Chicago International Film Festival, round 2.
Just to bring you up to speed, round one of the festival left me questioning the existance of a higher power because I wasted two hours of my life watching a doucmentary about a guy who likes to tell everyone how great he is. Incidentally, in the service of fairness, I believe equal time should be given for opposing viewpoints at the festival. For instance, I don't believe he's great in the slightest. Now gimme two hours to expand on that and you'd have more of a thesis than was found in his movie!
That being said, I went to movie #2 today with some trepidation.
Today's movie was called CCTV, which stands for Close Ciruit Television. CCTV is the camera system they have in place in London that is supposed to help deter terrorists by surveilling the entire city simultaneously. Apparently (and ironically) it is illegal to photograph the CCTV cameras. Anyway, the movie follows one single camera through the lives of MANY different owners. The camera has a glitch that keeps the tape from ejecting and makes it film at very unpredictable times. The entire movie is a viewing of the tape by the police department.
The camera gimmick is both good and bad. Good in the respect that it presents an opportunity for some very nice voyeuristic moments to be captured that might be missed by a traditional story-telling device. Bad in the respect that I was always asking myself why these people kept putting the camera in such auspicious places. The film maker has made over 40 documentaries, but this was his first foray into fiction. He employed a lot of non-fiction techniques in this film. None of the "actors" are really actors and they are making up the dialogue from an outline the director wrote.
The "story" doesn't really hold together as such, but I don't think that was the intention of the film maker. As an experiment in storytelling I think it works much the same way as "Time Code."
Tomorrow I see Errol Morris' "The Gates of Heaven." I'm really looking forward to that.
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