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Film
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The Diving Bell and the Public Eye
One film is all about first-person camera POV while another focuses on the prevalence of third-party monitoring. Both deserve credit for fully exploiting the medium of film.
Friday, November 30, 2007 at 10:55 AM
By Richard Horgan
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Captured Films
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Smile... You're on Candid Security Camera
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The theatrical release schedule occasionally has a way of perversely lining up a pair of films that, on paper, would seem to have absolutely no chance of sharing anything in common. Such is the case with today's highly praised Julian Schnabel drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and the forthcoming December 14th Adam Rifkin drama Look.
But there they sit, two films shot entirely from an atypical point-of-view: Butterfly from the POV of recovering stroke victim Jean-Marc Beauby (Mathieu Almaric) and Look from the POV of some of the 30 million U.S. security cameras that record roughly four billion hours of footage each week. On average, the latter film tells us, each American is captured on security camera video about 200 times a day.
While the Cannes Film Festrival gave Butterfly screenwriter Ronald Harwood’s daring conceit the full seal of approval this spring (the film won Schnabel a Best Director award and also merited the festival’s Technical Grand Prize), Look hasn’t exactly been a slouch in the awards department either. It seems somehow entirely appropriate that the city of Las Vegas would be the place where writer-director Rifkin’s film would earn its first Grand Jury Award, as it did at this summer’s CineVegas. If people only knew what was captured on security and casino cameras in Sin City, they would quickly realize that what happens in Vegas stays in a hard drive for quick and easy subsequent retrieval.
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Miramax Films
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Brilliantly spelling out P-O-V
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Earlier this month, at the Lone Star International Film Festival in Texas, Rifkin snagged a Special Jury Prize and a ringing endorsement from fellow festival attendee Bill Paxton, who deemed Look “a film every American has to see.” That’s pushing it a little, but there’s no denying that Rifkin’s seemingly real voyeuristic chronicling of a random group of Angelenos (all of whom are in fact portrayed by actors) boasts a POV premise as unique as that of Butterfly.
There’s another wholly unexpected parallel between these two films. Beauby’s various recollections and thoughts about his two nurses reveal him to be, despite full body paralysis, a past and present sexual being, while much of the surreptitiously captured footage in Look serves to unmask the sexual peccadilloes of a city’s citizens. Everything from pedophilia to stockroom philandering to Lolita ensnaring to deeply closeted homosexual yearning. Be it France or the southern California, sex and the desire for sex is what ultimately makes the world go round.
The last movie to be celebrated as much as Diving Bell for its all encompassing, alternate camera point of view was of course 1999’s groundbreaking indie The Blair Witch Project, which in terms of the horror-suspense genre ties all the way back to Michael Powell’s 1960 career damaging classic Peeping Tom, in which the last moment’s of Karl Boehem’s female victims are filtered through his camera lense. But it is a lesser known movie released a year later, the 2000 Belgian drama Thomas Est Amoureux, that is really the closest in spirit to Schnabel’s masterpiece.
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IFC Films
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The view of Thomas Thomas in 2000's Thomas Est Amoureux
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Benoit Verhaert plays Thomas Thomas, an agoraphobic man who refuses to leave his apartment. The entire film is shot, like Diving Bell, from his POV. It even goes a step further than Diving Bell, in that the audience never glimpses sight of the title character. Much like Schnabel in Cannes, Thomas director Pierre-Paul Renders received a pair of prestigious awards at the 2000 Venice International Film Festival – Best First Feature and the Laterna Magica Prize.
But if you want to go all the way back to the beginnings of this rarely used device for mass entertainment, it is a 1947 with the following tag line: ‘MGM presents a Revolutionary motion picture; the most amazing since Talkies began! YOU and ROBERT MONTGOMERY solve a murder mystery together!’ Lady in the Lake isn’t exactly a classic, but there is one very memorable scene about a third of the way through involving a bathroom.
Rifkin’s Look opens with perhaps the most clichéd and therefore most perversely entertaining security camera scene locale: the female change room at a major department store. As a pair of comely high school students exchange racy comments and possible outfits, the audience is drawn right into the film’s POV premise. One can only imagine what this film could have been like if actors of the caliber of Almaric and Emmanuelle Seigner had participated. As it stands, the film is never less than fascinating, counter punching the reams of fake reality TV with some faked reality film.
After the recent AFI Fest premiere of Look, an audience member who calls himself Kingsly posted this comment to the Rifkin blog on the film’s official website: ‘I was at AFI and this is the best film I have seen in years! Love the premise, and the execution. I totally get it. The medium IS the message. When are folks going to open their eyes? The lens is a mirror, but it doesn't see all. Except mirrors don't record and aren't searchable...’
Indeed, the medium is the message in Look, the medium is the art in Diving Bell and both films are way above medium in terms of their attempts to push the envelope of motion picture narrative.
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