Short Film Studies - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2019

Using montage editing, close-ups and subjective sound, the award-winning short film Avondale Dogs (1994) tells the story of a young boy and his dying mother. The protagonist, Paul, is quiet and sensitive, and his inner turmoil is conveyed through conspicuous cuts and a vivid use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound.

Avondale Dogs offers a beautiful rendering of a boy’s subjectivity and point of view during and after especially fraught and tragic moments. This article argues that much of the film’s power is due to the use of French Impressionist strategies that enable unusual access to the boy’s point of view and feelings.

What is important when transforming childhood memories into storytelling? The details. And resisting the temptation to place plot over detail. Through poetic rather than narrative plotting, Avondale Dogs demonstrates how to preserve the authenticity and spontaneity of a childhood memory. And that is when short films are turned into art.

This article discusses Avondale Dogs as a three-dimensional body of resonance. Through an analysis of the soundtrack, the article illustrates how images and sounds resonate with the subjective experience of the boy and an emotional remembrance of a lost but filmic very-present childhood.

Film editing deals with shots composed by melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements and combines them into unities developed through time. In Avondale Dogs, cinematic passages about an ill mother, a dead pigeon, friendly neighbours and scattered pies provide eloquent clues about some fundamental characteristics shared by music and film.

In Avondale Dogs director Gregor Nicholas deploys a strategy of resonance through contrast in order to comment on the relationship between life and death, portraying how his young protagonist, Paul, negotiates the passage from the tragedy of his mother’s death to the pubescent world of sexuality.

The present analysis shows Paul’s attempt to find meaning in the meaningless in relation to his mother’s illness and death. The analysis exposes mechanisms promoting guilt and shame, power and lack of power that occur when a child takes on the role as carer of a seriously ill relative.

The climax of Class 15 features a reverse cut that displaces the teacher from his fixed position on frame left to frame right. The functions of this decisive shift are examined, following Rudolf Arnheim and others, in light of conventional associations attached to the left- and right-hand sides of pictures.