Last night the MoMA showed "Outstanding Films from International Festivals." One of the most original was Volker Shreiner's "Counter," in which we count down to 1 from, I think it was something like 275. For each number, we see a split-second from a familiar movie in which that number appears. It might be on a hotel-room door or a calendar behind the hero or the back of a bus, and so on. Fudging a little, the director starts with an actual countdown timer reading out the 275 (or whatever) number, and when he wasn't able to find a clip for a number he will go back to the countdown timer. But not that often.

Doing this says things about film. The countdown is a plot but not a story, engaging in a way that we don't usually think of film as engaging us. Hitchcock said that every movie is a chase, because the film goes into the projector and out of the projector in one long sequence. On the same reasoning, every movie is a countdown, and part of our sense of anticipation is for the closure at the end.

Another really good film shown last night was Toby MacDonald's "Heavy Metal Drummer," about a Moroccan boy who plays in a band with two friends and loves heavy metal. Trouble is, neither his two friends nor anyone in the family or neighborhood has anything but disdain for this heavy metal kind of drumming. It's a short film, and it concludes at a gig where the band is playing people-pleaser stuff and suddenly the boy breaks out into this tremendous loud riff that just stuns everyone. Very charming.

Also some science-fictiony stuff of no value whatever. Science fiction is to film as acid is to milk. Let in one drop, and you need to throw the whole thing out.