Cinema Canada (Nov 1975)

a piano accompaniment for sound. Also the story is a rather sentimental love story which would be appropriate for the silent period. I found Her Decision delightful. There are amusing references to other films which I would expect students with a university education in film to make in a film such as this and which I would expect their peers to understand. For example, one of the titles is “Children of the fields”; this, I suspect, is a direct quote from D.W. Griffith. And later in the film when the boy slaps the girl, the slap is shown three times. I understand this to be a reference to the kind of shots of repeated action used in 1928 by Sergei Eisenstein in October. Similarly I understand a lyrical slow motion running sequence as a reference to René Clair’s 1924 Entr’acte. At least one shot is used which jarred with the silent style of the film. The couple is shown walking along a country road, and instead of moving the camera with them to keep their size relative to the frame constant, the camera is placed some distance in front of them and zooms back as they move closer to it. Although this zoom shot did jar with the period style, I think the anacronism makes the film more interesting. It serves to remind the viewer to think carefully about what is and isn’t part of a silent film style. Her Decision is one of the few films in which physically beautiful people play the lead parts. Students often seem to cast the first available friend in the leading roles, but the couple in this film look as if they were chosen to some extent because their appearance was appropriate to the sterotyped images of the leads in a love story. Actually instead of being a sentimental love story, I assume the film is intended to be a parody of a romantic silent film. Surprisingly there are moments in the film when it can be appreciated as an authentic silent film might be. These moments are fleeting, and laughter is the more pervasive reaction. Credit is due to the camerawoman, Rebecca Yates, for beautiful photography. (And I strongly recommend that the Festival avoid using ““Cameraman”’ as the Credit designation on next year’s entry form.) The music is credited to Charles Hofmann, and I would like to ask Glen Salzman if this is Charles Hofmann who was New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s pianist for silent films. If he is, then having him do the music is like having James Wong Howe photograph a student film. Mr. Hofmann is the leading professional musician for silent films in North America. Temporarily Confused opens with a fine shot which begins with a close-up of an elaborate clock and moves over a night table until it rests on a little girl in bed. Then the shot is overexposed to leave a blank screen; this is followed by shots of the girl preparing for school. When she finishes, she goes downstairs, and at the bottom of the stairs, there is a perfect mirror shot of her. She is seen in the mirror, but only after the camera moved did I understand that I was seeing a mirror image of the girl. This image is only the beginning for mirror images are the central device of the film. The little girl is regularly seen meeting herself in seemingly impossible ways. She sees herself as a living mannequin in a store window and inside of a cage with monkeys. This is disconcerting on two levels: On the level of content these double images seem planned to recreate a nightmare, and nightmares are disturbing even when they are someone else’s. On the level of the appearance of the film, some of these images cannot be explained by trick shots or the use of mirrors. Actually the mystery has a simple solution. There are twin girls, and I expect the film was planned around the availability of the actresses. Even so, I found that the film continued to be disconcerting and to surprise after I knew that there were twin actresses. I take this as an indication that the film was successful because the content of images kept making me forget momentarily the method that had been used to get the double images. The film ends with a shot of the girl sitting up quickly in bed with a look of terror on her 38 / cinema canada face, meaning of course that the eight minute film had been a dream from the point of the first shot overexposing to white until the final shot. This dream framework is a trite narrative device, but Ken Ilass managed to produce an interesting film in spite of it. Barry Greenwald’s Metamorphosis is one of the three honourable mention films entered in the scenario category. The story of this ten minute film is surprising, and this unexpectedness accounts for part of the film’s strength: A mousy looking man is shown transforming himself and eventually dying by mastering one part of his existence. Each day the man rides an elevator down from his high-rise apartment on his way to a routine, dull job. Very gradually he begins to master the space of the elevator car for the time of his daily ride. First he dares to undress in the elevator; then he becomes bolder and does more and more unexpected things during the daily trip. He delays starting to undress until he can do it in the last three floors of the trip, brings a chair, reads and even sets up a stove for cooking. The small part of his life spent in an elevator changes him into a happy, confident person, but the pace is too much: it kills him. The film can be understood as a metaphor for many less extreme situations in the world, so it is quite serious and relevant. However, the initial reaction to the film is laughter. Barry Greenwald really understands comedy, and he keeps adding gags to each elevator ride to make the trips progressively more hilarious. Several times I thought that this trip must be the last one because the film could not get more humourous, but it did. Films which are both funny and serious are difficult to make, and Greenwald has made a real winner. The two other honourable mention scenario films are also attempts at humour. Claude Laflamme’s Les Aventures de running shoes is the more successful of the two. It concerns the frustrated attempt of a young man to take a book, La Vérité sur le sexe of course, from a library shelf. The book seems firmly wedged in the shelf and cannot be removed. He tries tools, but nothing works. Yet another man walks up and just casually takes the book from the shelf with no difficulty. When this man returns the book, it immediately becomes an immovable object again for our young man. The frustrated reader produces a bomb and destroys the entire library, leaving only the shelf with the still immovable book and himself. The film is made with accelerated motion and is one of the funniest films from the Festival. The final sequence was particularly well done: The library is blown up, and the next shot shows the young man at the bottom of a huge crater with only the library shelf and a door remaining. It is a good image. The Bet is Antonio Rizi’s three minute honourable mention film. It is a story of two boys who bet another boy that he will not steal a tape recorder from a parked car. The boy accepts the bet and wins by taking the recorder. Then a police car appears and the two boys run away leaving the thief holding the recorder. The thief now returns the recorder to its owner who is driving away, and the owner rewards the thief because she believes two fleeing boys are the thieves. It is a simple film with a punch line that provides a chuckle. The modest length of the film makes it acceptable that all its interest is at the end. Two films which evidently did not impress the jury at all were among my personal choices for the most interesting films in the Festival. One of these Aura-Gone, is a ten minute experimental film by Neal Livingston from York University. The other is a 12 minute documentary, Cream Soda, by Holly Dale from Sheridan College. Both of these films impress me as not being student films. By saying this, I intend to point out that saying a film is a student film has the sound of an apology, as if a student film is not to be judged as rigourously as a non-student film. I consider both