Feature

You Ain't Seen Me, Right? – Timecode (2000)

Daniel

20th May 2011

Being a film reviewer and general movie appreciator, the phrase I hear most often is "You haven't seen THAT film? Oh my God, it's brilliant – I can't believe you haven't seen it". Every week our feature You Ain't Seen Me, Right? gives you the opportunity to be that guy.

You Ain't Seen Me, Right? is brought to you by Daniel Palmer, of Part-Time Infidel web fame. He is the only person to have seen every movie ever made. And he did it twice.

Timecode (2000)
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Timecode

Mike Figgis was one of the most prominent early adopters of digital filmmaking, stepping away from the security of directing high-profile studio projects like Internal Affairs (1990) and Leaving Las Vegas (1995) to explore the possibilities of this embryonic technology. Figgis prophesised that the widespread availability of cheap, lightweight equipment would democratize the medium: an assertion that failed to foresee the uncharacteristic alacrity with which Hollywood would adopt digital effects; and the torrent of mediocrity they unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Timecode's tag line says it all: four cameras, one take, no edits, real time. The film is an audacious technical experiment; a parallel narrative shot in four simultaneous, continuous takes with the cast improvising from a pre-determined outline. The screen is divided into four segments; following the intersecting lives of a group of LA residents who converge on the offices of a film production company. There is Lauren (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who suspects her girlfriend, Rose (Salma Hayek), of having an affair; Alex (Stellan Skarsgard), an alcoholic exec whose marriage to Emma (Saffron Burrows) is falling apart; and Lester (Richard Edson), a highly-strung director casting his latest film.

24 totally ripped this off.


Timecode is Dogme ’95 by way of Robert Altman, mixing the vibrancy of Festen (1998) with the dark satire of The Player (1992). The culmination of years of experimentation and refinement, Timecode served to refute the then widely-held notion that digital photography is intrinsically sloppy and ugly. Occupying a space between cinema, theatre and music, Timecode’s script was written on music paper, with Figgis as the composer/DJ, mixing the elements and tying the separate strands together into a coherent whole. Music is a crucial facet, with Figgis, an accomplished musician, playing trumpet on a score that encompasses Jazz, Blues, Trip-Hop and Classical; breaking up scenes in much the same way as the intermittent tremors that briefly and violently unify the characters.

Like Altman, Figgis was able to bring together a sterling ensemble cast. Holly Hunter, Xander Berkeley, Steven Weber and Golden Brooks play execs who typify the pomposity of the corporate culture Figgis was trying to escape; while Julian Sands and Danny Huston provide comic relief as an eccentric, peripatetic masseur and an ineffectual, drug dealing security guard respectively. The film’s naturalistic performances highlight the merits of digital’s unobtrusive shooting style, stripping away the barriers to intimacy and planting the actors firmly in the moment. On the other hand, the continuous shooting and loose structure demanded great discipline on the part of the cast, requiring them to inhabit their roles for the film’s duration - a task to which they rose across the board.

Timecode presents a city on the precipice, where millennial tension and the ever-present threat of ‘The Big One’ feed a frenzy of ego and avarice. Figgis satirizes the pieties and platitudes of the digital manifesto that was coalescing at the turn of the century. As much as he championed its adoption, Figgis saw digital as a valuable resource for artists with a vision that places them outside the mainstream, rather than a panacea for creative bankruptcy.
Right, now you all know your assignments. More from You Ain't Seen Me, Right? next week.

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