ezekielsdaughter | Mar. 25th, 2012

Went to see "This is Not a Film" last night.

The best of films leave me with a heightened sense of awareness. Every street scene I pass on my way back home becomes a significant tableau--the boarded up buildings across the street dressed in Caribbean colors, the cars merging in traffic, the poppies bending before the wind. Fatigue and good films (or books)--the best drug ever.
The filmmaker at the center of the documentary is at home and full of the need to create. He is on fire with ideas but the court system has just given him a 20 year ban on writing screenplays and directing films. But he has this screenplay, he explains to the camera--that someone else wrote. If I read it to you, that's not the same as directing is it? Don't you just love humans; they always find a way.
I don't know if it my being American and full of American movie expectations; or maybe these are human expectations--our non-directing filmmaker finds a way to get tension into scenes that have no apparent tension. It turns out his family has a pet iguana. In one scene, he sits and plays on the computer trying to get past the internet blocks. (Or maybe he is not-working on that screenplay). The iguana--that his family has begged him to care for--slowly strolls across the carpet, clambers behind the bookcase bolted to the wall. And I am sitting there thinking, the poor creature is going to get stuck and his family will be furious. But no, the moment passes with no crises. But he's held my attention on the screen when nothing has happened. Did I have those expectations because I am human or because American movies are fond of faux action?
We get a little film theory as he rages to a film who has come over to handle the camera. He slips a dvd into the player. They say that I direct, he says, but in this scene the location directed. In the scene, a woman rushes down a long hall defined by full length windows. Look at the vertical lines and how they add tension, he says. The location has directed this!
The movie ends outside in a blaze of color which makes you realize how muted the colors in the all the preceding scenes have been. Most of the movie takes place in his home, mirroring the screenplay that he wanted desperately to film. His denied film about an imprisoned young woman has been collapsed into this smuggled out documentary about his own artistic imprisonment.