Village Cutups

A patchwork of celluloid graffiti, Village Cutups stitches together scraps of small-town arcana—church bake sales, barber-shop gossip, a runaway goat in a wedding veil—into a jittery mosaic that refuses linear logic. Bud Fisher, moonlighting as both ringmaster and archivist, lets the camera loiter in alleyways where children swap secrets like currency and elders replay their youths through cracked porches. Fragments of silent slapstick collide with vérité melancholy: a boy’s soap-box derby careens into a funeral procession; a spinster’s phonograph waltz seeps through floorboards to interrupt a basement poker game. The film loops, stutters, rewinds, exposing sprocket holes like missing teeth, as if the village itself were chewing on its own memories. No hero, no three-act arc—only the communal bloodstream of a place that never existed yet feels naggingly familiar, like the smell of your grandparents’ attic. By the time the final reel dissolves into emulsion rain, the viewer has become another neighbor, complicit in every half-told scandal and half-remembered lullaby.