The Music of Erich Zann (1980)

A seventeen-minute independent short, and the most restrained production on file — no studio, no distributor, no incentive to shape the account into anything other than what it already was. The tenement room, the viol, the window that shouldn't open onto what it opens onto: all kept, without embellishment. One small oddity the Archive has otherwise left alone: the narrator is given the name Charles Dexter Ward, borrowed with no explanation from an entirely separate case file. On a production this careful elsewhere, the borrowing reads as a wink rather than an error, and has been filed as such.