P:O.V. No.1 - English
Summaries
- CAT'S CRADLE
- Bodil Marie Thomsen: Rewinding
- Zoran Petrovic: Undeciphered
- Søren Kolstrup: A straight line from death to resurrection
- Edvin Kau: The moviegoer as living dead
- Richard Raskin: From screenplay to final cut
- LA VIS
- Bodil Marie Thomsen: The head on the nail
- Zoran Petrovic: Familiar strangeness
- Edvin Kau: Ex-centric visual narration
- Søren Kolstrup: The straight line is a spiral from beginning to end
- Richard Raskin: Making Sense of the Ending
- AVONDALE DOGS
- Bodil Marie Thomsen: Arpeggio
- Zoran Petrovic: The form of memory
- Edvin Kau: Who sees Paul's secret?
- Søren Kolstrup: The straight line is divided and brought together again
- Richard Raskin: An interview with Gregor Nicholas
In every respect, this is a film about revivification. The revivification of
the dead in the filmic medium is in fact our modern version of remembrance. As
the film proceeds, the boundaries of an ongoing project - to bury the dead
father and let him rest in peace - are streched to affect the way in which our
western culture seems to be able to make life reversible. The four natural
given elements - earth, wind, fire and water - are transcended in our ability
to control time. The story is in no way a moral tale. It is morbid, humorous
and loaded with visual jokes and ironies. It is also a cadeau to the filmmedium
- and its ability to revive, to revise, to reverse and create new meaning in
repetition - as in the children's game, Cat's Cradle.
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Avoiding concrete answers to questions about the underlying meanings of
Cat's Cradle, the author asks why those questions keep popping up. The
reason seems to be the dead-pan acting, absence of dialogue and the minimum of
character subjectivity. This blocks anthropomorphication, stops the usual
identification and makes it almost impossible to come up with hypotheses about
the story development. When this is combined with the difficulties of
determining the genre, it all makes the viewer search for deeper, implicit
meanings. Thus Cat's Cradle keeps our attention due to its combination
of visual brilliance, narrative tactics and strategies and wide range of
possible implicit meanings.
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Cat's Cradle is seen as a perfect example of simplification of the
filmic language. Due to the total absence of language, the story is reduced to
a simple linear plot in an apparently realistic setting. But the combination of
incongruent realistic details (combined with the absence of language) produces
a strongly ironic and absurd narration about human relations in life and death.
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Cat's Cradle is a game. The girl is playing with her string. This short
film is playing with the characters' efforts to get their husband and father
buried. Neither play is successful. The article argues that the play of the
movie is also an experiment, which takes place somewhere between reality and
un-reality. In the course of this "narrative test" Cat's Cradle as a
whole can be said to become a symbol. And the article tries to point out how
this leap from realistic pictures to symbol, from concretion to abstraction,
happens through specific details of/in the narration. This mechanism is traced
through an analysis of the use of close-ups and of special sound qualities.
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The original screenplay contained elements which were not included in the film,
because the writer/director felt they were either unnecessary or might have
made the corpse less appealing in our eyes. There are also important elements
in the film which did not appear in the screeplay, such as the objects placed
in the corpse's hand and shots of the daughter playing "cat's cradle". These
changes and the choice of the title - also added at a late point in the
production process - are discussed, on the basis of information supplied by Liz
Hughes. The article also takes issue with a published interpretation of the
film.
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What creates the special humour in this film is the continuing visual collision
of lines, movements and spaces. In every detail of each scene the emphasis on
impossible movements, unintended results and visual tricks makes it clear, that
the statement of this film is purely metafilmic. Its concern is not so much the
statement of things in the 'real, modern world' (as in Tati) or the isolation
of the anonymous individial in a Kafkaesque or a surrealistic world. It is, as
this author sees it, an illustration of the conflicting forces, that always
works, when someone wants to create a filmic illusion. How to make depth in a
flat perspective is the translation of the transference from screw to nail. The
solution, the clue, of this film is not to deny this difficulty but to
demonstrate, to show it.
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With its outlandish appearance and silent film technique, the opening of La
Vis prepares the viewer to see a very self-conscious pastiche. But despite
its oddness, all the meta-fictional references make the film seem familiar.
More precisely, the inspirations seem to be the "silent" films of Jacques Tati,
where the interest is centered on digressions, which show useless inventions
and technology - in short the paradoxes of modern life. La Vis is also
inscribed in a kafkaesque tradition, which portrays man in the labyrinths of
bureaucracy. Finally, it is possible to draw a line between the laughable but
endearing characters of La Vis and the East-European films of Forman,
Menzel and Kusturica. All in all a hilarious mix of gags, caricature and
meta-discourse.
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In La vis Monsieur K discovers that every screw he has got is a
non-screw; they are screws without notches. The film follows his case and his
complaint to the factory. The solution turns out to be a non-solution too, and
on our way through the firm's department store together with K we witness a
series of product demonstrations, which are also turning everything upside
down. The film itself is this total inversion. The potential of the
cinematic presentation takes over completely and subverts any/every attempt to
pinpoint one, simple, story behind the images and sounds of the
narrative. No authoritative narrator or character to identify with can be
found. This becomes clear from La vis' experimental playfulness, and it
may show something about the film medium as such too: Rather than looking for
one central narrative position, it seems reasonable to describe a pattern af
enunciating positions, which the audience experiences in its totality, and
enters into interplay with. The consequence of the article's argument is that
the centre of cinematic story telling is not to be found in some pure plot or
story ("behind" style and narrative). Cinema is not a central perspective
medium. It is by definition an interplay of several perspectives in a pattern
of "experience-explorations". La vis can be seen as a demonstration of
this - with an irony that makes any so called solution a laughing matter. It is
a gesture, whose centre is only to be found in the unfolding and style of its
examples.
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La Vis is as linear as Cat's Cradle. But the linear actions of
the protagonist are presented together with a strong number of small scenes
and/or narratives that never interfere with the linear main line, but act as an
absurd ironical background The film (in black and white) uses language in two
ways, either bits of existing languages or as totally artificial language. The
use of incomprehensible language reinforces the absurdity of the visible story
- nothing in this film is real!
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Easier to enjoy than to understand, the final minutes of La Vis raise a
number of interpretive issues, especially with regard to the fact that Mr. K
and the worker he gets into trouble, turn out to be doubles. After considering
possible meanings the film might have in this connection, I suggest that the
doubles are more a structural need of the story than a vehicle of meaning,
since they: a) deliver a surprise when one is needed; b) facilitate a
transference of our identification from one character to the other; and c)
enable the story to double back upon itself in its moment of closure.
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The author has chosen to put special emphasis on the pathetic and aesthetic
spirit of this film. It seems evident that the turning point or the point of no
return (to a childish universe) is the moment when Paul pulls the trigger. In
focusing on the illustration of his visual non-mastery in the
subsequent scenes, it becomes clear that the leading visual clue is
decomposition. In reference to the term arpeggio, that plays a significant
acoustic role in the film, the author makes a small digression in order to
comment on the widespread misconception of the lacanian term, the gaze, in Metz
and Mulvey. In fact, the author would argue, you could not imagine a better
'textbook example' af the split between the eye and the gaze, than this film -
and that might be the reason why it is so 'moving'.
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This article traces the reasons for the great emotional impact, which
Avondale Dogs has on the viewer. It does so by using Edward R. Branigans
different types of character subjectivity. Exemplified by the sequence leading
up to, and showing, the pigeon-shooting, it is stated that the film gradually
deepens the character subjetivity, and by this passes on Pauls emotions. The
analysis of the frames, dramaturgy and lack of color reveals how the whole film
makes a more general impression of subjectivity and memory. Eventually it is
shown how the dramaturgy, the foregounded form and the subjectivity gives an
impression of determinism and by that evokes a bitter-sweet melancholy.
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Avondale Dogs is about a boy's mind. The point af departure of this
analysis is what's on Paul's mind: His feeling and love in relation to a) his
mother (and her imminent death), b) Glenys, the girl next door, and c) his
friends. It is a kind of film that can easily provoke a discussion of
subjectivity and identification with the main character. The article
investigates in what ways the film gets the audience involved, and especially
how it goes beyond the mechanisms of identification and even
against possible tendencies of sentimentality. This is done by
foregrounding how the effective use of subjective point of view is balanced
against Paul's surroundings. To the audience both the boy's relations to
other persons and milieu and subjectively positioned p.o.v's are placed
"out there, with somebody else". The conception of identification often is
exaggerated, but it is a one-sided and over-simplifying view of the matter. The
moving pictures are symbols, without identification. This film's story (as well
as others') is not told from or through one point or centre (Paul's), but from
a whole field or network consisting of several elements and their interplay.
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Avondale Dogs uses simplification in language, in plot and in degree of
details. In this respect it looks more like a "normal" film. Avondale
Dogs wants to be a realistic, poetic and psychological story. It is the
claim of the author that the film is not able to construct psychological
realism within the framework of the short film. The short film cannot build up
the setting of the film in 12 minutes.
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Gregor Nicholas answers questions about the making of Avondale Dogs, the
intended meanings of specific shots, the film's depiction of Maori culture, a
director who has had an influence on his work, the feature film Gregor Nicholas
has just completed, and filmmaking in New Zealand today.
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