Week 3

Week 3 Response

The films that we watched this week both seemed to appeal to meta cinema in a very clear way. Both of them featured films being made within films (and in the case of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, films within films within films). In "I am Curious: Yellow" we are given a fictional version of this, where as in "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One" we are given real documentary footage about a fictional movie being shot. It gets sort of complex. In "I am Curious: Yellow", we follow a man in the process of making a film, one about social issues in the world. He finds a good looking young theater girl to play the star role in it. Over the course of the movie, you sort of forget this initial setup and sink back into the typical viewing experience of watching a fictional film. However, later in the movie the "crew" show back up and play, again, a role in the film. The film sort of backs up and looks at itself when later in the story, our "director" begins feelings of jealousy toward the actor. The film cheekily ends how it began, with our director meeting up with another young woman. 

In "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One" (that's the last time I'm typing that out) we are given a more straightforward, but at the same time more complex version of something similar. We start out with a few scenes from a film, sort of out of place and out of context. After the titles we back up and see behind the camera. We see the director, the sound guys, the actors out-of-character, and the setting around them beyond the fictional areas within the frame. The director orders the other camera men to film different things. One crew will film the making of the movie, sort of like a behind the scenes documentary. The other crew is told to film THAT crew while they film the OTHER crew. So like inception, we just keep going deeper. All at the same time we get a fictional movie, a documentary about a movie, and a documentary about a documentary filming a movie. Even better, the director goes out of his way to cause trouble on set, doing his best to stir the pot. The end results are chaotic, and certainly well documented. What sets this film apart from "Yellow" is that not all of the meta cinema here is unauthentic. Even though some people appear to be playing characters, and although the film is documentaries folded in on themselves like matryoshka dolls, a lot of what is shown is off the cuff and really happened. What I really enjoy about the directors approach here is that he somehow managed to create a somewhat honest environment despite the number of cameras floating around. Whenever someone knows that a camera is pointed at them, they act differently. Even if they play it cool, they end up playing some kind of character version of themselves. But when you've got eight cameras all filming different things in utter chaos, it's the same as having no cameras. The true personalities come out, and we see what things are really like on set (granted, it seemed like the director was "playing the part" and purposely stirring the pot to create tension.)