Look Both Ways

I went to the movies last night and saw 'Look Both Ways'. It's not a new film (made in 2005), but it was showing at the GOMA as part of the Contemporary Women in Film that is on at the moment. It's fabulous being about to go along to awesome free movies at the art gallery!!

The movie was great - really artistic, interesting and challenging. It intersperses 'normal' style film-making with drawing/text/images from the internet/animated sketching/photo flashbacks to show snippets of what the main two characters are thinking which added interest, depth and an unusual way of showing what a character is thinking as opposed to voice-over. Death was the key theme through the movie, and the female lead (an artist) constantly sees herself dying, and we see this through her drawings which are flashed onto the screen and animated. The male lead (a photographer), recently diagnosed with cancer, also sees flashing images of research he's done on the internet into his cancer, or subjects he's photographed and seen suffering etc. It's such a powerful medium of showing their thoughts and fears in a visual way.

The storyline was interesting and involved many varied characters which I thought were all depicted really well. I also liked the style of the film and simple framing used throughout. The story linked between a major train crash which kills many people, and the accident where a single man is killed. It was about the impact on so many peoples lives no matter how big or small the issue they are dealing with, and how it's always central to their own lives. The use of weather was also clever - buildup of heat through the high pressure/tension main part of the film which then closed off at the end with a downpour of rain and release of emotional tension in the concurrent stories being depicted towards the end of the film.

I thought it was interesting the way differnt medium were used in this film (photos, drawing, text and video footage). Just yesterday morning I had been reading an interview on Conciencious Blog with Christian Patterson who created Redheaded Peckerwood which was a very popular photobook published last year. He also apparently uses different medium in his book which follows loosely the crime story of two young people travelling across America killing people. He uses archive material, studio setups, landscape images, black-and-white and colour images to tell his story in the book. This idea of mixing up mediums is interesting and would provide another avenue for creativity within a photographic project.

References:
JM Colberg, (2012) Concienctious Blog [online] Available from: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archives/a_conversation_with_christian_patterson/ [Accessed 5 May 2012]