Each month we are going to be bringing you a specially curated short film section, surfing the waves of the ocean of online video, fishing out the audiovisual pearls and taking you on a highly entertaining cinematic cruise. To correspond with this month’s article on anthology films, we bring you some of the most charming sections from various anthology collections for your viewing pleasure.

Incidentally, you can have all the clips mentioned below play automatically through the playlist on the brand new Running in Heels YouTube channel here

Chacun son cinema

This is the collection commissioned by the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 to celebrate its 60th birthday. An astounding panorama of 36 internationally renowned directors each agreed to make a 3-minute short film which expressed “their state of mind of the moment as inspired by the motion picture theatre” (the films ‘subtitle’ is ‘Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s’éteint et que le film commence’ which translates as ‘or that thrill when the lights dim and the film begins).

There are few directors who could cram as much heady eroticism into a mere 3 minutes as Wong Kar Wai (director of In the Mood for Love and 2046). This piece seriously raises the bar on any scratch and tickle you may ever have had at the back of the cinema:

Watch: I travelled 9000km to give it to you – Wong Kar Wai

Personally my favourite section from this collection is the Lars von Trier piece entitled ‘Occupations’, which he directs and stars in. For those of you who’ve seen the inner workings of his mind unleashed in ‘Antichrist’ (if you haven’t read Anna Parkin’s article here) you might wonder how much of himself he put into his axe-wielding psychopath! Unfortunately it’s not available to view online so you’d have to grab the notoriously hard-to-get DVD

Paris je t’aime

Two of the better segments from this collection celebrating Paris explore hetero and homosexual love respectively. Natalie Portman is her charming self in the Faubourg Saint-Denis.

Watch: Paris je t’aime – quartier du Faubourg Saint-Denis

Meanwhile Gus van Sant frustrates women everywhere by featuring Gaspard Ulliel (remember him from these adverts with Kate Moss?) as a guy being charmed by a dishy Elias McConnell in Le Marais (which is indeed Paris’ gay quarter).

Watch: Paris je t’aime – Le Marais

For more of Nataile Portman in short films in Paris, don’t miss Hotel Chevalier which was the enchanting prologue to Wes Anderson’s ‘The Darjeeling Limited’. Whilst I enjoyed both the short and the feature, there was a large contingent who professed to prefer the former to the latter…

Coffee and Cigarettes

Jim Jarmusch’s series of vignettes about coffee and cigarettes was a labour of love that he filmed at different points over a 17-year period.

How can you ever find fault with a clip featuring Iggy Pop and Tom Waits? In this clip apparently the latter, famous for toying with journalists, improvised his excuse for lateness which turns out to be very witty.

Watch: Coffee and Cigarettes