I do not think I could have worded my thoughts on the movie any better than DeBruge; the movie so considerably altered the sequence of events that it was almost unwatchable at times. I for one was not able to attend class, so I simply rented the movie from the Allen library and saw it. Since I could not finish it in one session, I resumed the second half today. Now, despite the small lull in time (only one day between sessions), I was completely unable to follow a significant part from chapter 10. The fact that the movie had little continuous storyline, instead focused on showing and setting up the murder from all angles, proves the amount of “jumping” around the storyline.
The film itself is full of twists and turns, and never do they seem to fit together into proving some “bigger” picture. This moves into the point that there was little footage of Andrew Bagby, and that almost random footage was strung together to prove a point. I have to draw on an erroneous example from some CSI episode from the weekend, where a man is framed by having a string of his answering machine messages “put together”. In this way, a totally random set of data was combined to form a threatening message. This is part of my opinion of the movie, which does not draw on any long strings of evidence but rather short clips that are botched and placed together. In this way, the filmmaker is able to directly force a point, and when coupled with the fact that (I felt anyways) the movie lacked a complete focus (throughout the entire movie), Kuenne is able to force his opinion upon the audience.
One more point. The way this movie seems to FLY through the evidence; capitals do not express what truly was happening (cut off sentences, weirdly animated figures and pictures, extremely fast narration, quick cuts all over the place). To me this is completely unacceptable, and really causes me to question what is going on in the movie. Why, I must ask, are they trying to rush so fast? Is there something to hide? Something that would reveal “too much”. The argument stays in mind as incomplete, unjustifiable, and entirely aggressive.
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You bring up an interesting issue, Miheer: the way that we view films. Your experience of seeing different parts of the film at different times *seems* to have become more common today,* with easy home access to films that one can pause. I must admit that I do this all the time, though I think about it regularly and always qualify my viewing experiences because I'm not sure how fair it is to a film to watch it split up this way. 'Dear Zachary' seems a terrific example, because I would imagine that, indeed, it would be difficult to follow in a broken-up fashion. One question is whether we can we blame the filmmaker, who designed the film for one continuous viewing, for this.
ReplyDelete* I should note that I'm not entirely sure about this -- for instance, it used to be not uncommon practice in theatres for patrons to come in during the middle of a film (ie, not plan to come at a certain time -- just come in whenever) and then stay through the next showing until they had seen all the stuff they had missed.
I agree that the film lacked one central theme. It was more several themes all connected somehow to the man Andrew Bagby. However the process that was used in the film seemed very natural to me. Maybe not natural in the way a film maker purposefully sets up a story, but more so how life unfolds before the very eyes of the person living it. I believe many points are forced because of Kuenne's emotion pouring into the film. Dear Zachary, then, may not be so successful in making some cogent point. I do think it is highly successful as a personal documentary.
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