Copy Shop

I've never seen any Austrian movie before and I would have thanked God to have made me tape this short movie if I believed in God!!! This is an excellent experimental movie which develops a very interesting idea and clever new technics which consist in animating photocopies of pictures. Moreover Virgil Widrich wrote the right story to stick with the technics. And the result is amazing: the aesthetics are very good and the special effects well-done. But it's not all: Zlamal's music is very moving and Johannes Silberschneider performs his several roles with majesty! At the end I felt very strange and wondered a lot of things but above all I thought about problems of cloning humans! Generally I thought about the dangers of homogeneity: can we become all fools?... But I won't tell you more because suspense is so important in cinema!

A man who works in a copy shop decides to take a picture of his hand. As he muses over it, we realize that the copier he uses has a supernatural ability to reproduce this man. Copies are produced in geometric progressions until the city is filled with copies of this guy. As much as the plot is interesting is the speculation about what happens to all these copies at the end. A really interesting concept.

A young man who works in a photocopying shop photocopies his hand with amusement one day. However the photocopy then kicks out copies of him earlier in the day etc. He turns the machine off and locks the copies away. However he finds copies of himself repeating themselves all over his town as things begin to get out of hand.

I had very high hopes for this before I watched it because I had heard good things about it and I was mainly satisfied afterwards despite a few problems. The story could be taken as an allegory of cloning or several other things. I ignored the subtexts and focused on the fact that it was simply a clever idea at heart. Technically the film is brilliantly imaginative and worth watching. The film was shot digitally. These digital images were then all photocopied and then animated. In terms of the plot this adds eight to the copying subject but it is also an very different way to make a film.

The slight downside is that the grainy images and rough style can be a little hard on the eyes at first, but I soon forgot this as I watched it. The plot is very clever but it is just one idea. After several minutes the novelty and the freshness wears off and it starts to outstay it's welcome – I wanted it to go somewhere. The ending is good and it saves the film just as it was starting to run out of steam.

Overall I enjoyed it and there's no doubting the imagination and technical ability that went into making this. In a world where Being John Malkovich is praised then this too should be appreciated as it has similar shots if not ideas. Well worth a look – plus it's easily the best (the only!) piece of Austrian cinema I've ever seen!

According to the Short Of The Week website the process of filming COPY SHOP was done like this: Shot on digital camcorder , was transferred on to computer and was edited on computer . So what you ask ? Well after that - and here's the hard bit - each and every frame was photocopied and then each and every frame was filmed on 35 mm camera . It leads to a meta-fictional context for the film which narrative wise involves photo copying going haywire and I bet director Virgil Widrich must have gone a bit haywire himself while doing the process . It sounds a nightmare of absolute frustration to do

As admirable as the work that went in to it I am someone who likes a self contained narrative to a story and for something to really jump out and grab me by the throat . Alas COPY SHOP is a good idea filmed in a unique way but is rather one note . A man photocopies himself and this leads to ... well you can what the natural succession of this is going turned up to the power of eleven . No doubt this influenced a film directed by the son of a very famous rock star with Kevin Spacey playing the voice of a computer . You know the movie I mean , a movie incidentally I wasn't mad keen on and to blunt I wasn't mad keen on this one either

Interesting films are copies of life (or something related to life) that enclose and acknowledge themselves.

I call this "folding," where the film does something and them does something with itself, usually the same "something." That's the idea in many, many films. It is a hot topic in some films schools and many script labs.

And that's what this veteran of film intellectual circles addresses (even though he is from a historically daft area cinematic ally).

Nominally, this is about a man who copies his own reality and encounters the copies. What makes it interesting viewing is how the "copying" is woven into the actual making of the film: what we see was "filmed," then each frame made into a photocopy (with many artifacts of paper) and then filmed. So we get two layers of paper and two layers of film interwoven. Only the paper artifacts are acknowledged.

Very clever. It is only an essay compared to a real folded film like "Moulin Rouge," but a fun film school exercise in real folding.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.