Offscreen Notes
Cannibal
Cannibal is a 15 minute short film by the Nova Scotian filmmaker Rod Marquart which was made on April 25, 2007 and is presently being submitted to festivals. Marquart, who filled many of the other creative and technical roles in the film, does not hide the fact that it was shot in one day, with zero budget using a MiniDV camera. The film does not try to escape from these limitations, but attempts to explore other creative dimensions not necessarily affected, such as mood and style; and in this regard the film is an interesting little exercise in sustained visual dementia. There are only two story actions that occur in the 15 minute running time, both of them extremely violent: a derelict man living in the woods kills, dismembers, cooks, then eats an infant; later he repeatedly hacks away with a machete at the body of a man hog-tied to a tree. However, it is not these two acts –the first graphic, the second kept off-screen– that demands our attention, but the mood of the remaining 10 or so minutes of screen time. There is no dialogue and most of the action happens at a non-real speed, either too slow or too fast for normal human locomotion. The color scheme is either garishly saturated colors that give the natural scenery a strange painterly quality, or monochrome/black and white. There is even a few seconds of pure abstraction which gives the image the look of an abstract expressionist painting.
At times, the texture reminded me of Super 8mm films from the seventies with the color stock starting to go bad. There are moments when the digital color manipulation goes too far, especially with the solarization effects, but for the most part the abstract colors, unreal shooting speeds, and intensely brooding experimental music (by “Drums & Machines”) combine to form a hyper-stylized aesthetization that offsets the realist impact of the atrocities (especially the first killing). The film opens with selected freeze frame images which foreshadow the second killing (we see a brief black & white image of the second victim tied to a tree). The opening intertitle informs us that a man and his infant daughter have gone missing in the woods of Goodwill Nova Scotia, and that locals believe they were abducted by a rarely seen mountain man. A few shots later tension is created when we hear the off-screen sound of a crying baby, as the hand-held camera pans across the picturesque scenery and then cuts to ominous shots of a man’s boots. A cut to an infant wrapped up in a bundle confirms our worse fear. The baby is shot, dismembered with a hacksaw, cooked over an open fire, and eaten. For the next 5 or so minutes we are treated to a symphony of wailing sounds, shots of the man moving through the woods, a helicopter flying above (will he be found?), point of view shots peering through the woods, until the killer arrives at his second, tree bound victim. What makes this sequence of trivial action effective is that each shot has a different texture (shifting in light, color, focus, speed, sound, etc.). Unfortunately, this sequence is far more powerful than the murder of the man, which suffers from poor choreography (neither the killer’s machete thrusts nor the editing are convincing). However, it improves when it moves away into abstraction. At times the film recalls Night of the Living Dead (with the black & white freeze frames), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the cannibalism, backwoods horror, slow zoom-ins to flesh) and the short works of Jim Van Bebber (Roadkill and My Sweet Satan), which is not bad for a film made on such minimal means. It will be interesting to see what Rod Marquart can achieve with some time and money.
