Thursday, November 13, 2008

Day 13 - A Student Film

In film school I made a movie called "Cindy Fey's November," the title of which you can read a couple of ways - it's a movie about November, made by Cindy Fey or it's a movie about my November. It's really the latter. In typical overwrought film student fashion, I strung together seemingly random images and sound that more or less tried to create a mood rather than a story. You hear my neighbor telling a story about trying to get her car started on a snowy morning so she could get to work as a waitress at the Iowa City supper club out of on I-80 and how her husband had her pushing the car in her uniform - a black dress and white apron - as he tried to jump start it. A woman reads this passage from Harriet Doerr's Stones for Ibarra in a gentle voice:

Later on, when she lay down shivering in the warm night to sleep, she spoke out loud to Richard. She said, "How could you?" For he had somehow permitted himself to be removed, had left a space between them so vast it was impossible to measure and therefore seemed no space at all.

She slid her hand across the sheet to his cold, smooth side of the bed. And even if he had been resurrected to lie next to her again, holding the length of her against the length of him, even then she might have pulled back long enough to say, "How could you?"


You see footage of a building being demolished. A colander in the grass spilling the end of the season cherry tomatoes. A man with a pipe on a porch swing, looking into the lens. And black. Lots of black. Now that I think about it, I guess I could have overlapped the pictures and the sound instead of letting the audience sit through silence during picture and black during sound. Duh.

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