Jason Sondhi
In a surprising development, one of my all-time favorite short films has been given a new breath of life this week via highlight on two great platforms. Death to the Tinman is the 2006 graduation short of Ray Tintori, a filmmaker we highlighted in 2008 with one of our top ten favorite shorts of that year, Jettison Your Loved Ones. Now, after years of bootlegged copies confined to some of the dustier corners of internet video, the film appeared this week on both Vimeo and YouTube thanks to NoBudge and Vice.
If you happen to be a fan of Jettison Your Loved Ones this film will be familiar to you—a similar breakneck pace of plot development, lovely B&W cinematography and an endearing tilt towards the mythological and legendary. Jeff Delauter is once again the protagonist of the film, and he’s able to cultivate the same tone of idealistic iconoclasm tempered by heartache that so memorably defined Jettison. Bill is a legend in his own community but his brash excellence alienates those around him. After being cursed by the town’s preacher, he begins to lose his body parts in accidents, and his best friend, who is also a mad scientist, puts him back together as tin. A plot description for the film is a bit silly though. It’s really all about attitude, verve and emotion. I’ve looked for years for any film to seize upon this joyous mix in the way Tintori did, yet i’m still coming up empty.
Of course it doesn’t help that we’re still awaiting a proper followup from Tintori himself. Coming off these films, Tintori directed a series of music videos for the band MGMT which have come to be considered modern classics. He caught the eye of Spike Jonze who attached him to direct a feature project in 2009. But by the following year the project had fallen through. The promise of Ray’s filmmaking is now being subsumed by the growing legend of Court 13 (the collective of filmmakers out of which these two films were birthed). They also gave us Glory at Sea, and now, most famously, the Oscar-nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild. Tintori directed the VFX segments of that film, responsible for the imposing awesomeness of the giant boars.
Now Benh Zeitlin is an amazing filmmaker, but back in 2008 if you asked me to pick between Glory at Sea, and Jettison Your Loved Ones/Death to the Tinman, I would have stood by the latter. Filmmaking isn’t a competition of course, but in light of all the acclaim that has come Zeitlin’s way, the republishing of this modern masterpiece reminded me of how much I wish Tintori would find himself in the director’s chair once again.