Max Montel – Associate Producer
New Blog Post (from Associate Producer Max Montel):
It is a crazily exciting time to be in the process of movie making now, with Oscars just days away. As many of you know, our hopes for Detka are high, and we like to think we’ll be writing to you while trying on tuxes a year from now.
It’s not a category that gets a lot of press or hype, but damn if there aren’t some cool movies there, and one clause descriptions just don’t do them justice. So in the interest of righting wrongs, here are a few more words on each of this year’s Oscar-nominated Best Short Films. One at a time.
Death of a Shadow
I’m so glad I’m not still writing coverage and I don’t have to come up with a logline for this movie. Trying to do a “meets” sentence would take forever; almost every second of it contained echoes of another story or movie, but it still managed to feel original and surprising. It’s about a photographer in a futuristic vision of Purgatory. His task is to capture people’s deaths throughout time for a mysterious “keeper” in order to earn his freedom. It’s a stylish film, with steampunk-like technology, but an old-world European feel to it. So you see why it’s hard to categorize—how many visually unique philosophical tragic romances about supernatural time-travelers from Hell set in the future but with World War I scenes do YOU know?
Ok, besides Twelve Monkeys.
I have to say, for all the different tropes that Death of a Shadow borrows, I keep thinking of it most as an Orpheus story. Both Orpheus and our hero Nathan (last name Rijckx—a name only a Belgian could pronounce) travel between the underworld and the real world. Both do it for love, and for both, art is the key to convincing the lord of the underworld to let them go. Nathan doesn’t seem like an artist—more like an old-timey newspaper photographer—and he clearly hates his job, but the Keeper treats the shadows he collects as art objects. There’s a beautiful shot in the movie of an endless gallery with shadows of death filling the walls.
So what we get is a reversal of the Orpheus story. Orpheus sang for the unfeeling god of Death, until the power of the song got through to him. In this movie, it’s the Keeper who appreciates art and keeps sending Nathan out to collect more of it. He criticizes Nathan’s choice of subjects, comments on their composition, and speaks of masterpieces, while it’s clear that Nathan couldn’t care less about the work he’s doing, he wants it to be as painless and unexciting as possible and to be done with it. Is there a comment here? Are we the Keeper? Equating pain and suffering with art and demanding more and more of it from creators who would like their work to not all be about the same thing?
Possibly. There’s a love story that runs through the plot too, and that’s where the movie’s main focus is. But for me—and probably for Orpheus too—the journey is a lot more interesting than the destination.