Catalogue
essay for Practices in Isolation by
Gary Popovich
In A Trilogy, the film's focus is on the
relationship between the filmmaker and her son, structured both to allow and to
refuse easy dissection, whence is generated the main tension of the film.
Breaking
down A Trilogy into three separate
pieces or even searching for parts of the trilogy as distinct sections is
misleading, for trilogic elements
abound in the film (three sets of rolling titles, three seemingly distinct ages
at which the young boy is shown, the three days marked out by CBC's "World Report," the three distinctly
separate letters read by the mother, et al). Furthermore, the film has three
major distinct sections which weave in and out of each other throughout the
film: 1) a woman diving into a swimming pool and a man running down a road; 2)
a narrative section in which a husband and wife are having breakfast; 3) a
collection of personal images, home movie footage, and memories, most of which
are optically printed and most directly evocative of Sternberg's emotions vis-à-vis the themes of the film.
Each
of these elements constitutive of the whole is always separate and distinct,
yet always resisting separation. As if the active voice of the filmmaker was
everywhere trying to assert its presence amidst the roar of emotion which has
already denied the voice these easy delusions... the absences join together by
a fiction situated outside of presence representing loss...two movements—one
always moving inward toward some unity of expression, and offering from
filmmaker to viewer; the other a visual and oral representation of the coming
apart... the recognition of hole in whole; the parting of mother and son.
The
opening shots record these very movements. A woman poised at the edge of a
swimming pool hesitates to dive into the water. A man runs down a country road,
his panting breaths are broken by occasional remarks about water, sinking, love
and giving. A breakfast scene depicts the habitual ritual reducing emotion to empty
gesture; a kiss, a spoken good-bye while "World Report" talks about
disaster at sea. And throughout the film a mother and her young son are
together or moving apart, at beaches in or near the water. As images race by
and emotion comes to a pitch, the now submerged swimmer from the beginning of
the film breaks the surface as the loud cry of a newborn baby and the
subsequent cutting of the umbilical cord mark the representation of the first
significant separation.
As
the boy is always running or moving away from his mother, so in the end does
the running man keep running. But the camera no longer
stays close to him. It stops to watch the man disappear in the distance, then it returns to the woman poised at the edge of the pool
to capture her dive expressing its affinity with her situating itself in the
water with her.
A Trilogy begins unveiling itself at
the title so that 'title' is passed from the filmmaker to the viewer and from
the filmmaker to the son by means of the film. The two movements then (moving
together and coming apart) both unite and separate filmmaker and viewer, and
mother and son. As the filmmaker passes
the title to the audience she also passes it to her son—title as a form of
recognition, title as film—the emotion into which both must plunge.