A Frightening Slice of Life
Hello, my name is Sun-Yi Park and I am a film student at NYU who has had the incredible good fortune to be invited to contribute articles here at ScreenAnarchy.com. ScreenAnarchy has always been one of my favorite movie sites since their interest in and focus on “strange little films” is something I avidly share. As an aspiring filmmaker myself, I’m thrilled that unusual and small scale film projects can enjoy the exposure that ScreenAnarchy affords them, especially since the advent of digital home recording has made it possible for so many well-done independent projects to be made. Because of my Korean heritage I have a particular fondness for Korean and other Asian films, especially horror and so-called monster movies. I’m excited to be given a chance to share my (hopefully) unique perspective with you about quirky and often obscure films that I find interesting and that I think the ScreenAnarchy audience might too.
It seems somehow appropriate to begin this first foray into online journalism and film critiquing modestly, with a short and relatively small-scale film entitled Still Life by director Jon Knautz. It bears the Brookstreet Pictures label and I saw it at the Atom Films website. It’s less than nine minutes long so it is an easy watch, made more so by the fact that it is a well-thought out and constructed work also.
Still Life opens with Nathan (played surprisingly well by a young actor named Trevor Matthews, also credited as a producer on the film) looking for a place to rest and refuel during a long and obviously exhausting road trip. As his car’s fuel gauge warns “I’m empty” in its limited vocabulary he inadvertently and luckily comes upon a small town in the remote snow covered countryside. I admit I didn’t necessarily have high hopes when I first clicked on the PLAY button for this film but I found myself surprisingly impressed by both the believable acting and the effective if somewhat generic camera shots within the first two minutes of the movie. Even though it was all very ordinary to that point, it was also very transparently engaging, meaning it didn’t feel or look like an 8 ½ minute independent film. It felt real. It is right about that point that both Nathan and the viewer crash headlong (literally) into a world that is disturbingly odd and unreal, aspects enhanced by the previously noted organic feel and look of the work.
As Nathan begins to explore the small town that at first doesn’t make any sense to either him or the audience, the camera’s focus is single-mindedly on Nathan, cutting away only briefly for glimpses of the world around him. It is a world where nothing moves (hence the title Still Life), at least while Nathan is directly looking at it. The town is populated with mannequins, lifeless and motionless dummies who are well-suited to the frozen backdrop of the town but are in stark contrast to the growing disbelief and fear we see in Nathan. They don’t seem to see him or even know he is there, but how could they? They’re dummies, aren’t they?
The musical score is uninspired, consisting primarily of an apparently random mish mash of generic horror film sound loops and effects, but the music isn’t really the most important component of the soundtrack anyway. It’s used almost as camouflage, while clues to what is really going on in the town are hidden in the non-musical background noises of the score. All is still while Nathan’s looking directly at it, but when he looks away, he can hear things moving. So the small sounds of a chair scraping on the dining room floor or the tinkle of a bell on a storefront door, normally throwaway pieces of a standard film’s soundtrack, become the audience’s and Nathan’s only way of knowing what is happening around him and the clichéd musical bits actually serve only to highlight their importance.
By the time Nathan feels forced to seek the safety of a nearby home about five minutes into the film, Knautz has succeeded in placing the viewer firmly into Nathan’s point of view and reality, despite the growing feeling that the perspective we’ve accepted doesn’t quite add up. I didn’t question Nathan’s decision to defend himself at all, somehow completely ignoring the reality of the situation he had put himself in by invading a private home. Knautz’s success in getting you to place yourself in Nathan’s shoes is what enables the movie’s big twist to work, even though, in retrospect, it seems very predictable. Still Life proves that competent and sometimes creative filmmaking technique can even make an unspectacular story concept effective. All in all, the film is definitely more than worth the 8 ½ minutes it takes to watch it and serves as a good example of the potential of independent movie making made possible by the pervasive spread of recording technologies.
STILL LIFE by Jon Knautz and Brookstreet Pictures, 8:35, written by Charles Johnston, produced by Patrick White, Trevor Matthews, available at http://www.atomfilms.com/film/still_life.jsp and http://www.brookstreetpictures.com.
