Julie Talen’s /Pretend/ <http://www.beginllc.com/projects/pretend.html>
is a powerful and formally innovative no-budget film (actually shot on
digital video, not film). /Pretend/ tells an emotionally wrenching
story, about a nine-year-old girl who stages the fake kidnapping of her
six-year-old sister, as a ploy to prevent their parents from breaking
up. Children spend a lot of time playing make-believe, but what happens
when their fantasies cross over into actuality? With its unreliable
narrator and presentation of multiple possibilities, the film offers no
easy answers.
But what really makes /Pretend/ a remarkable film is its use of multiple
frames and screens-within-screens. Split screens are used now and again
in Hollywood films; Andy Warhol experimented with multiple images
projected at once in the 1960s; Mike Figgis’ /Timecode/
<http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0220100/> divided the screen into four
quadrants, projecting the simultaneous output from four synchronized
cameras; and Peter Greenaway has done a lot with frames-within-frames.
But no narrative film (and probably no avant-garde film either) has ever
done anything on the order of what Talen accomplishes in /Pretend/. The
screen is continually being divided into three, five, nine, twelve, or
as many as forty-two frames; sometimes there is a checkerboard pattern,
other times the screen is split top and bottom, or left and right; still
other times, frames of different sizes appear as boxes floating in front
of an image that would otherwise cover the entire screen. Sometimes the
various frames show different but simultaneous scenes; sometimes they
show the same scene from different angles; sometimes they depict
variations, or metaphorically associated scenes, or fantasies that
somehow relate to the action in other frames. The movements and
arrangements of the multiple frames often seem to be organized according
to musical principles; speaking about the film, the director spoke of
some of these sequences as “fugues” of images. Other times, the visual
arrangement of the frames seems more directly motivated by the narrative.
Of course, none of this could have been done before the arrival of
digital video, and programs like Final Cut Pro. In addition, Talen makes
much of the visual properties (and limitations) of digital video.
Sometimes different frames are given different color balances; sometimes
some of the frames are blurry, or shot with a slow shutter speed, or
blown up so much that individual pixels appear on the screen.
While the effect is sometimes close to abstract, the film as a whole
never loses sight of the narrative in which it is anchored. The result
of all this is extraordinary: at times, while I was watching /Pretend/,
I felt that I was perceiving things in an entirely new way, as if the
very process of vision had been reinvented. (But it’s important to note
that Talen’s radical visuals never interfered with the narrative, but
made total sense as a way of conveying it, just as more familiar
cinematographic and editing techniques do).
The sort of fragmentation of the visual field that is evident in
/Pretend/ is really just a way of moving cinema, that quintessential
20th-century art form, fully into the 21st century. Marshall McLuhan
said that technological changes, the invention and dissemination of new
media, results in changes in the “ratio of the senses,” mutations in the
human sensorium itself. McLuhan , writing in the 1960s,was concerned
with the way that television was different from movies. Today, under the
impact of computers, and more generally the information and
communications revolutions of the last thirty years, our minds have
become more accustomed to multi-tasking, and our visual experience has
become ever more heterogeneous and fragmented. Think of the multiple
windows on our computer screens, or for that matter of the multiple
windows, with text ticker at the bottom, of a station like CNN Headline
News. /Pretend/ is the first film I have seen that does full justice to
these changes in our everyday visual experience; what’s more, it doesn’t
just mimic these changes as a formal exercise, but deploys them in a way
that is intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant.
--
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Steven Shaviro [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
http://www.shaviro.com <http:/www.shaviro.com>
THE PINOCCHIO THEORY:
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/
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