Salute Your Shorts: The Rentals' Songs About Time

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

On the first day of 2009, Matt Sharp and his band The Rentals began Songs About Time, which can be best described as an insanely ambitious multimedia project. The basic premise is simple but quite epic in scope. There are three main prongs to the concept:

Photographs About Days: "Every day we will add a photograph to our photo diary. These shots will compose a calendar of images that will chronicle Songs About Time. In addition to the digital images posted in the photo diary, we will also shoot one roll of 35mm film each and every day."

Films About Weeks: "Every Tuesday evening, a new black and white short film will be premiered exclusively on our website... In addition to the songs we are recording we will also be scoring and arranging original music for the 52 films."

Songs About Time: "Every three months, The Rentals will release a new chapter of music from Songs About Time. A total of three digital mini-albums will be recorded and released over the course of 2009. The first release will be in April. The second will be in July and the final release will be in October."

Or, you can hear Sharp explain it himself midway through the project:

In order to embark upon this project, Sharp moved into a house/recording studio and invited his bandmates to join him for as long as they possibly could. They tended to drift in and out, causing a chaotic recording schedule and many near-misses to the production schedule. Along with this, the group bled through editors at an alarming rate, with at least 13 working on the project, dropping in and out as things went through. In the end, though, somehow everything was completed, and the results are available to see on TheRentals.com.

In particular, the filming schedule seemed the most ridiculous when this project was announced. I’ve seen other people record music at an even faster rate than this (Jonathan Coulton released a song a week for nearly an entire year, for instance), but doing so concurrently with creating concepts for these films, not to mention shooting, editing and scoring them seemed overwhelming. It’s clear from what resulted that in a lot of cases that was, in fact, reality.

The first film of the project, “January One,” sets down many of the project’s tropes that will continue throughout various films. Shot in stunning black and white, it’s less than two minutes long and significantly shorter if you just look at when the titles end. That being said, aside from acting as a nice introduction for the project, it’s also a somewhat clichéd and romanticized tale of missed connection. This romanticization plays a large role not just in the films but also the music of the project, much of which is embued with a wistfulness and longing for the past that’s fitting for a project titled Songs About Time. A book titled Songs About Time in the project’s signature font will also reoccur throughout the project, as well as many other invocations to the project itself. Many--in fact nearly all--of the films are focused on or at least reference Songs About Time. Also remarkable is that surprisingly few of these films are just music videos for the newly birthed songs.

Following this first film, the next was quite a let-down. Still shot in the same style, it’s just a behind-the-scenes video that, while interesting enough for fans of the band, isn’t really much more than this. Throughout the project whenever too busy with other facets or simply drained of ideas, the group returned to these videos, especially throughout the first half of the project.

The film for Jan. 13 introduces another pattern to the shorts, which is the language aspect. For some reason never particularly specified, the film part of the project was divided into four “seasons.” Each of these seasons is differentiated by having their narration in a different language, first in Japanese, then in Spanish, French and Portuguese. “January Thirteenth” is ultimately just odd notes of longing narrated onto pretty pictures, but as a sort of tone poem it’s still quite beautiful. The involvement of foreign languages certainly helps with this romanticization of the project, as each of the languages becomes beautiful in turn when put into these films. It also adds a dash of pretension to things, as Sharp’s mother apparently remarked to him about the project, but it’s nonetheless effective.

With 52 films total, there’s too much for me to fully describe from the project, so I’ll simply highlight some of my favorites. Most of these seem to have come as a result of a sort of panic that happened midway through the project. This was documented on the video from May 19, which begins with a confessional of Sharp saying, “The one thing, my God, that we don’t want to do, but we’re doing right now, is this confessional."  The next one following this was largely about refocusing efforts.  After many weeks of  what was ultimately just glorified behind-the-scenes footage, the film part of the project kicks back into full gear and the second half of the year resulted in much more interesting shorts.

The short that came after this revival, “June Two,” is like a breath of fresh air. It’s a simple film, nothing more than a woman walking down a hallway while a camera tracks behind her. That being said, the music and photography, combined with more nostalgic narration, turns this into more than just a formalist exercise. It’s also, for once, fiction, which is more affecting than what’s come before. The film had two follow-ups in this sort of simplicity, one on Nov. 24 with the camera following Sharp as he jogs in a symbolic head towards the end of the project, and my favorite on Oct. 13. Again, it’s just one camera shot, but the beautiful angle and score of the film are irresistible. The shot’s perfect composition takes the entire piece to the next level, reminiscing about the city and glorifying the solitude enabled by so much motion and population.

Several movies continue the interaction between Marie-Anne’s character, introduced in the first video, and Matt, such as “February Three” and “March Three.” Her character soon left the project for many months, seemingly just because the group switched its focus to documentaries. She finally returns in “July Twenty One,” which is a wonderful two minutes of unadulterated silliness. After many months of oppressively unhappy music and bleak videos, it’s a nice contrast. Completely anarchic in style and editing, the short's pretty trifling but a whole lot of fun.

On Aug. 4 the group branched out from its more project-based films to create a miniature, surreal movie about a woman from the future searching for her octopus friend. The entire bit reminds me a bit of Godard’s experiments, not just because of its French narration but because of its whimsical creation of a story that largely makes no sense but gets treated seriously nonetheless. Sharp’s Thursby character is precisely that sort of weirdness, and the short’s rapid-fire editing and stylistic excesses make it interesting regardless of the whole Songs About Time business. Like many of the project’s films, it ends with a sense of loss and regret, but its fun until then contrasts this to create a surprisingly complex little work.

In this same vein of utter randomness, another noteworthy creation is “November Ten,” which is just meerkats. Sound effects are edited around their movements to make it look like they’re reacting to things, but really it’s just a goofy couple minutes worth of watching meerkats do their thing. Nothing wrong with that.

Of the music videos the band made as part of the project, two in particular stand out. The first one is the noir-influenced “July Seven,” which is accompanied by the song “What a Strange Day.” The video dramatizes the band reuniting after months apart, which is part of how the song was made and also a clever, well-executed concept. It’s not quite professional quality, but considering the conditions it was made under, it evokes the feelings of the song better than would be expected. That being said, it’s definitely outclassed by “October Twenty,” which is effectively a music video for Rentals’ song “A Rose Is a Rose.” It’s a somewhat daffy song due to some ridiculously pretentious lyrics. But because of this, editing in a group of cute kids acting like adults is somewhat fitting.  These actors are actually the Los Angeles Children’s Choir, who provided the backing vocals track.  The video's combination of film, photography and music is a perfect fit for the project, and both the track and video are difficult to get out of your head after watching.

There were plenty of other films made for the project, including everything from a multi-part story of switched identities to an abstractly-animated film to more behind-the-scenes footage than you could wish for. Taken as a whole, the works also tell a much larger story of ambition, failure and eventual success, that weaves in and out of the works documenting the Rentals’ year. The quality is mixed and seams frequently show, but in a way, that’s part of the charm of a project like this, that the undertaking is in some sense a part of the finished project.