An acquaintance recently turned us on to the work of Seattle-based filmmaker Matt Cibelli, whose work flits between the narrative and the experimental with disarming ease. In particular, his new short, Kicks 4 Cranes, is one of the coolest things we’ve seen in many a moon. The one-sentence pitch doesn’t quite do it justice: The film juxtaposes (beautiful) footage of construction cranes with (enigmatic) audio of women talking about their shoes. It’s hypnotic, but what does it all mean? Like all good experimental films, it manages to render its subjects even more mysterious than ever before. But it also draws our attention to the way that beauty, particularly of the female kind, often has to be constructed and maintained, just like a giant office building. And, perhaps most surprisingly, it does the reverse, too: It shows us (particularly through cinematographer Adam Forslund’s hauntingly lovely images) that a giant, gleaming construction crane against a sky can, in its own way, be as alluring as a pair of pumps.
