Das Rad, or “The Wheel,” is a brilliant stop-motion short from 2003 (at which point I was clearly not paying attention to anything) about two stone beings having a conversation. Being stone, their perception of time is more expansive than our own, and as such, years pass in a moment. Through most of the film, we literally see nothing of what’s going on around the stone folks until the filmmakers slow things down to human perception—at which point we see these folks move so slowly as to be simple piles of rock.
The film has a brilliant formal subtext as well–it’s a stop-motion short, exploiting the persistence of our vision, spinning a tale exploring persistence of vision. Wonderful idea.