Short Film Studies - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012

The camera's presence is obvious throughout Natan. Its apparent clumsiness, exemplified by a series of rough or tilted close-ups and low-angle shots, is a means of rendering the main character's marginal personality. Only at the end does it stand at a clear distance, signifying Natan's new-found stability.

This article analyses the gestural language of the hands in Natan, as seen particularly in relation to the opening of the kebab packet and to Natan's final stroking of the dog. These events articulate a contrasting rhetoric of the body and also two very different ways of understanding relationships.

This film makes an ideal classroom vehicle for discussing three-act structure; dramatic form and its terminology; the principles of characterization; point of view and style options; and the need for a main character to develop. It also helps in teaching the interrogation techniques of project development that professionals use to extend a story to its full potential.

The encounter between dog and (potential) owner is the catalyst for Natan's interrogation of the human/animal binary. Drawing on Haraway's concept of 'companion species', the article explores the film's critique of a double commodification of animals: as pets, and in agribusiness, via Viggo's kebab-shop chain and consumption of meat.

Art cinema is often celebrated for its commitment to duration. Genre film, on the other hand, tends to articulate time in terms of narrative momentum. Natan offers an opportunity to explore the tension between these contestatory temporal registers in film through its economy of narrative, character and style.

This article analyses Natan against the background of an increasingly mobile world where social relations and practices have become disembedded and social capital decreases. Natan outlines an inability to feel at home in modern society, and counters this experience by restoring a nostalgic home for a seemingly homeless man.

In The Cage, youth brings decay home, yet once it convinces the patriarch to embrace the possibility of recuperation, the mechanism the impotent father adopts becomes obsolete. This article analyzes The Cage's allegorical and political nuance by way of a passively perched camera that fails to zoom, track or pan.

Since the mid-2000s Romanian cinema has, on all levels, been gripped by a new wave characterized by austerity, unflinching realism and a bleak, deeply metaphoric mise-en-scène. This is a style that is both prevalent in and enhanced by the exhibition of masculinity in crisis as shown in The Cage.

This article looks at how the family's libidinal economy gets deployed in cinematically rendered practices of space. It identifies the balcony as a space of release from fraught interactions within the family and the cage as an intrusion within the strictly surveyed space of the household, as a small heterotopia within the affectually dystopic family space.

'Chaotic Confinements' explores modes of irresolution in The Cage. The film's unconventional editing, overtly limited point of view, and tense closing moments open up a disconcerting range of interpretive possibilities that complicate the film's seemingly linear narrative and problematize traditional ways of conceptualizing narrative.

Through its sensual and tactile evocation of dirt, eating and touching, The Cage produces an atmosphere of domestic intimacy and confinement which is disrupted by the appearance of a sick bird. This article explores how Mihaes' shift from initial disgust to a surprising tenderness is revealed in embodied terms.