Taxi
1969 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Roland Stutz
Genres: comedy, experimental
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
Set to an expression of frustration by Claude Leveillee, this short uses accelerated camera movement to turn a taxi driver's trip through congested downtown streets into a frantic obstacle course.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2-minute film that weaponizes sped-up camera work to turn commute tedium into controlled chaos—it's exactly the kind of formally unhinged move that makes you forget you're watching a taxi driver and remember you're watching cinema have a minor breakdown. Leveillee's voice adds salt to the wound; the whole thing refuses to apologize for being a bit much.
Stutz's deployment of accelerated motion recalls the kinetic formal vocabulary of city symphonies and structural film, though here it's conscripted into comedy rather than documentation—a deliberate inversion of the avant-garde tradition it references. The rigor is in the constraint: two minutes to compress frustration into form without a wasted frame.
The accelerated camera movement is the entire film, and it's the move that works—it transforms what could've been a one-joke premise into something genuinely disorienting and alive, where every frame *feels* like it's straining against real traffic. That decision alone is what lifts this from concept to experience.