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Hi Djordjije Not trying to be rude or anything, but did I actually see the same film you saw? How can you say that this film is so "easily decipherable"? I find Gaspar Noe's work to be an incredibly challenging piece of cinema. I haven't read much about it except for the "sensation" it caused in its initial screenings ie with oxygen tanks and everything -- and that bit of tabloid news only in hindsight. I saw it here as part of the French film festival program. Perhaps you are taking the narrative aspect of the film -- and all the 'clues' found there -- too readily. For me, the film is about challenging and transforming our perspective. This is evident in the opening sequence -- when the camera seem to be 'floating', it's movements are turbulent, it convulses, it is aberrant, it is difficult to decipher what is 'visible', but one can sense that this movement is deliberate, an in a way choreographed, as distinct from bad hand-held movements in say a film like Blair Witch. So what are we presented with here? A would suggest that it is a perspective of a world, of a time and a space, that is unknown to us, we recognise certain things, eg light, the wall, but it is not a world that 'belongs' to us, it is a world that is freed and perhaps only availble to us through the 'optical unconscious' (to borrow from Benjamin). Then, we are shown episodic sequences, varying in length, camera style, as an 'unfolding' of time occurs, but not in the conventional sense. Why I am resisting your reading as that of a dream is because everything can then be 'explained away' and the film can then be read and somewhat dismissed through psycho-analytic terms. I think more attention needs to be paid on the structure of the film, and specifically the images' correlation to the concept of 'irreversible' -- and the quote shown at the beginning of the film "Les temps detruit tout" -- "Time destroys everything" -- including our preconceived ideas of perception, or how narrative must be read, or how a film should be structured. We need to unlearn what 'history' or the 'time line' has taught us and be mindful of this other temporal world, such as the notion of memory by Bergson -- whereby memory exists in time, rather than in your own head. Or for Benjamin -- where memory is 'duration'. So, perhaps another way of reading this film, may see the 'event' (keeping in line with the Deleuzean idea of the 'event' as time as series) of the killing of that man in the gay club, 'Rectum' as a point of recall. But that is still besides the point, because this film opens up so many different lines of thought for me that I will do it injustice to pin it down to just the one reading. And I guess time (its lack) does not permit me to go any further at this moment, but I hope to return to thinking and writing about this film soon. Oh and one last thing, at the end sequence, Monica Bellucci's character is seen reading a book that had a title of something like "Experiments with Time"... cheers Janice ------------- Janice Tong Cinema Studies Department of Art History and Theory University of Sydney Ph: 61 2 9351 6908 Fx: 61 2 9351 4909