The Seventh Floor

Essentially I had 4 main goals for the short I put together.

1) complete my first short (big moves right there)- I've wanted to make a film for a while but have really had no idea what to work with until this idea came to me. I played with it for a while and eventually came up with what you see here.

2)Since I didn't make a film first semester I wanted to pull from some of the formalist theorists and play with montage and subject matter in such a way that it was obvious that this is in fact a film. The suspension of disbelief required to watch this piece is sufficient I feel to drive it away from the realist realm. The individual shots require each other in order to arrive at the work's full meaning and I wanted this to be a clearly present quality within the work and feel that I was successful in that.

3)Another avenue I wanted to explore was the concept of Bazin's realism and forcing the viewer to accept what they are seeing for what it is. In many ways, the end result I arrived at serves to contrast formalist and realist theory in the sense that some shots operate independently from the overall narrative while others are directly related to it. Each floor operates as its own individual piece of observational cinema and yet they are all still connected by the sequences in between. I would like to think that due to this it becomes difficult to attribute my piece to either the formalist world or the realist world but rather some place in between.

4) When I set out to make the work, I also wanted to place a significant amount of emphasis on the overall structure of the film. Although it certainly doesn't operate on the same kind of precise time screen as zorns lemma it does remain faithful to a system which is only broken in a few intentional instances (ie. the visit to the seventh floor is significantly shorter than all of the others) to add meaning in a certain way. This was in many ways to see if in fact a system could be developed and utilized that did not bore or distract the viewer to that same degree that structural cinema frequently does.

Enjoy!