Color TV, No Vacancy
2016 · 12m
Directed by Daniel Brown
Genres: experimental, fantasy, surrealism
A seedy, sexy fever dream through the subconscious, reimagining fairytales and myths in a visually resplendent experimental short.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—someone making fairytales genuinely *uncomfortable*, pulling the fever dream out of the subconscious and refusing to let it resolve into meaning. Most shorts about myth are either reverent or ironic; this one just wants to get weird with you.
Brown's visual language is deliberately lush, but what anchors it is a clear lineage to the structural experimentalism of Maya Deren and the sensual surrealism of early Kusama—craft conscious of its own history, even as it resists narrative convention.
The decision to let the palette and rhythm drive the piece instead of plot is the move that works; without a clear story to follow, every color choice and transition becomes the thing you're actually reading, which transforms what could be indulgent into genuinely hypnotic.
Reviews
Resplendent visually, Color TV, No Vacancy is a fever dream, a seedy, sexy jaunt down the rabbit hole of director Daniel Brown's brain, exploring subconscious reimagining of fairytales and myths. The images are primary and the rest of the film progresses outwardly from these kinetic moments—Brown says that the inspiration for the film came from an incredibly vivid dream where he saw a someone kill a man with a samurai sword and he bled a rainbow.