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October 31, 2008
Lumberjack
I'm currently serving on the jury of a film festival, a process which has involved whittling down the stack of short films that are in competition with one another. It's a tiresome process, validated by those exceptional gems that unexpectedly leap out of the lineup and declare themselves. Some of which are good, some very good, but none of which have yet caught my attention like this clip Joe showed me this evening (via Ray Pride).
How is it that the most complex and emotionally effecting film I've seen in a long time is a commercial for a bank? The appearance of that HSBC logo is almost shocking, coming as it does at the end of the spot; it's not so much reductive as it is entirely perplexing and tonally disparate from what we've just experienced. Likewise, even though the slogan that appears with it ("The more you look at the world, the more you recognize that people value things differently") attempts to brand the spot as part of a campaign, that brand is too limited to hold any sway; it fails to wrap up the narrative under the trite bow of its Madison Avenue prose.
Rather than comment on HSBC's motives, let me direct you to John Swansburg's excellent article at Slate, in which he examines the bank's position in the current economic climate and how that relates to the intentions behind this campaign. Removing from the equation that this is a piece of advertising, what astounds me about this spot is not just the quality of the filmmaking but the text to which it's been applied. In just over ninety seconds, an elegiac and even-handed portrait of civil disobedience is established, and then compounded; it's easy to read the throughline as an exchange of the political for the personal, but its the latter that makes the open conflict of the piece so effective, just as the politics lend such a profound sense of disquiet to the denouement.
There is an equal exchange occurring over the course of the piece that trumps what could be perceived as a third-act twist and a will to compromise (a reading that is perhaps more applicable in thirty-second version of the commercial that has been airing on television, unseen by me). The film sides neither with Thoreau nor with - well, with the company whose commissioning of it opens up an entirely new and even grayer can of worms.
Regardless of that, it's a beautiful piece of work, one which both validates and recapitulates Kubrick's notion that "some of the most spectacular examples of film art are in the best TV commercials. If you could ever tell a story, something with some content, using that kind of visual poetry, you could handle vastly more complex and subtle material." In the decades since that quote was printed in the New York Times, that visual poetry has formed a Moebius strip with cinema; one informs the other informs the other, and now we've got this: a commercial that a. ) fails as an advertisement, b.) epitomizes the power of advertising as a narrative form and then c.) loops back and turns out to be a success after all, because here I am discussing it.
Posted by David Lowery at October 31, 2008 2:33 AM