In an era during which the short film is becoming increasingly popular and easier to create, it’s appropriate that, in a column titled ‘Breaking the Mold’, my favorite short film, Chris Marker’s La Jetée, makes an appearance, the month before it gets a DVD release from the Criterion Collection.

What some—but, unfortunately, not all—moviegoers know is that Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, an interesting but unexceptional work, is a refashioning of this incredible little film. Made at the start of the French New Wave, it was originally shown before prints of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. But Marker’s film, even more so than most of Godard’s work, throws down the gauntlet to the very essence and structure of filmmaking.

The title of La Jetée has multiple meanings: ‘the jetty’; a past tense of the verb ‘to throw’, and a homonym of ‘la j’etaise’, meaning ‘there I was’. All have significance, here. The story is set in post-World War III France, where a prisoner is used, by the war's survivors, to experiment with time travel. He repeatedly returns to a violent incident that's somehow tied to a woman with which he speaks, and to a memory from his childhood. The ending is pure Nouvelle Vague: a deconstruction of the very narrative we’ve been watching, and a tragic iconoclastic response to the science fiction of Hollywood.

The most impressive part? The 28-minute film contains only one motion shot. Nearly the entire film is a series of photographs cut together with voice-over. And, yet, its ‘cinematography’ and editing are integral parts of its story, and remain, to this day, heartbreakingly beautiful. Where some New Wave works obsessively embraced realism, Marker experimented with a combination of artifice and realism, and how the two related to one another. The result: what I (and many others) consider the finest short film ever created.

How does one recognize and accept the past without ripping it off (or to shreds)? S/he adopts an idea like Phillipe Poulet’s: to use the original Lumière camera—the cinématographe—and place it in the hands of acclaimed directors from all over the world.

In essence, this experiment from 1995 is akin to a reality TV set-up: posit a scenario, list a few rules, and point and watch. The result is admittedly inconsistent, but we’re offered a truly unique opportunity to see how modern-day filmmakers, awash in the technological advances of the past century, handle the limitations that the very first filmmakers faced on a daily basis.

The rules:

1. The film can be no longer than 52 seconds—the same length of time it took for one roll of film to go through the camera.

2. There can be no synch sound—leaving films to be either silent or utilize a simple musical score. And all sound effects must be foleyed.

3. No more than three takes are allowed.

As mentioned, what we have is very much hit-or-miss; but, unlike longer short anthologies, these films are all less than a minute long. What remains interesting is how each director approaches his/her film—whether to embrace their handicap or bow to it.

Those who bow, channel the spirit of the Lumières to create ‘actualities’ of everyday life, but many of these seem a cop-out as opposed to a tip of the cap.

Those who take this as a challenge end up with the most arresting films, and it should come as no surprise that it’s David Lynch who rises to the occasion. His Premonition Following an Evil Deed is so incredible, you'd think he cheated. It’s a masterpiece of imagery and innovation, and it sums up the point of this experiment: the possibility of cinema.

Lumière and Company ranges from the sweet and intimate details of a home movie to the wild depths of the darkest imagination. Film can be all these things; we only need to find the storytellers who are open to the entire spectrum. Unintentionally, what Poulet’s experiment reveals is that the ease provided by technology is, at times, a constraint. The passion of some is the play of others, and the lengths to which people will go to tell a story reveals quite a bit about the current state of the medium.

Surprise, surprise...my favorite Danish auteur releases a new film, and it manages to make its way to the top of the May calendar! But if there’s one more thing for me to say about von Trier, it’s that he’s consistently honest with himself about his filmmaking. After Dogville incited many and Manderlay left others indifferent or cold, he realized that the closing chapter of his ‘USA' trilogy, Wasington, wasn't in the immediate future. He needed a break, and what better way to get away from the daunting Brechtian process of his previous two films than to make an office comedy? But it wouldn’t be von Trier if the comedy didn’t push a boundary or two...

The premise is a small I.T. company looking to sell up and make some cash for its owner. The problem is that the owner has invented a fake ‘president’, who the buyers wish to speak with exclusively. What’s a small-time owner to do? Hire an actor to play the part, of course. Yet, as entertaining as the trailer makes it look, audiences in Denmark (those that like von Trier, at least) have already pointed out its incredible ability to raise questions of morality and human behavior while still going for the guffaws.

I can’t wait, Lars.

Hal Hartley’s fallen on some rough times since his mini-explosion back in the early-nineties. Since the turn of the century, most of his work seems out of focus, unsure of its own purpose, and lacking the dry but insightful humor of his earliest offerings. But with Fay Grim, Hartley looks back to his last success, Henry Fool. Yes, I know, this qualifies as a sequel—something I was decrying, just a bit earlier. But my main displeasure with the sequel train isn’t that any are made (sometimes stories and characters have more in them than just one film), but why they're made. And when looking down the list of summer releases, it’s a pretty easy answer as to why most were greenlighted. The one thing of which you can never accuse Hal Hartley is doing something purely for financial means (I wouldn’t be surprised if 9 out of every 10 people you ask don't even know who he is). Instead, it seems that Hartley is doing what many a filmmaker down on his creative luck has done—he's learning from past successes. Now, this is tricky territory. One can rediscover a lost fire and emerge, shining brightly, again; or one can become George Lucas—tinkering, expanding and revamping until even original successes have become tarnished for all eternity. Which side will Hartley fall on?

I’m not exactly sure what happened to William Friedkin to compel such ludicrous detours as The Hunted and Rules of Engagement, but if picking up a surrealistic paranoia play is his way of getting back to his roots and thinking outside-the-box (and, yes, that means before The Exorcist and The French Connection…I'm talking The Birthday Party and The Boys in the Band, here), I’m all about it. The play (and screenplay) were penned by playwright Tracy Letts, a member of the famous Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and is a darkly comic examination of psychosis and obsession seen through the four main characters—a cocktail waitress, her ex-con former husband, a lesbian biker, and a seemingly schizophrenic Gulf War veteran. Friedkin describes this as ‘the most intense work I’ve ever done’. If that’s true, we could be in for something of a spiritual rebirth from a director who knows how to push the right buttons.

I’m dying for this to be good.

Finally, we come to HBO—a network that's synonymous with ‘breaking the mold’. Their tagline, ‘It’s not TV; it’s HBO’ isn’t just lip service. I, however, am not one of the holdovers from the early years of “The Sopranos”, “Sex & the City”, “Oz” and “Six Feet Under”. I’m more of a “Deadwood”, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, “Rome” and “The Wire” type of guy. But this second wave is also drawing to a close. With “Deadwood” retiring with its wrap-up movies in lieu of a fourth season (I’m still waiting, by the way, Mr. Milch), “Rome” already concluded (not surprisingly with a budget nearly half of Spider-Man’s) and “Curb” and “The Wire” likely on their last seasons, we have to see what the third wave of HBO programming has to offer. While not quite as strong as Showtime’s mini-Renaissance, there’s one show that had me from the first episode, last summer—“Big Love”. A consummate performer, the show didn’t let me down for a single minute of its first twelve hours, choosing not to dissect ‘THE’ American family (as so many shows attempt to do [see my previous pick, that’s faltering, “The Riches”]) but ‘AN’ American family. Instead of searching for universality, it searches for penetration of a concept, and comes up with a nonpareil.

If you don’t know what the show's about, I’ll keep it short and simple, as the beauty is in the way the series unfolds. Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) owns a successful chain of hardware stores, has three wives, and lives with the entire group on a normal residential street in Utah. They’re Mormons, but are caught between the extremes of the cultish polygamists of their lineage and the ‘normal’ world around them. In essence, they’re an ugly duckling of a family, and the constant pressure of having to live one way and believe another pulls them all in different directions. Paxton is tremendous, and Tripplehorn, Sevigny, and Goodwin are his equals—an incredible core of actors who only magnify each other in every scene they share.

The first season is already available on DVD, and is also being re-broadcast, counting down to the second season premiere. It’s rare that a series this original and this good happens along. Take the opportunity to catch it while it's still new. Others try to reinvent, reexamine, revitalize…re…re…re…"Big Love" has become its own mold and, along with its spiritual cousin on Showtime, “Dexter”, has set the bar high for the next wave of television.