Ersbel Oraph
This is a weird film. Weird in a good sense. It is hard to place it in a category. Has this idea been done before? I would have liked an extended version. Yet in such a static environment the film might turn boring. Static? The lift is moving. The door keeps opening. And people go in and out. The exterior shots are making everything less tense, less claustrophobic. Is there a chronology? No. Or at least this is not the order in which the pieces were filmed. But in its weird way, the film builds up a story. I don't know how. And certainly the audience doesn't have the slightest idea who are these people. Yet, in the end, can anybody tell more about one's neighbors without being a busybody?Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch
bob the moo
For ten hours each day filmmaker Marc Issacs stands in the lift of a typical London tower block with his camera, filming those that come and go during the day. At first he is greeted with indifference or just plain ignored by all except a man who is rather jolly after a few drinks. However as he starts to become more of a fixture in the lifts, his blunt questions start to draw information out and gain the trust of some of the residents. Some bring him food every time they travel up or down, others ask him questions and several tell him personal stuff about themselves – whether deliberately or by accident When this film came on as part of a mini-festival of short films, I had the sneaking suspicion that it would be one of the lesser films because it really does sound like it shouldn't work or it will be so tacky as to make other "reality" shows feel like high art. At the start it appeared that it wouldn't work; the majority of people just shuffled around in front of the camera, occasionally throwing a sideways look at it but no more than that. The only person to really talk to the camera was one rather rotund man who was merry with drink – but the film allowed him to seen in rather a sad, lonely way which, in fairness he probably is. However, as the film went on it started to work as people started to talk but I still felt that some of the people were viewed as sad and insecure people – an sentiment shared by the audience who laughed at the merry bloke as well as the very insecure black guy always licking his lips.Happily the film turned this around and helped us see the people a bit better and, if they were sad and pathetic then so be it – but it did it in a way that didn't invite us to mock them. The black guy is a point in case; at the start he just seems sad and even says that after work he is just "watching the hours go by". But later in the film we learn more about him, understand why he seems so insecure and broken and my heart went out to him. In a way I came to care about or be interested in almost all of the characters, whether it be their comic value or the empathy that the film managed to draw out in me. It isn't perfect of course but the moments that work become the majority towards the end and some of them work so well that it is worth sticking with the ones that don't.Overall, it works and works much better than your cynical writer expected it to. I don't know how he did it, but Issacs has taken what could have been intrusive and exploitative and turned it into something that is touching, honest and surprisingly intimate. Won't be everyone's taste of course but it is worth a look at the absolute least.
