THE PHOTOGRAPH   

 

Written and directed by Young, this short film is a meditation on loss, shot on New York harbour adjacent to Lower Manhattan in a storming twilight. Jessica Joffe plays the unnamed woman. The dialogue-free video offers no information about the character. A panorama of downtown New York, arguably one of the 21st century's ultimate symbols of loss, often frames Jessica's face and form. The film is an emotional chain of sorrows and anguish told through cinema's most expressive tool, the close-up.

 

“Close-ups heighten a phenomenon called emotional contagion, the tendency to involuntarily mimic and synchronise expressions, vocalisations, and postures with another person and consequently to converge emotionally.” Amy Coplan, Philosophy Professor, CSFU.

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“The Photograph” is an homage to Carl Theodore Dreyer's “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” (1928.)

 

Young, “My piece is less about the plot and more about immersing yourself into details of the woman's experiences etched across her face.” The psych-pop “five stages of grief” furnish loose scaffolding for the film's narrative arc. A Polaroid of a young girl in the second to last shot hints at the source of the woman's pain.

 

Film writer Jacob Oller, “Closeness to a face means closeness to understanding, even if the emotion is beyond our experience.” 

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Music: “Skyscraper” by Paul Banks