SXSW part 3

THE SOUND OF INSECTS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a8yGLc4U_g

http://www.peterliechti.ch/page.php?en,0,16,1

Short version: Anonymous man goes into the woods to starve himself to death, and we hear the narrated words from his journal as he documents the process of his suicide.

This was one harrowing concept film. There was literally no other voice except the narrator reading his journal. The main challenge, of course, was what would we see? Their solution was better than I imagined, but still didn’t sustain the entire length of the film, for me. Evocative, abstracted landscape shots, scenes of rain showers, the reconstructed shelter the man built, and visions of his hallucinations were the bulk of the imagery. When the images built a scene, like a rain shower, with a beginning, middle, and end, it worked. When it started to feel like a parade of random shots, disconnected from one another and disconnected from what we were hearing, it did not work as well. Eventually the novelty of the ‘evocative’/’poetic’ imagery wore off, and it felt repetitive.

As my mind began to wander in the meditative mode this film was inducing, what I started to think about was what subjects are best suited for documentary, and what subjects are best suited for radio, or print, for that matter? On its face this seemed like primarily an audio-driven piece, reading the journal, fashioning a soundtrack of natural ambiences mixed with evocative electronica for the moments of memory and hallucination. What, really, is it necessary for us to see? Obviously the filmmaker answered this question differently than I did, but I’m not sure how much I truly benefitted from the images in the film, what it added to the experience (or, conversely, what did it take away from the experience?). These are questions that every filmmaker should ask him/herself before embarking on a project, and answer truthfully. Of course maybe that challenge is what drew this director to this project in the first place, and maybe that’s enough.