Filmmaker Leah Shore — a 25 New Face who contributed an illustration to Joanne McNeil’s Speculations column last issue — has directed a music video for the band The Malpractice. With pink curtains, green shag wallpaper and cardboard broccoli, the video features Sarah Ellen Stephens, who stars in Shore’s recent short film, Puss, and film critic and programmer Aaron Hillis in a playfully menacing infantilism scenario that Shore shot entirely in her own apartment. Check it out above.
by Scott Macaulay on May 26, 2021It’s hard not to touch your face — something I, and many of you, have undoubtedly learned in recent weeks. As much as I now better understand epidemiological chains of transmission, I still sometimes slip up. So, I’m going to try to keep this punk earworm by the Lunachick’s Gina Volpe — here visualized in a brashly impactful video by Leah Shore, a 2013 25 New Face — in my head as I (only very occasionally and necessarily) venture out into the world.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 8, 2020Who doesn’t love cookies? And who hasn’t eaten too many in one sitting — perhaps even recently? Filmmaker Leah Shore, who landed on our 25 New Faces list in 2013, set out to make a confectionary-themed holiday card when scatological impulses got in the way. Her typically outrageous and beautifully animated 40-second animation, she says, “morphed into a tiny film, a gross pooptastic one.” (Indeed, Shore’s animation features the most novel appearance of a Christmas tree I think I’ve ever seen.) So perhaps be careful who you send this to, and if you have a sensitive stomach, watch before eating, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2015Leah Shore made our “25 New Faces” list in 2013 on the basis of her totally trippy animated short, Old Man, which traverses the entirety of 20th century history, from Hitler to Kennedy, the bomb to Michael Jackson, in a rapid-fire, image-morphing five minutes that’s voiced by imprisoned cult leader Charles Manson. The recordings came from a series of tapes Shore obtained by Marlin Marynick, a psychiatric nurse. Explains Sarah Salovaara in her Filmmaker profile on Shore: Marynick forked over approximately 10 hours of audio recordings, which resulted in Shore “sitting in a dark room for two months and going […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 28, 2015“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. The muck of romantic language — spoken, inscribed on the body and splattered, along with images, on the screen — is the subject of Leah Shore’s latest short film, I Love You So Much. Shore made our 25 New Faces list back in ’13, and I Love […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 19, 2014