Shooting a film in one location has long been a staple for the low budget independent film maker. It’s a great way to keep a story framed and it really keeps the budget manageable. And, if you happened to want to stage a siege of the living dead, you really need a place for the characters to be trapped.
The first film of the week is a bona-fide classic. Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” (1948) is a great story framed in an experimental technique that Hitchcock pulled off with the utmost skill. In the opening scene, you will see the film’s only visible cut. The rest of it flows as though it were one continuous shot. Back then however, you could only get about ten minutes of footage per shot. The cameras simply couldn’t hold anymore film. So, every ten minutes of this film, the camera will focus on a still object. The cut is made, film reloaded and the story continues. I think it’s hard to appreciate at first glance the level of difficulty involved in making a film this way. Every line of dialogue or character movement has to be calculated and choreographed with metronomic discipline.
This week’s second “Pontypool” (2008) is a Canadian sci-fi/horror that takes place almost entirely in a small town’s (Pontypool) radio station. We’ve seen the plot before. A mysterious deadly virus begins infecting a population and before you know it, the crazies are banging down the door. What I loved so much about this one is how effectively unnerving it is while ultimately showing very little. This is true tension building. It’s a great example of less is more low budget filmmaking.
Enjoy.
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