September. 15. 1998.
Ann Hornaday ........ FOUR STARS
"In an era of the 17-writer movie, filmgoers live in a tyranny
of narrative, in which story is all and the formal elements of filmmaking...
such things as shadow, light, camera movement, composition, gesture and
sound design... are given short shrift, or are ignored entirely.
With "Inside/Out" which makes its U.S. premiere at the Charles
Theatre today, Baltimore based filmmaker Rob Tregenza stakes a clam for
cinema, not as an ox pulling the narrative cart but as the cart itself.
Tregenza makes the sort of abstract, theoretically driven films that are
commonly put down as "artsy", "intellectual" and "pretentious".
Well, yes, and more power to him.
"Inside/Out" offers the inspiring idea that film can still
be a medium for artistic expression, as plastic and dimensional as paint
or clay. Ostensibly "Inside/Out", which traces the experiences
of a group of mental patients, their caretakers and an Episcopal priest,
traumatized by World War II, is about the institutions that control our
lives and how we live inside and outside them. But these themes, as well
as the plot that weaves them together, remain obscure in the face of Tregenza's
investigation of cinema itself.
With long, wordless takes, a swooping, pendular camera, the enormous
expanse of the CinemaScope format and sophisticated Dolby sound, he creates
a filmscape across which images and sound sweep with majestic, almost oceanic
force. Whether it's the absurbist tableaux of a fox hunt interrupting a
woman's escape from a hospital or two men engaged in a Chaplinesque vignette
on a snowy railroad track, the meticulously composed pictures and sounds
(the fox horn, a train whistle) emerge in clear, sculptural relief.
Tregenza's meanings are purposefully oblique, and what dialogue there
is recalls the arch pseudo-poetry of the Obsession perfume advertising
campaign. ("I am an acrobat dancing on the line between reason and
insanity.") But the elemental power of "Inside/Out" is undeniable.
Let it wash over you, and experience film as it is too rarely experienced
today: as an artistic medium to be experimented with and celebrated."