The piece starts with a provocative image: a long unbroken tracking shot of a middle-aged woman (played by actor Florencia Lozano, Netfliix’s NARCOS and UGLY BETTY) walking alone to an anonymous hotel room high above a modern jetport. Outside a giant window overlooks a runway where travelers come and go, an all too human restlessness. We hear the dull roar of jetliners taking off and landing. The woman walks to the window and presses her hands against the glass and collapses.  We see this scene play out in seven variations.

 

SHE ENTERS THE ROOM SEVEN TIMES is inspired by Warhol’s multiplication of image as in “Triple Elvis” and the cinema of Gina Rowland’s and John Cassavttes – whose often troubling depiction of modern women – alone, alienated, desperately trying to stabilize as they run amok. This short work is concerned with the artifice and nature of cinematic story telling in a time when much about story is being called into question with its stars and storybook fates neatly presented in three act structures. With this film I am interested in cinema freeing itself from formal strictures, open to retinal experience of seeing, a sense of mystery in performance, and story not burdened by linear analysis.

 

SHE ENTERS A ROOM SEVEN TIMES is a deconstruction of the traditional narrative film grammar, subverting mainstream expectations and arriving at a new kind of experience.  I am interested in finding a new relationship to story by developing form and annexing it simultaneously. 

The audience engages the event observing the intimate unfolding of the main character’s reality in revealing close-ups, long tracking shots and sometimes consciously manipulative non-diegetic music, and subjective sound design. Questions abound about the main character. Who is she? Where is she? Is she running and if so, why and from who? Her mystery ties us to our own.  She stares out almost without expression into the abyss outside her hotel window, into the enigma of the self. In spite of the ambiguity of the cumulative affect of the variations, we naturally try to decipher the buried narrative codes and make a story for her.  Even when we try to destroy story and it stubbornly returns.