11/14/2022 0 Comments Silver screen![]() Ten screens lets you see twenty minutes into the future. Assuming you can make out what’s going on ten screens in, when something happens on the tenth screen, it’ll repeat two minutes later in the ninth screen, then two minutes after that in the eighth screen, and so on. Practically speaking, every level of screen embedment lets Kato and the gang see two minutes into the future. This creates the Droste effect of the Japanese title, more commonly known as mise en abyme, where an image is repeatedly embedded into itself recursively. One of Kato’s friends has the galaxy-brained idea of bringing the future screen to the café, so that both screens face each other. To maintain timeline continuity, he announces success to the past screen and, more importantly given their enthusiasm for temporal shenanigans, to his friends. Kato goes, but Megumi rejects him, saying that she doesn’t listen to live music. Then, in the first sign that everything may not be as rosy as it seems, Kato is egged on to ask Megumi out to a concert – including by his future self, who announces success. To test the time delay for themselves, they receive and send passwords and scratch card lottery results through the screens. Some friends arrive to both simplify and complicate things. In addition, the line deliveries and physical performances have to match to make it easier, the actors are directed to go broad and simplify emotion, a choice whose practical motivation is well-hidden by the film’s comic genre and low budget. This means that the plot can only advance in bits and pieces, yielding the side benefit that there’s no time for the exposition to get carried away with itself. The conversations between past and future selves have to be plausibly motivated, while not exceeding a strict time limit that includes the time it takes to move between the two locations. This immediately poses a couple of filmmaking problems. The future screen shows what will happen two minutes into the future, as seen by the camera of the past screen. Turns out there’s a two-minute time delay from the screen in his room (let’s call this the future screen) to the one in the café (the past screen). There, he sees himself in his room and repeats what he has just heard himself say. He tells himself to come down to the screen in the café, quick. #Silver screen tv#One day after work, Kato heads back to his room, where, while looking for a dropped guitar pick, he hears someone calling him from the two-way TV screen behind him, which he has hooked up to another screen in the café as a kind of CCTV. He leads a simple life with simple desires, namely a crush on Megumi (Asakura Aki), the hairdresser next door. The hoodie-wearing Kato (Tosa Kazunari) owns a café on the first floor of a walk-up, where he lives on the second floor. Writer Ueda Makoto does a hell of a job in just 70 minutes.įriends arrive to both simplify and complicate things. There are cuts in Beyond – of course there are cuts it’s a time travel film – but to keep up the illusion, the requisite plot complications have to develop organically from the situation the characters find themselves in, and from who they are as characters, as people. To give you a sense of its flavor, it was inspired by One Cut of the Dead ( カメラを止めるな ! “Don’t Stop the Camera!”), Ueda Shinichiro’s 2017 smash hit about a group of people tasked with making a one-shot microbudget zombie film. Beyond is shot to look like it was done in a single take, using just one phone, tripod, boom mic, the world’s longest power cord, and lots and lots of stopwatches. If they aren’t, paradoxes manifest, the cinematic world collapses, and viewers branch off from the storyworld prematurely, each into their own individual lifeworlds.Ģ020’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes ( ドロステのはてで僕ら “We at the End of the Droste”), director-cinematographer-editor Yamaguchi Junta’s feature debut, realizes this metaphor in the most direct way. Continuity must be maintained, and character and emotional arcs made convincing. The metaphor applies doubly to filmmaking, which usually takes a narrative and shoots it out of order. Like the unread pages of a good book, the future has already happened it just hasn’t yet happened to you. Tosa Kazunari in Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |