A preamble: Squarise doesn?t do film reviews any more. We decided that the sheer volume of films coming into cinemas, coupled with our small budgets and lack of very wide press screening coverage meant that we weren?t really equipped or availed to the task of providing anything close to worthwhile film reviewing. So now we?re focused on feature writing, editorial pieces, thoughts and ideas, because we?re all over-educated arts and humanities students with too much to say as it is. But I?m making an exception here for The Circus Animals, for a variety of reasons. Main ones being that it?s a tiny ? really tiny ? indie film released in completion for public viewing on Vimeo; I found out about it through the Filmmakers? subreddit on, well, Reddit; and it?s really, really good.
Reddit is surely part of the Internet canon by this point; it?s a junction at which people from all points of the Earth, all walks of life, seem to converge on topics as general as funny images or as specific as tiny sub-sections ? subreddits ? dedicated to baristas discussing their craft and work, fan communities of just about anything, or filmmakers talking shop. The Filmmakers subreddit is typically filled with questions from aspiring newbies, trailers by community members, or just shout outs and information that people may be interested in. Reddit?s voting system tries to ensure that the best and newest submissions are most visible, and the worst are filtered into oblivion.
?future_robot? posted a link to his entire feature film, The Circus Animals, on the site on Friday September 7th, and as of writing it sits at 14 votes. Which is perfectly admirable for this relatively small ? yet active ? subreddit. It?s the kind of vote count ascribed to worthy but fleeting discussions, or competent trailers and tech demos. Watching the film itself, however, it?s easy to feel that this is a massive disservice to this film, because it certainly deserves more. This isn?t just an /r/Filmmakers film ? it?s a proper, real, very good film.
THE CIRCUS ANIMALS a film by Nicholas Clift Bateman from Painted Stage Pictures on Vimeo.
The film is layered, interwoven, with three filmic styles being overlaid upon each other in order to tell two stories which are really, ultimately one. The characters of the film are themselves making a film, a magnum opus which that have promised themselves will work because, after all, it must. Our characters are young, hopeful, artistically minded and optimistic ? for filmmakers like these, projects always ?must work?. If there was even the slightest chance that they wouldn?t, the momentum would die and the endeavour would die out. Of course, in the end, these things often don?t work, but by then the work is done and the disappointment is in an unreceptive audience, and not a job incomplete ? the disappointment fits into the romantic tragedy of the misunderstood artist, and not the crushing mundanity of the unmotivated student filmmaker.
The film being made is one of affected, deliberate artistry, emulating something between Woody Allen?s Manhattan and the indie quietudes of Blue Valentine, or a Sofia Coppola movie. It?s a soft-focus and close-ups, sepia tones and verbal gymnastics, voice-over and jump cuts. If Rian Johnson had gone a few steps too far into his noir fantasy in Brick, he?d have ended up with something akin to the film these characters are putting together; a film trying to be Godard, and evidently, a film which is most aptly described through allusions to others. It?s postmodern in its construction, it?s fatally postmodern in its attempt to be sincere about it. That?s no flaw in The Circus Animals, of course ? this film within a film is supposed to be an object of conspicuous creation, not one for objective criticism. It?s a comment, an apt and astute one, on the nature of art cinema today in the hands of us unwieldy kids and our extensive prior reading.
The making of this film is documented by a roaming video camera, capturing the characters fighting amongst each other, and within themselves, to get this thing done, with footage processed to resemble a less-than-indecipherable Phil Solomon work, or as ?future_robot? describes it, something like ?the way old first run screen prints of Maxfield Parrish?s work decay.? It certainly feels decayed. It?s peeling, coming apart at the seams, vibrant and real in its immediacy, documentary. The characters interact with each other and the camera, offering comments and in-jokes, as the production goes on, giving a wonderful insight into the distinctly decaying faith they have with their vision and their ideas. The production ticks on and the characters smile less, they curse more, they no longer use the word ?art? as much as they once did.
The film comes into perspective through beautifully graded and fluid shots of pure cinematic cleanliness; everything is shown ? the characters acting out their film, their filming of it, their documenting of the process, their fragmentation before our now-omniscient eyes. It?s simultaneously alienating and intimate, giving us-the-audience a glimpse at everything whilst also definitively excluding us from the world of The Circus Animals. We no longer have characters in the movie-within-a-movie, nor characters within the documentary-within-a-movie, we have a collection of people, ferociously interesting and vital people with a dream and a downward spiral that inevitably sucks them all in.
The beauty of the film comes from its near insistence on being considered as a complete whole, not just as a work of art in and of itself but as both a proof-of-concept that modern cinema is not threatened by the onslaught of easily available high quality equipment, and as a semi-autobiographical exploration of the lives not just of these particular characters, but of struggling artists everywhere. Every element of this film is crucial, even the parts that aren?t ? I?m not sure I?m making sense here ? where rambling tales and vignettes of idle people and idle footage only adds to a visual collage of people doing what they want to do, and damning everything else. The film they are trying to make, that sepia stylised exercise, is the film all us student filmmakers are trying to make ? it?s what these filmmakers are trying to make with The Circus Animals. It?s a work aspiring to self-evident worth, something that can?t be swept under a carpet or placed into a box because it is its own moment of brilliant clarity. An important work. Where the characters fail the actual film succeeds, for it recognises this basic flaw in thinking, it recognises that the point of everything isn?t to make everyone think you?re special, but to show something slightly true, something slightly real.
The production is sub-Hollywood, because this isn?t Hollywood ? it?s filmed on the Canon 550D, a cheap and cheerful DSLR which packs an excellent bang for your buck. Flaws in aspects like dynamic range and resolution are dealt with wonderfully through excellent colour grading and a firm understanding of how to push this equipment to its full potential. The sound is similarly excellent, with the occasional bit of cable noise and wind distortion doing this film some favours by reminding us now and then of just how limited the resources of this film really were ? which is important, because it?s very easy to be fooled into thinking this is the work of established auteurs and not struggling young Brooklynites and Baltimoreans. The music flows between scenes, between the film-within-a-film and the actual film itself, tying everything together because what they are depicting is what they are also doing. And everything matters. I won?t write too much on the music, it works in such mysterious and gorgeous ways that I don?t know where or how to start.
The Circus Animals is a tremendously human, universal film of struggle and endeavour, of small betrayals and smaller achievements. It?s a film that anyone can watch and come away with a worthwhile experience, but it?s a film that, for new and young filmmakers, can cut to the core of what we?re all doing here, and why we?re doing it. It?s not often redid gets an exceptional film; it?s almost never that it gets an actual work of art. It?s comforting and exhilarating to be reminded every now and then that truly great things are possible with limited resources and some beautiful minds.
Source: http://squarise.com/2012/09/circus-animals-troubled-pursuit-art/
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