From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Officers #1 is a deeply unsettling short film, less than eleven minutes long. A young woman carrying a baby and with a toddler in tow stands in a train shed in some European city. The movie is shot in grainy black-and-white. The young woman and her children enter a construction site, pushing through a chain-locked gate. Then, the woman tapes a poster to piece of machinery and begins to climb a ladder on the exterior of some sort of scaffolding. The film doesn't use conventional establishing shots and, so, it's not clear what the woman is climbing or how high she will ascend. The little boy climbs the ladder ahead of her. She has the baby strapped to her belly and, also, carries a sheaf of papers in a bag. After climbing for long time, the woman and her children rest on a precarious-looking grid of metal girders. The woman throws papers from her perch and they sail down to the muddy construction site. The papers read: "Last Attempt: if don't have affordable housing by 6:00, we jump." The woman, then, starts climbing again. Her ascent is filmed from some location parallel to the ladder that she is climbing. This time, the toddler is clinging to her body. The woman climbs for a long time and, then, pauses at metal joint from which a sixty-foot boom extends. Moving more slowly now, because the boom is exposed and provides limited handholds, she inches out to the tip of the iron machine. A long shot shows her with the two children squatting at the end of the boom, revealed to be a part of an enormous and towering construction crane.
This short film is very frightening. I don't know exactly how it was made, but the woman's frantic scramble to the top of the 150 foot construction crane seems to be shot in several long takes by a camera on some nearby crane that tracks her climb. Neither the woman nor the two children seem to be tied-off in any way and their peril is palpable and breathtaking. We have a visceral sense of the height of the crane based on the woman's climb -- we see her ascend through a hundred rungs or more with the children clinging to her. As she climbs higher and higher, our dread increases. The sequence in which she inches laterally toward the tip of the boom is heartstopping. The final shot shows the woman and her children perched over a grey abyss.
A German feminist filmmaker, Helke Sander, made this movie in 1985. It won a Golden Bear prize in Berlin for best short film. It's an example of structuralist film making -- the movie is about climbing a very long and high ladder, filmed from a position parallel to the ladder. The short subject acknowledges an important fact: images of a woman and child climbing a metal ladder of this sort are as thrilling as Mission Impossible or an Indiana Jones movie. The point, I think, is that being a homeless mother with small children is as dangerous, even potentially deadly, as being on the front lines in a war zone.
Also on MUBI is a short picture that is a polar opposite (pun intended) to From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Officers #1. This is a little film produced by the National Film Board of Canada called Christmas at Moose Factory. Moose Factory is a village in Canada's far north located on Moose Island. The movie consists of close-ups (details) of crayon drawings by children of Christmas celebrations with a sound track in which the kids talk about presents, family gathered for the holidays, encounters with bears and rides on ski-doos (snowmobiles). It's a charming short picture featuring the handsome cartoon coloring by the children. A montage at the end shows the artists who seem to be very cute Indian children between the ages of three and eight -- the people in Moose Factory are Cree Indians.
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