Director: Erez Pery / Israel, USA 2020
Category: Author’s Film / Personal point of view / Art & Culture / New York / USA
Production: Erez Pery, Elad Peleg: Daroma Productions, Israel
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Length: 50 minutes
A filmmaker living in downtown Manhattan for a while, observes the street below from his apartment window while making some cinematic experiments.
Filmmaker Erez Pery, an Israeli filmmaker living in downtown Manhattan for a while, observes the street below from his apartment window while making some cinematic experiments inspired by “Rear Window” (Hitchcock’s film from 1954). A fixed camera, records from a low floor of a building the passage of passersby, at different climatic moments and gradually begins to look parsimoniously at specific subjects. Then the camera focuses into scenes on the sides, details from other windows, until leading to a more complex story, where the documentary eye turns to the language of (science) fiction. All stimulated by the off-screen sounds of “War of the Worlds”, the famous radio drama carried out by Orson Welles in 1938, which caused a mass hysteria by the listeners, who believed that Martians were attacking earth. The effect of that classic description of Martians landing on Earth, combined with seemingly everyday situations and reinforced by a suggestive ambient music, provoke a fascination that shatters the naturalistic atmosphere of the initial proposal.