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Vid recs/commentary
Two vids to die for.
Birth of a Geisha by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
charmax
Sumptuously beautiful, as befits the subject matter. This vid uses overlays and crossfades as elegantly as the eponymous Geisha wields a fan, the way the focus shifts from side to side very much recalls that cloistered world, its sliding doors and layered robes, secretive liaisons and impenetrable mystique. There’s a glorious sequence using serial overlays to give the impression of the child protagonist running though snow covered roofs to be confronted by her adult self.
Another strength is the centrality of the relationships between the women, men look on but the greatest passion comes between the girl and her mentor/anti-mentor good mother/bad mother ending in fire. It gives a disquieting edge to the Cinderella ending, the doors slide open for the last time to a scene of suspiciously hyperreal beauty. It’s deliciously unclear whether the prince at the centre of the labyrinth is really a toad.
Blood Fugue bysockkpuppett
Another kind of labyrinth but in this one the central secret is unambiguously horrific, a small boy and his shadow in a room filled with blood. The image the vid circles inexorably in on, fragmented at first, flashing subliminally on dismembered shots of the boy’s head and hands. The action flinches away from that scene to document another present, disembodied dolls, mug shots of bound victims mid-garrotte, the inappropriately charming smile of the killer. His own head visually bisected as he sinks under water to cleansing rain. Gradually the fragments coalesce, the whole blood-drenched picture coming clear. Blood everywhere, smeared on glass, oozing live from a neck wound and back down that corridor to that room, the boy with blood on his hands, the man caught forever in a bloody rain.
I don’t think it’s intended but the vid/show keeps reminding me of a short story by Ursula LeGuin The Ones Who Walk Away from Omalas. Which also has a traumatized child locked in a room as its central image but representing a societal rather than a personal secret.
Birth of a Geisha by
charmaxSumptuously beautiful, as befits the subject matter. This vid uses overlays and crossfades as elegantly as the eponymous Geisha wields a fan, the way the focus shifts from side to side very much recalls that cloistered world, its sliding doors and layered robes, secretive liaisons and impenetrable mystique. There’s a glorious sequence using serial overlays to give the impression of the child protagonist running though snow covered roofs to be confronted by her adult self.
Another strength is the centrality of the relationships between the women, men look on but the greatest passion comes between the girl and her mentor/anti-mentor good mother/bad mother ending in fire. It gives a disquieting edge to the Cinderella ending, the doors slide open for the last time to a scene of suspiciously hyperreal beauty. It’s deliciously unclear whether the prince at the centre of the labyrinth is really a toad.
Blood Fugue by
sockkpuppettAnother kind of labyrinth but in this one the central secret is unambiguously horrific, a small boy and his shadow in a room filled with blood. The image the vid circles inexorably in on, fragmented at first, flashing subliminally on dismembered shots of the boy’s head and hands. The action flinches away from that scene to document another present, disembodied dolls, mug shots of bound victims mid-garrotte, the inappropriately charming smile of the killer. His own head visually bisected as he sinks under water to cleansing rain. Gradually the fragments coalesce, the whole blood-drenched picture coming clear. Blood everywhere, smeared on glass, oozing live from a neck wound and back down that corridor to that room, the boy with blood on his hands, the man caught forever in a bloody rain.
I don’t think it’s intended but the vid/show keeps reminding me of a short story by Ursula LeGuin The Ones Who Walk Away from Omalas. Which also has a traumatized child locked in a room as its central image but representing a societal rather than a personal secret.