Intervals (1973)

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

"Intervals" is a 6.5-minute short film from 1969, so a couple more years and it has its 50th anniversary. But is this really a reason to celebrate? It is a British production and the writer and director is Peter Greenaway. He was still in his 20s when he made this film and it's an early production from him, but not one of his earliest. It's also in black-and-white which was not too uncommon for the 1960s. Other than that, my review title summarizes it basically. It is nothing but people walking in front of walls. The narrator that we occasionally hear is Italian for whatever reason. I personally did not see any artistic value in here and I believe that honestly, this is a film that almost everybody with a camera can re-enact or make. I am also not sure how much was staged in here or if it is a 100% documentary film. Anyway, I did not enjoy the watch at all as you have probably understood by now. Not recommended.

A short examination of structure and sound, this film shot in black and white in the location of Venice presents three sections of similar film to us over its duration of six minutes. In the first section a metronome is used to count events in the film. People walk across the frame, sometimes in the foreground, which is accompanied precisely by a different sound. In the second section a male Italian voice can be heard counting through the alphabet. Music by Vivaldi is heard in the third. Shot 26 December 1968 - 8 January 1969. Dubbed 30 October 1973.

The same film footage is played four or five times with a different audio background each time. I liked it personally because it was a good example of how we react to film through both audio and visual cues, and as an example of how rythms can be imposed on anything. There's is also some amusing bits in there too. Not essential greenaway, but worth seeing if you can find it.

As if "L'Année dernière à Marienbad" has been made with holiday film rushes. Shot in Venezia by Greenaway with a bolex, never showing water, structured to give the feeling that viewer goes back and forth through different layers of time, this astonishing short film already has the main characteristic of early Greenaway's works : ironic clash between fiction and documentary.