After American documentaries about fantasy and reality, my mystery box of padded envelopes from padded cells has offered up a rather arresting collection of surreal and fantastical fiction shorts. One of my aims with this blog is to try and give some rough indicators of the general creative mood of the Shooting People community and, well, if last night’s random selection is anything to go by we’ve all been sucking on the same pipe as Luis Buñuel.

First off, and in keeping with the transatlantic tone of the next Mobile Cinema tour, a selection of films by Oriana Fox, an American Feminist in London. And boy does Oriana earn that capital F in feminist… her work is entirely focused around women, or rather “woman” as a political, social and sexual concept and most especially around a woman, herself. Producer, Writer, Editor and Actress, she takes Whitney Houston’s boast, “I’m every woman” to it’s logical extreme and plays all of the female parts. Though of course, being a good modern feminist, there’s only one part that she’s really interested in and that’s the vagina.

Since one of the key motivating factors in cinema history has been man’s desire to see lots and lots of fanny, a filmmaker who is obsessed with cunts (say it and be proud) is not a new thing. However it is a surprising relief to see them scattered across the screen with such gay abandon. Sometimes this is hysterically funny, like the woman who, to distract herself from her boyfriend not calling, is sewing a huge vagina shaped blanket; sometimes, like the woman who poses naked with a load of tiny vulvas all over her body, it is properly disturbing in the true spirit of the surreal. Most of all though, watching all of Oriana’s films back to back, it is nice to feel the power of cinema take us on the familiar journey from shock to acceptance and on to banality. Vaginas are everywhere and I don’t care. I’m not sure if this is what Oriana intended, but I feel like I’ve been cured.

Her website (which includes all of these films) describes her as an artist rather than a filmmaker and these films are definitely more concerned with ideas than stories. At times this is to their detriment. One film seems to be an exact copy of an episode of Sex In the City but transposed back into the 1970′s and with Oriana giving rather fine impersonations of the four main protoganists. I think I sort of understand the point of Oriana playing all the characters and of transposing this scene in time and of the vaginas appearing on her face in the photo-shoot, but the more I unpick the levels of self-reflexive cleverness the dizzier I get and in the end the whole thing doesn’t really give me more than the SJP original. Equally “The Embodiment Workout” wins hands down the non-existant prize I’m not offering for the oddest film I’ve been sent. My problem with conceptual art is that all too often the concept is far more interesting than the execution. The idea of a work-out video in which all of the exercising women are the same woman in different wigs is quite clever when you think about it, watching it is less enjoyable.

However when Oriana takes on her family, lip syncing in character with her mother, her step-mother and her father the ideas finally start to lock together with more purpose than just being clever. Out of a diverting and enjoyable catalogue of poltico-sexual self-exploration “3 into 1″ shows her at her strongest, looking at what has made her who she is from the inside out and the outside in at the same time. I’ve no idea what she’s going to do next but it’s going to be worth watching.

Keeping the mood tapped into the sexual subconscious in a way that’d keep Freud in Viennese buns for a decade, Jacqueline Wright has sent me three short films which again make good use of everyone’s favourite themes of the moment – sex and death.

I’ve seen the film about the guy who falls in love with a dead girl a thousand times over and on the whole I hate it. There is always some comic potential in playing out romantic cliches with a corpse but there’s not much new to be said about any of the cliches by doing so. Consequently my heart fell when “Stiffy” started, not least because my Dad was watching the films with me and I’d just made him sit through half an hour of Oriana’s vaginal obsessions and I could tell he was starting to wish I’d let him watch the tennis instead.

“Stiffy” is about a doctor who is in love with a dead girl, it was made as a straight 8 and is one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen in an age. I love it. It doesn’t quite answer my underlying doubts about the value of the dead-girlfriend genre but it does make me put them in a box and forget about them. The photography in this film is to die for, the blacks so crushed, the reds so succulent and the occasional flash frame so perfectly placed that Jacqueline must have used up all her good fortune the year. I’ve not got any notes with me as I write this so I’m afraid I can’t tell you who I’m praising, but this is one of the best corpse performances I’ve ever seen. The flop as she falls from her wheelchair in the dance scene is one of the finest pieces of physical acting any shooter has sent me, so the thought that she did it in the first and only take leaves my head spinning. And the whole thing is only four minutes long. Brilliant.

“Out Of Water” is ten minutes long and was made through Screen South’s Digital Shorts scheme (one of the more dependable strands of that programme). It stars Alice Lowe, who seems to be doing an Oriana and playing herself in a fabulation of her own teenage life. Lowe gives a great performance, mouth turned down into a fish-like pout as her family tease her and a waiter tries it on but, call me stupid, it was only when I saw that Alice also wrote the film that I realised casting an adult as a teenager was a deliberate artifice rather than just a plain odd choice. I thought it wasn’t quite as successful as “Stiffy” but my Dad loved it, and was keen that the open ending could be read as her turning into mermaid and escaping.

Finally “The Great David” is a very dry little film about my namesake Mr.Blaine (he of the magic tricks and death stunts). It’s a wry little gem that gently pokes a very sharp stick, but he might be related to me so I’m not going to say much more.

Lastly in my long round up of nightmarish visions, a quick word about Evan Wilkinson and Chloe Wheeler’s “Elysium”, if only just to show that men are capable of being odd as well. It’s slow to start and like so many films which take a surreal approach, it spends too long being odd without offering any reason to keep us watching. However just as I was promising my Dad we could turn it off, the plot kicked in. A woman is in a coma and a man is making a pact to travel inside her mind to bring her back. This simple piece of information sparks the rest of the film, it justifies the whirling oddness and gives you a reason to care about him as he goes through some genuinely nightmarish ordeals (snakes, boxes, shudder).

Best of all when he finally does pass through into the woman’s mind the whole film becomes animated clay, a nicely worked idea that keeps the pace of invention from flagging in what is otherwise a quite straightforward quest story. Visually rich and constantly on the move, director Evan and producer Chloe have put together an interesting film on a very tight budget and I hope that next time someone can trust them with a bit more because I’m sure there are more ideas to come.

If the flavour of the month is subconscious desire and fear then you’re going to have to work hard to better the work of these three.