Words

While I don't think I quite enjoyed this as much as Bob the Moo (he recommended I watch it), it is a very clever little film--the sort that makes me wonder what sort of wonderful work the filmmakers (William Johansen Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante) will do in the future. They have a few credits between them but I am pretty sure you'll see more from them.

The film is one you really have to pay attention to. I must admit, I was initially lost--not realizing that all the random images flashing on the screen were not random in the least--they have common threads. I could say more, but really think you really just need to watch this. And, like me, when it's all over, you'll perhaps watch the first moments since now you understand what the film is trying to convey. Fascinating and quite clever.

This film is a series of images that are edited together to flow from one to the other with associations of a handful of words between each clip; that is a factually correct statement about the basic structure of this film that, as is so often the case with words, totally fails to capture the beauty and creativity within the film. Indeed I suspect whatever I say here will actually just do the same because there is no way of not making it sound like it is smugly clever film that is technically impressive but little else, which would be a shame because that is not the case. The film doesn't edit – it flows and it does so in the way that a stream does, it doesn't change, there isn't a part where one piece of water ends and the next little bit begins, a river is a river. So it is with this film, it flows along with separate clips but they all merge together and perform their function as part of the whole.

The music over the top of the film is beautiful and again compliments the flow of it. In each moment there is life and I found it hard not to be moved by it because all of it seemed so genuine, so real that it held me. The concept of linking it all by words gives it a structure but to be honest it was my third or fourth viewing of it before I starting thinking about that because there is so much "life" going on across the clips that the "gimmick" (bad choice of words I know) felt secondary to me. Technically the film is very impressive – so many different locations all for the sake of a few seconds at each and all of them captured consistently in very crisp images full of colour and life. The selection of the shots is quite brilliant – my favourite moment is within the section on "falling" , a split second shot of a girl falling in love – it says so much with so little but it is unmistakable and instantly moving.

Beautiful short film. There was nothing I didn't love about it.