10 Minutes (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #13 extract: 10 Minutes (2002)

This is a straightforward short film that utilises the little time it has quite well. It juxtaposes a Japanese tourist in Rome waiting for his pictures with a scene from the 90s Bosnian War. 

An interesting element of this film is its use of the long-shot as a form of realism in the war scene. This is something you see in a vast plethora of films (Children of Men, Atonement, Oldboy) and is also something you can read theorists like Bazin discuss. The long-shot not only imitates a real perspective (an omnipresence POV almost) in real-time, but it forces a viewer to watch a scene much like they would watch the world passing them by. What the long-shot then presents, as Bazin would widely talk about, is an alternative to montage (a scene made up of cuts and many shot types). There is then an ambiguity that lies at the heart of the long-shot as we are not told so directly where to look and how a scene functions through montage based cinematic language. Such mimics reality because, largely oblivious, we form visual narratives as we move through life - and cinema can be an abstract representative of this. 

And I think this outlines the crux of this movie. Not only does it show abstract parallels throughout the world, but does this through realism, implying what we may refer to as a form of truth.