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Living in Between the Frames of a Multi-Shot Film
By Hamed Safaee
hamed@tehranavenue.com
August 2008
به فارسی بخوانيم
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The sun rises above the horizon. Tehran is conquered by the morning. Beams of light hit the screen. This is a movie theater.

In a long sequence, you behold a highway. You sip on your tea and listen to the sound of the neighboring woman taking a shower. Before your eyes, the image of a soiled pigeon cuts to an elevator.

The elevator jump cuts to a chance encounter with a nice-smelling young woman on the quiet, silent ground floor. Cut to a year ago, the close-up of a memory in One-Shot.

You smell nothing. This is a movie theater. All the scenes smell of the leather seats of KOUCH, the movie theater off of KHORASAN Sq.

In one shot, it was autumn and people dissolved in leaves and leaved dissolved in your eyes. How terrible was the editing of the sequence of your conversation with the nice-smelling woman on TAJRISH Sq, cut to the bus terminal, cut to the road before the final credit -- one of those endings that you dislike. It is raining now. You cut to the present. The young woman on the ground floor flees.

How many short sequences left to the café scene? A sound off the frame announces that the Subscriber Is Not Available. The sequence fades out to the night, to darkness. It then fades in on the visage of the nice-smelling woman on the ground floor. She is smoking a cigarette, paying tribute to 1970s films. You like to cut to the room, but that scene connects to the drizzle and the creaking of seats on Kouch Movie Theater, meaning that the movie is over.

The picture of the highway at night / the elevator waiting in between floors / the woman passed out on the floor of the bathroom / you read a funny story in bed / the film has ended a while now.



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