Everlasting Wounds [Shortfilm explained]

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THE IMPOSSIBLE DESERTION OF A BROKEN HOME

The audiovisual art is mostly known as narration with characters (fictional or not) interacting with each other and the world that conducts them from a situation of equilibrium to a disequilibrium and to equilibrium again. “Everlasting Wounds” is an experimental project that shows the decadence and depression that appear when a girl abandons childhood and gets into the world of adulthood without showing characters or dialogs. The perfect dollhouse in communion with the hands of protection frame an era of happiness and without worries. Then, while growing up the protection dissipates and everything on the inside and outside world is lonely, blue, wrecked and hopeless. The technical aspects of an audiovisual piece usually include the using of camera, lightning, mise-en-scène, editing, direction and sound. Analysing this we can get a whole view of the piece in detail.

CAMERA:

In the first part of this film, the camera is always in a traveling. This suggest a wandering being that conducts the narration, it is showing us the plot as we were that small girl playing with her dollhouse. This wandering point of view is also the one of the audience. Hence, from that point of view, as the camera was her eyes, the own spectator experiences the feeling in first person. Then, the meaning of the whole film dissipates to let each viewer adapt the message to their own life lessons and feelings, becoming then more like a painting than a film: each whom understands the film with different motives and feelings, and this is what makes it experimental.

DIRECTING:

‘Everlasting wounds’ have to do with the sequels of lost love and affection, the loss of meaning of life and ghosts of the past that always haunted the principal character. The film titles start with a traveling in that makes us enter through a glass into the dollhouse. This denotes the entering of an inner world, it means we will see everything from a subjective point of view. The directing choice of never showing faces in the real world, showing only hands, is motivated by keeping the illusion of the subjective point of view, so every spectator may get into the camera’s (principal character) skin and feel those actions as they were made just in front of them, as they were the ones that put that dollhouse together. The hands are shown as soft and caring, just as we see when they are sewing up the trousers, fixing what is not right (Figure 1).

The shots of the house in the second part of the film are made in general and in detail shots, in other to create claustrophobia, just like in Mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017). This rush and anxiety the shots create are a metaphor of the claustrophobia of being with the self, usually associated with mental illness such as anxiety or depression and as in Aronofsky’s piece, this is shown as an anxiety (claustrophobia) on the outside for the inside. As in Sharp Objects (Marti Noxon, 2018), the dollhouse is another principal character that holds a very important part of the narration, as it parallels the real world inside that play house. The small wooden house is what holds the pain, the insecurities and the hurting, and portraits the real world inside it, it means a hurting not only by itself but as a metaphor to the characters. In ‘Everlasting wounds’, we can appreciate that at the very end, there is an actual bleeding wound in the corner of the dollhouse porch as the “the end” title comes in Figure 2.

EDITING:

In the first part of the film, it makes parallels within the dollhouse, which represents the inner world, and the actual house, the outside and painful world that her mother is protecting her of. Through the editing, there’s a sense of continuity with the parallel shots within the dollhouse and the real world. For example, the tea set is put in the same position in both realms making the audience set the connexion between them (Figures 3, 4). In the second part, however, there is a fast edition and superposition of images with the dollhouse only. The fast cuts represent anxiety, and that there’s no longer parallel shots with the real world means that the principal character has been trapped in the inner world trying to run from the reality that was hitting her to realise that the world that’s now hurting her is the inside one as a consequence of the outside that she has always been protected of, but no longer. That hurting she has within her, has let in her wounds that will never go away. In the girl’s room from the dollhouse there’s a comparison of he mixing shots in the girls room with the destroyed madness and the chair that moves all alone that portrait the mental illness.

LIGHTNING:

The light in the full composition tends to be smooth and dark being lighter in the outside world (Figure 4) and darker in the inner (Figure 3), which reminds us to psychological thrillers such as Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010) or Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). In the second part the flicking light puts a state of tension in the double bedroom, the parents’ one, the heart of the pain, the loss and the hurting: that place is the one in the inner world which causes the girl mostly of the tension and the special kind of lightning shows it to us through the rounded mirror.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE:

The mise-en-scène is everything in this piece. The most important narrative resource are the parallels between the two worlds. One of the first things we see are the flowers that are both realms. In flower mythology from ancient Greek and Christianity, pink roses are a symbol of happiness while the eucalyptus leaves represent the division of underworld, Earth and heaven, in this case, the division of the two realms. The inner world during the first part, which we can determine here as the happy place, the narration is conducted by the hands of the mother, as a symbol of protection, softness and care. Nevertheless, these hands also represent the suppressed trauma that’s about to come. The care, the love and the protection haven’t been enough and the chaos will blame them when they’re gone in the second part of the film. The childhood is represented and held by the dollhouse, when it is good, the house looks perfectly decorated, but when childhood is gone, the house is destroyed and decadent, full of dirt and abandoned. Inside the dollhouse,

the mirrors hold important symbolical weight. In the bedroom, the rounded mirror will show no face , just as the one from chest of drawers (Figure 5), that shows no one in the bed of the dollhouse but then we see that the mother is sit there in the realm of reality that leaves the mirror just where the small prop mirror in the dollhouse will be left behind (Figure 6). This is an augury of the future loneliness that will come after, when it’s in the bed by itself. In this second part of the film, when the tension is at its peak we see that close up of the rounded mirror in the dollhouse on the bed surrendered by the flicking lights of terror. This is because the mirror held the lying dangers that now are arising like some faceless monsters that comes from within. There is a gesture to Psycho (1960) in the frame of the water going down the waste pipe of the bath, it marks an inflexion point between stability and chaos. Unlike in Psycho, which symbolises the end of the tension, here, it represents the start of it.

Following the flowers symbology, at the end of the piece they end up in the ground in the point where mostly of the tension has been build: this means that the happiness is gone (Figure 7).

SOUND:

In the piece, the chosen theme for the soundtrack is the Moonlight Sonata from Ludwig Van Beethoven. The first movement, l’Adagio Sostenuto, is soft, calm and peaceful and matches the description of the good place, the home of happiness, pace and childhood. It is played by an only piano and transmits security and relaxation. However, when the film gets to the point of inflexion in which everything changes into destruction, the second movement Allegretto is omitted and we listen to the third. This jump provokes agitation, as we are missing the regular and natural flow of the metaphorical river the sonata would have been. The third part, Presto Agitato is strident, fast, anxious and tense. Besides, unlike the original piece written for piano, the sound mixing made it possible to be even more strident by combining the piano with a violin that plays the same part in delay, repeat and mute. The piece is not used full but in small capsules to make contrast with the piano as well as to create tension in crucial points. This lets the images get the full meaning to relate it with its genre: the thriller. The cinematographic elements as a whole are trying to find and reach the spectators’ emotions. Based in the dreamlike world of Buñuel and with characteristics that drink from Hitchcock’s base in thriller we discover a lost childhood that haunts back as old and ghostly wounds symbolised by the decadence and decay of the perfect dollhouse (as a metaphor of the emotional and mental stability) that once gone, you can’t help finding yourself submitted in a chaos you can’t control, left with everlasting wounds.

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FILMOGRAPHY

Aronofsky, Darren (2010): Black Swan

Aronofsky, Darren (2017): Mother!

Buñuel, Luis (1929): Un Chien Andalou

Hitchcock, Alfred (1960): Psycho

Noxon, Marti (2018): Sharp Objects (series)