Short Film Studies - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2017

This article interprets Jude’s short film through its realist-modernist attitude that I argue is the distinguishing characteristic of the New Romanian Cinema. The seemingly transparent images highlight how the represented social world remains ambiguous, and reflexively foreground the processes in which the hesitant spectator assigns meaning to them.

The article discusses It Can Pass Through the Wall in the context of New Romanian Cinema, arguing that its subject is a search for knowledge and the difficulty of finding it, which feeds the characters’ curiosity. It also suggests that the film can be regarded as a metaphor for the position of every film viewer.

In It Can Pass Through the Wall, Radu Jude, gravitating towards spaces in between worlds, explores a number of thematic elements – namely suicide, mortality, and ‘living death’ existence – that have strongly marked his previous work. This article discusses these elements, highlighting the short film’s display of Jude’s auteur signature.

By guiding our attention to the emotional responses of a little girl and her darkly lit surroundings, Jude’s film explores human existence in the face of death. Informed by existential philosophy in the vein of Heidegger, this article investigates the difference between fear of death and fear of the dead.

Through a prolonged single shot evoking a gaze that belongs to bodies located at an elsewhere, the film affirms the evidence of the spectre. Implementing a careful denial of reciprocity, the spectre is rendered invisible as it dwells both the inside and outside of the cinematic space.

Sound and image compete in It Can Pass Through the Wall, as in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), to create tension between what is seen and what is heard. This disconnect between image and sound draws attention to the limits of the visual and the possibilities of the audible.

This article discusses how the combination of circumambient sound and predominantly fixed camera position in It Can Pass Through the Wall achieves a similarly spatial and performative use of sound to that found in multi-channel electroacoustic concert performances. I consider to what extent space itself can ‘tell a story’.

In the context of Dutch seventeenth-century painting thematizing eavesdropping and the use of off-camera voice in classic cinema, this article explores the relationship between framing and voice-off, revealing its figurative potential in representing the taboo of death as a threshold that is inaccessible to perception and cognition.

This article discusses It Can Pass Through the Wall as a compendium of themes and styles associated with Jude’s oeuvre and with the minimalist aesthetic principles of the New Romanian Cinema. The film weaves mythological and historical time within its versatile narrative and visual architectonics, transforming a simple everyday event into an existential metaphor.

This article will examine how the film uses horror tropes through its title, mise-enscène and camerawork to create a dichotomy between the cosy, ‘safe’ apartment and the dangers that manage to pass through its thick walls.

A patient and somewhat disturbing camera in Jude’s film turns the coming-of-age tale into a ghost story. Is the innocent girl, surrounded by drunk and indifferent old men-children, aware of this ‘other presence’? As ‘seeing’ is one of the basic themes in this film, this article will analyse its intrusive and seductive point of view.

If much contemporary German-language art-house cinema exploits film’s potential to use space and time to extend the affective moment, focusing on the gap between action and emotional resolution, The Jacket does the opposite. Instead, it creates a moment of claustrophobic intensity, that nonetheless similarly pivots on the function of affect in film.

Paul and Kaya journey through three dimensions of reciprocity: the World, the pub and their ‘world’. The unmaking of their relationship suggests an underlying confrontation between incompatible gendered values. This might be interpreted as a reflection of current anthropological changes in Austria, particularly in the meaning of masculinity and femininity.