It’s been five years since I finally finished my first “official” short film Palindrome.
Palindrome plays in a fictive universe where time has started to go backwards – where the years count downwards, the clocks are reversed and technology is slowly decaying. Henri, a film archivist living in the reversed 1930s stumbles upon an old film roll, that depicts time flowing in the normal direction.
He invites two American curators – Iris and John – to his Parisian home cinema in an attempt to convince them to spread his movie, and thus maybe halter the moonwalk of time. The film he has found namely bears ominous signs of an upcoming new world war…
Palindrome is a filmic experiment with surround sound, that stands on the border between cinema, theater and installation. An essential part of the plot is conveyed through the sound – Henri, Iris and John never appear on the screen, one only hears their voices. The surround sound is especially used to give the viewers the feeling that the characters sit among them in the audience – dialogues and sounds not only come from the front, but from all four walls of the cinema hall. In one scene one hears the humming of an old projector from the rear wall, the whispers of the guests coming from the room centre, and a curious monologizing voice coming from the front.
Utilizing the surround sound in an experimental way, Palindrome tries to create and encourage a new way to experience cinema – a new spatial cinema, where the fiction is not only limited to the screen, but now also encompasses the whole cinema hall.