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DIRECTED BY: Jamin Winans
FEATURING: Laura Rauch, Anthony Nuccio, Ian Hinton, Martin Angerbauer, Sidney Edwards
PLOT: Ella desperately seeks information which might lead her to god before she succumbs to death from a brush with an incendiary fog.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Winans’ world, characters, score, and all that work so well together as a unit that the Myth of Man feels completely natural. But—this is a dialogue-free adventure quest set in a cotton-candy dystopia featuring neat gizmos and unconventional physics whose heroine is a deaf and mute messiah seeking an interstellar artist-creator-god. This strangeness cannot be overlooked merely because it is so credibly conveyed by the filmmakers.
COMMENTS: The first thing which catches your eye is the glowing rectangle on Ella’s shoulder. It pulses a soft green color as she looks about her train car. An unkempt youth enters the carriage, his indicator flickering red. Shunned by the others—all of whom feature blinking green—Ella is struck by the tragedy, and goes over to the sickly boy. He dies soon thereafter, but not before Ella hands him an odd, humanoid figurine of wire; on his passing she clasps his hand, and feels something, nearly seeing it.
Our first brush with Myth of Man lays out much of the groundwork. Not only do we understand the odd “HUD” system in place, but plenty of other things: this is a visual world, as necessitated by the protagonist’s circumstances. Ella’s eyes wander constantly (typically accompanied by a subtle smile), as she takes in the ambient wonders of her day-to-day existence. Great machines whir in the background and foreground; cybernetic telepathy enhancements summon a dazzling animation of a Creator; black-market medicine extracts the incipient humors of death; and warning systems blare scarlet at the approach of the frequent death clouds that descend upon the metropolis.
Jamin Winans’ latest film continues his tradition of low-cost, high-impact marvels. With nods to City of Lost Children‘s technological elements, as well as the defiant triumph of humanity lurking under the surface in Brazil, he paints us a picture of a futuristic society existing under the omnipresence of cindering doom (the effects of the gas are unlike anything I’d seen before) in a society which manifests as something of a reluctant police state. Eye-popping visuals abound, and Ella’s cryptic forays into the afterlife astound with their windswept vistas of photographs and assembled flip-book recollections. The enchantment worms its way quickly into the viewer, so once the inevitable tragedy falls, the whole exercise feels not only satisfying, but rational; even though we’ve just undergone a strange and fabulous dream.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
I feel that Winans should’ve followed Godfrey Reggio’s lead and halved the running time. I think this aesthetic works much better in shorter doses.
That said, I hope this encourages people who like it to start investigating silent films on their own.
I agree, if not for the dispiriting reality that no one* watches short movies.
If a great idea is wrapped in a short film, it may be a better viewing experience, but exponentially fewer people will come across it.
*: 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦
Thank you so much for reviewing this, I was a big fan of The Frame and Ink but for some reason Winans had fallen off my radar, and though it’s not without its faults I adored it overall.