Monday, July 21, 2008
Caught in a Digital World Stuck in Boxes
René Besson's 2000 film Boxes has tagged onto it the supposed distinction of only costing 300 to produce. That is a dubious claim in my book because of the size of the cast and the sophistication of the piece. If this is true at all, then Mr. Besson was able to get a lot of starving actors to give their time and starved them so more.
The flag of this claim might be important, however, it attracted my attention. What Boxes is certainly is a creative work that explores and utilizes the unique capabilities and possibilites of Digital Video hardware and software as a medium of its own. One could create a lineage of these works that Boxes would be a part. The list would include David Blair's Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees , Darren Aronofsky's Pi and Requiem for a Dream as well as the more experimental films of Hal Hartley, Stephen Soderbergh and Mike Figgis.
DV's possibilities of color manipulation, portability, depth of field to near infinity, and ability to spot color and utilize split screen and other kinds of effects are pushed and explored in this story of shallow late 20 somethings at turn of the century Los Angeles. Cubicle dwellers Wren and Madison are young roosters on the make who somehow are able to pull Eden Salenger into accompanying their ventures into single bars at night. Wren and Madison don't refer to their carnal pursuits and fellow office dwellers not by real names but by identifiers like Concerned Office Guy, Ms. Iran, and Eager Office Girl.
Eager Office Girl is one of two random deaths in the film. These events help add to the off-kilteredness of Boxes which is kind of like Neil La Bute's early films (Your Friends & Neighbors and In the Company of Men gene spliced with the work of an experimental video artist. In that I am interested in how light, time, space, and film chemistry limitations can be twisted and transformed with DV, I found Boxes moderately intriguing, but most I know would probably see it as mostly tedious in form and boorish in content because of the protagonists behavior. I am likely more forgiving to those who try to pursue the new, particularly in experiments of form and technology.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:55 PM
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