy, and it'll be completely different.

While Residents fans are the obvious core audience here, anyone interested in animation or experimental films will find plenty to latch onto. What the disc is, really, is a self-contained international short film festival.

But the videos are just the beginning.

The Residents have always pushed new audiovisual technologies in ways no one ever considered before. In 2001, they began toying with the possibilities of DVD on their first video collection, Icky Flix. The Commercial DVD is a leap forward, blurring the line between DVD, CD-ROM and videogame. First, you have the option of watching these videos in several different ways (by song, by theme, etc). That's simple. But the central feature on the disc is an animated navigable maze that-as in a video game-holds (and hides) the videos and other surprises. It's a fascinating experiment, quite unlike anything I've seen on DVD before, and they succeed, as always, brilliantly.