Short Film Studies - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013

Cat’s Cradle metaphorically stages the image schema ‘death as a path’. It is argued that the strangeness of the fiction, its ritualistic surrealism, is enhanced by its soundtrack, which downplays the natural link between human action and environment. Instead, the sound seems to emphasize more abstract and thematic aspects.

Both despite and because of its numerous references to the act of passage, Cat’s Cradle by Liz Hughes presents a narrative that joyfully erases the cruelty of death. This article examines the metanarrative devices deployed by the film to create, through contrast, a sense of endless anticipation to a loss eternally deferred.

A literal interpretation of Cat’s Cradle cannot be taken seriously. The travelling through time and space of a family carrying a dead body to deposit it in a cinema suggests a metaphoric intention. This article speculates on resonances generated by the title and a critic’s proposal of a dead audience.

Initial responses to a moving image, even when subsequently revised, can anchor the viewer’s experience in a framework that tints, and potentially overpowers, the narrative drama. In Cat’s Cradle, questioning the father’s deadness results in enriching layers of semiotic exploration and reflection.

The article explores how Eating Out, after raising expectations of a conventional suspense plot, unexpectedly changes direction by subverting the unity of action and deflating the dramatic question, thus leaving space for the subtle effects of a more decentralized and open narrative structure

Eating Out features character interaction, yet each of the four characters appears to be in a different film. This article will examine how performance choices define character interaction. I will identify each character’s ‘circumstances’, ‘objectives’ and ‘actions’, considering how they work together in the short film.

At the 1997 Cannes Festival’s Semaine de la critique, Pål Sletaune’s Junk Mail/Budbringeren (1997) attracted international attention and was seen as the harbinger of a new and exciting phase in Norwegian cinema. In this article, Sletaune’s short film Eating Out is placed in context and discussed as a thematic and stylistic forerunner to his acclaimed feature film.

Eating Out by Pål Sletaune (1993) portrays seemingly unsympathetic characters in a dirty and filthy bar most of us would avoid visiting. This article will discuss the director’s strategy, and focus upon how the film might be considered both in the light of dirty realism in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and in connection with French films in particular from the 1990s.

This article examines the presence of two concurrent elements in Eating Out – abjection and nostalgia, and explores the way in which they work together to shape the temporal identity of a space. The article argues that abjection functions throughout this short film to safeguard nostalgia and slowness as identity markers.