Short Film Studies - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012

Iványi's meticulously choreographed short film Wind portrays the perennial, cyclical nature of violence, while also throwing into sharp relief how photography and its motion counterpart, cinematography, frame the world, project authorial vision, direct the spectator's gaze and elicit audience interpretation – the film thus elucidating the process of cinematic construction.

The article explores the aesthetization of trauma in Marcell Iványi's short film Wind through the association of two aesthetics – of nature and death. It focuses on the narrative role of sound elements in addition to their role in shaping our aesthetic apprehension of trauma.

The fall of the young woman is a climactic moment in In Chambers. The spectator is deluded into believing that by being thrown into the precipice she will meet her death. Yet, it actually corresponds to a rebirth, as she leaves the world of darkness and plunges back into light.

In Chambers appropriates some of the visual and narrative motifs that we associate with the Holocaust. Although In Chambers is clearly situated within a tradition of dystopic fantasy narratives, it finds similarities with the torture porn genre – which also adopts the iconography of the Holocaust.

In Chambers imagines a science-fictional experience for comatose patients. Working as a puzzle, this film does not reveal the reality of the comatose patients until the conclusion. By unlocking the coma experience through a crystal image, In Chambers revises the potential of the crystal image not only to collate past and present, but to articulate a concept as well.

A literal translation of this film's Norwegian title is 'Behind Closed Doors', which connotes that the persons we meet are institutionalized. This article will concentrate on intertextuality and on ways in which the film manages to create a nightmare-like, claustrophobic mood that at the same time is somehow pleasurable.

In Chambers describes being in a coma as a purgatory-like, surrealistic nightmare. This article examines the universe created in the film, places its use of a virtual parallel reality in a film historical context, and claims that the action it represents in the coma state was not only a dream.