INSIDE/OUT reviews

REVIEWS and COMMENTS ON

INSIDE/OUT

"Inside/Out" is Tregenza's third feature film.

JEAN-LUC GODARD reviewed Tregenza's first feature ,TALKING TO STRANGERS at the Toronto Film Festival 1996. This film is frequently mentioned in the following reviews of INSIDE/OUT and is hence a good place of departure for an understanding of the later work.

Jean-Luc Godard Review of TALKING TO STRANGERS

Pirandello ......"The screen play should remain a wordless art because it is essentially a medium for the expression of the unconscious." THE BIOSCOPE (Feb.6,1929)

CHICAGO READER "Critics' Choice" January 15 - 21, 1999 ......... JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Inside/Out by Jonathan Rosenbaum

" An uncredited Jean-Luc Godard produced this 1997 third feature
by the singular American independent Rob Tregenza (Talking to
Strangers, The Arc), and along with Hungarian filmmaker Bela
Tarr, Godard is certainly a presiding guru over this powerful
if enigmatic view of life in and around a psychiatric hospital
somewhere in rural, snowbound America. Shot by Tregenza himself
(one of the best cinematographers on the planet) in
black-and-white 35-millimeter 'Scope--mainly in extremely long,
choreographed takes that transpire with a minimum of dialogue
but with an extremely inventive and original Dolby sound
track--the film offers not so much a plot in the usual sense as
a series of interlocking characters and events governed, like
the film's title, by polarities: sound and image, interior and
exterior, sanity and madness, freedom and institutional
captivity, society and isolation. According to clues planted in
the clothes and decor (especially the cars), the action begins
around 1945 and ends in the present or near future, but to
confuse matters further the characters and their behavior
remain unaging constants. Tregenza's background in existential
philosophy serves him well: every shot comprises an event, and
most of them were shot only once, in a single take (as in
Talking to Strangers), allowing change and contingency to shape
the material. Art conceived as both adventure and
confrontation, Inside/Out requires a certain amount of creative
energy from the audience but grandly repays the effort. Facets
Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday, January 15, 7:00
and 9:15; Saturday and Sunday, January 16 and 17, 2:30, 4:45,
7:00, and 9:15; and Monday through Thursday, January 18 through
21, 7:00 and 9:15; 773-281-4114.
--Jonathan Rosenbaum

In a fascinating review of THE THIN RED LINE by T. Malick, in the same week's edition of the CHICAGO READER, Rosenbaum also discuss' INSIDE/OUT.

www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1999/0199/01159.html

Quotes from that review follow. The entire review can be found at www.chireader.com

"A person could more profitably compare The Thin Red Line,
currently playing at McClurg Court, with Rob Tregenza's
Inside/Out, playing in a one-week run at Facets Multimedia
Center (and Inside/Out is a Critic's Choice this week in
Section Two). But the parallels between these two epic
experiments are pretty striking. Each is the third feature of
a prodigiously talented middle-aged eccentric and original
thinker with a background in existential philosophy that
informs every artistic move he makes. Both films are shot in
wide-screen 35-millimeter with Dolby sound (though Tregenza's
film is in black and white). And both filmmakers are
passionately (and unfashionably) devoted to the aesthetics of
silent cinema: The Thin Red Line makes as many visual
references to F.W. Murnau's Tabu (1931) as Days of Heaven
makes to Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and City Girl (1930), and
Tregenza, who likes to film pantomimes in long shot, includes
on his Web site a beautiful quotation from Luigi Pirandello
that applies almost as well to Malick's film: "The screenplay
should remain a wordless art because it is essentially a
medium for the expression of the unconscious." The films
share narrative strategy as well. Both discard the
conventions of a central character and a single story,
running a relay between many disparate characters in the same
rural setting, none of whom is subjected to any moral
judgment. And both are a little too long for what they can
achieve dramatically--Tregenza's film is just under two
hours, Malick's just under three--but that's because both are
overly ambitious. If you agree with me that 90 percent of the
movies made nowadays are insufficiently ambitious, being
overly ambitious is a shared flaw that deserves our deepest
respect. Both filmmakers value physical environment as much
as "action" in the ordinary sense, and both--albeit in very
different ways--use the cleavage and disruptions produced by
World War II to reflect on the second half of the 20th
century.

Yet they're playing to different audiences in radically
different venues. Inside/Out--made for a tiny fraction of the
other picture's budget, with no stars to speak of--has had
too limited and piecemeal a national release since its 1997
premiere at Cannes to qualify even as a minor contender in
any present or future NSFC awards, even in the experimental
category. No articles about Inside/Out will show up in Vanity
Fair or Premiere, no reviews will grace mainstream magazines
or TV shows, no qualifying Oscar screenings will be held
anywhere. Economically and culturally speaking--which in this
country generally amounts to the same thing--the two pictures
are never going to be permitted to inhabit the same universe.
The fact that Tregenza's distribution company, Cinema
Parallel, has allowed us to see Michael Haneke's The Seventh
Continent, Bela Tarr's Satantango, Jacques Rivette's Up Down
Fragile, and several recent films by Jean-Luc Godard locates
him in a separate cosmos as far as most critics are
concerned. So any context that can accommodate him and Malick
has to be created by the audience."

 Malick's intimate acquaintance with the aesthetics of silent
cinema reaches well past Murnau. The punctuating shots of nature 
in the midst of combat--a wounded bird, a riddled
leaf, a hill of waving grass--are pure silent-movie syntax,
as is the notion of a collective war hero (often found in
films and fiction about World War I; William March's 1933
book Company K is one distinguished example). The poetic and
philosophical internal monologues of Malick's various
soldiers, often paired with a sustained and soulful close-up
of the character, are the structural equivalent of
intertitles in silent films of the teens and 20s. This is a
precious legacy that most major filmmakers of the 90s
(excepting Godard, Tarr, Tregenza, Manuel de Oliveira, and a
handful of others who live outside the Oscars sweepstakes)
have either forgotten or never discovered in the first
place--a sensibility that frees images from the tyranny of
the sound track, allowing them to register in all their
primordial power--and the major achievements of The Thin Red
 Line would be unthinkable without it."

	copyright J Rosenbaum Chicago Reader

THE BALTIMORE SUN, 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."



LOS ANGELES TIMES, LA Oct., 30, 1998
'Inside/Out' Is Compelling Look at Reaching Out ........... By KEVIN THOMAS

Writer-director-cinematographer-editor Rob Tregenza trusts in the purely visual
power of the camera and is equally unafraid to place the utmost demands on his
viewers. And he rewards the patient with his compelling "Inside/Out," which takes
us into a derelict, only partly inhabited mental institution in some rural, wintry
setting, somewhere in the eastern U.S.--judging by the cars, the time looks to be the late
'50s or early '60s.
Right from the start Tregenza makes it clear that he's interested in images rather than
words. His camera picks up a man and a woman running across a field only to be turned
back by the chance appearance of a group of hunters on horseback surrounded by a pack of
hunting dogs.
Swiftly, the young woman, Monica (Berangere Allaux), is grabbed by two men and
placed in a pickup truck, which we follow to that mental institution, a sizable compound of
red brick buildings that has the look of a typical small college campus.
What ensues is a kind of slow, erratic dance of life in which people reach out to one
another fleetingly, sometimes in kindness, occasionally in confusion and anger, only to
withdraw. The inmates, who are not generally mistreated by nurses and guards, do little but
wander around aimlessly, occasionally experiencing moments of pleasure, rage and fear.
Gradually, we come to identify various individuals: an Episcopal priest (Tom Gilroy)
who presides over the institution's chapel; his elegant organist (Stefania Rocca) who rejects
the priest's advances but is ultimately drawn to Monica, who in turn is drawn to
good-looking French painter Jean (Frederic Pierrot), who in turn is followed around by a
mute man, Roger (Steven Watkins), a jazz trumpeter.
Brief skirmishes, the occasional fragment of a conversation or interview, everyday
incidents, more than a few cryptic events, even a stab at a party for the inmates, soothed for
the moment by the gentle music of a harpist, interrupt but never really break the film's
constant sense of flow, of people connecting and disconnecting, from one another and
maybe themselves as well.
Conventional insane asylum movies love to pose the question of who's really mad,
the keeper or the kept, but thankfully Tregenza has something else in mind, which is to
quietly invite us to see ourselves in these people in all their longings, their endless reaching
out and retreating. By the time "Inside/Out" is over its metaphorical impact resounds but
with the power of silence, not noise.
* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film's style and themes are decidedly adult. Some
brief violence.

'Inside/Out'
Berangere Allaux: Monica
Frederic Perriot: Jean
Stefania Rocca: Grace, the Organist
Tom Gilroy: The Priest
A Cinema Parallel presentation of a Parallel Pictures and Baltimore Film Factory
production. Writer-director-cinematographer Rob Tregenza. Producers J.K. Eareckson and
Tom Garvin. Lighting director Arthur Eng. Harp music arranged and performed by
Eareckson Mary Tregenza. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.
* Exclusively at the Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown Los Angeles,
(213) 617-0268.

DAVID STERRITT , CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR...Film Scouts on the Reviera www.filmscouts.com

I'm most enthusiastic about "Inside/Out" by the redoubtable Rob Tregenza, who returns in this movie to the long-take mode of "Talking to Strangers," his fabled 1988 schizodrama, now available on video from Parallel Films, (Cinema Parallel) his Maryland-based production and distribution company. Like that earlier picture, "Inside/Out" follows a minimal storyline with a deftly moving camera that films the action in lengthy shots of extraordinary gracefulness and virtuosity. The effect of these fluid, unblinkingtakes is to heighten both the gritty realism and the dreamlike delirium built into the bare-bones plot about inmates and authorities in an out-of-the-way psychiatric hospital. Tregenza is a true master of cinematography, and "Inside/Out" is worth a close look by anyone with a serious interest in cinema as a visual art. Once again the weak link in his aesthetic is his handling of the performers, many of whom are visiby acting in a movie that must be about sheer *behaving* if it's about anything at all. But this caveat aside, I hasten to reaffirm that filmmaking of this high order doesn't come along very often.

(see review at www.filmscouts.com Dave Sterritt or at the Vancouver Int. Film Festival.)


LA WEEKLY, Los Angeles, Oct, 30, 1998, Manohla Dargia

This exquisitly photographed, impenetrable film takes place in and around an insane asylum sometime in the 50s.... a series of masterfully choregraphed sequences...the rest is all devouring blacks, whites and mystery.

NEW TIMES, Los Angeles, Oct., 30, 1998 Paul Cuffum

...Rob Tregenza's formally daunting third feature, an impressionistic tourdefuse whose stark monochromatics and rangy, restless camerawork literally suck the energy out of small-town America. Like the snowy postcard pastoral in Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows" or the Thorton Wilder scripted everytown in Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt", this pristine idyll masks something appreciably darker. For our purposes, that becomes the airborne dread we encounter in a narcoleptic walking-tour through snow-tracked silence behind a handful of characters... a priest, an artist, an artist's girlfriend... both inside and outside of a mental institution. Unfortunately, that's all we get as plot and character are subjugated to this incessant somnambulism. One of those films (Orson Welles' "The Trial" for me.... maybe something else for you) that's hard to remember even while you are staring at it; your mind seems to slide right off the screen."

THE RENDEVOUS WITH MADNESS FILM FESTIVAL, Toronto Canada. Nov.16, 1997....... by Dr. David Dorendaum,

" I came out of your film throughout the hollowness of a trumpet, an orifice that blew me out to the wind. It was as if desire wanted to be articulated, compelled to come out from within in the form of an utterance, a word. Perhaps it is no coincidence that through out your film we encounter doors, windows, train tunnels, sink orifaces, cracks, points of entry or departure, thesholds, limits, like the bar in the middle of the title, INSIDE/OUT. The bar is inscribed at the centre of who we are, barred subjects, because we are talking beings and the word constitutes us. However, betweeen the word and the thing it names, there is a gap.

INSIDE/OUT, the embodiment of our flesh, always cracked, cleaved, never wholesome. In 1956 Jean Hypolite wrote of a first myth of inside and outside:

"You feel the full significance of this myth of outside and inside in alienation, which is founded on these two terms. Beyound what is expressed in their formal opposition lie alienation and hostility between the two."

Our body, our talking body, our sexual body, cannot be defined in terms of binary opposites. Mr Tregenza, you had no choice in venturing to film the crack; you had to locate your lens either at the theshold of the oriface, or way above through the eagle's eye, c'est la vie!" Dr. David Dorendaum



THE NEW YORK POST, New York City, Oct, 6, 1998, THREE STARS V.A. Musetto

"Inside/Out" opening today for a week at Anthology Film Archives, is arty and self-indulgent. But Rob Tregenza wrote, directed, photographed, and editied the movie, and if he wants it to be arty and self-indulgent, who's to stop him? And who's to say that arty and self-indulgent are necessarily bad? The third feature by Baltimore based Tregenza, "Inside/Out" chronicals life inside a mental hospital somewhere in rural America. Sparse of plot and dialogue, it is best appreciated for its sweeping and unforgiving visuals. "Inside/Out", which received enthusiastic receptions at such festivals as Sundance, Rotterdam, Cannes and Toronto, was shot in wide-screen, shadowy black and white, using long taakes filmed from afar. Tregenza has a cinematic eye... he composes each frame as if it were a fine photograph... and a sense of the absurd, whether it's a fox hunt interrupting a woman's escape from a mental hospital, or a party for medication-numbed patients... Inside/Out might send some viewers running from the theatre. But those who elect to stick it out and be transported into Tregenza's strange universe will be amply rewarded."

VILLAGE VOICE, New York City, Oct. 13, 1998, James Hannaham

"With hardly any dialogue, and seductive black-and -white cinematography, writer-director Rob Tregenza shows rather than tells a sort of love rhombus between a small-town priest (Tom Gilroy) and three patients at a nearby mental institution. Tregenza has a great talent for choregraphy and pacing. A scene that consists of a continuous pan, as nurses and patients fight over the arrangement of a group of chairs while a psychotic rock band plays along with a harp, is a brilliant piece of Altman-esque staging. But lurking under the skin of this art film is a fairly conventional melodrama... Tregenza sometimes shoves the love story into a straitjacket, but his facility with visual narrative is fascinating and even liberating."

TIME OUT, New York City, Oct. 1-8, 1998, Mike D'Angelo
"Relentlessly experimental, audaciously avant-guard, Inside/Out is the kind of film that will either strike you as utterly sublime or make you... clip your fingernails before showtime."

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, May 10. 1997, Cannes, Kimberly Newman

"What does it mean to be free? To be normal? These are the universal questions posed by "Inside/Out", selected for Un Certain Regard. Written, directed and shot by Rob Tregenza, the film is set at an insane asylum with a cast of inmates including a former jazz musician, A French artist and Episcopal priest, among others. Consistant with its madhouse setting, the vision of this black and white film could blow one's mind but the ponderous pace could drive one crazy.

Lacking the plot or emotional impact of the mainstream "Awakenings" or "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" this indepedent production is an extraordinary visual experience. Little dialogue punctuates one magnificant shot after another for nearly two hours. This film represents perhaps the height of cinematic style, but possibly also the nadir of public appeal. Put another way, it is not for the intellectually infirm or inpatient. Only true cinematic enthusiasts need attend."

FIGARO, May 10, 1997 A. Bourmeyster

" Black and white and wide screen work well for Rob Tregenza as he explores with long tracking shots the prison-like world of an American psychiatric hospital. Prison? The camera which constantly surprises us by the luminious perfection of long takes, a snow covered terrace, climbing the labyrinth of metalic stairs, going deeper into a maze or corridors, sweeping the room where patients and medical staff become agitated. The camera proceeds slowly, methodically for the pleasure of the eyes and deepens the abyss between the outside and the inside of souls tormented by unspeakable ills. Speech is absent. Who is alienated? Who is normal? This questioning, this common place finds a captivating interpretation with the play of ellipsis between image and sound, the quest for impossible harmony is suggested by the music. Bresson? Tarkovski? Non, Rob Tregenza, president of Cinema Parallel distributor of independent films."

EDDIE COCKRELL at Nitrateonline.com REVIEW OF TORONTO INT. FESTIVAL 1997

For sheer artistic brevity consider the case of Maryland-based Rob Tregenza, perhaps the most courageous and focused independent feature film maker currently at work in the United States. His newest film, Inside/Out (Contemporary World Cinema), tells of four people, inside a secluded mental institution and around it, who are struggling to make some sense of the world. Photographed in widescreen black and white and edited with mesmerizing deliberateness byTregenza (truly the complete filmmaker), "Inside/Out" has about it the air of deliberate inspiration, the stark rural landscapes and indecipherable characters who wander in them fusing into one puzzling and delicate canvas. His three films Talking to Strangers (1988) and The Arc (1991) are the others are languorous in a way that only the bravest and most committed filmmakers would dare, individual voyages of discovery that cumulatively reveal Tregenza as a technician of subtle skill and a storyteller who orchestrates and transforms the mundanities of life into spiritual quests for order and meaning. Putting his money where his eye are, Tregenza also distributes his work (as well as Haneke "The Seventh Continent" and films by Jean-Luc Godard, BélaTarr, Jacques Rivette, Aleksandr Rogoschkin and others)through his company Cinema Parallel. For last year's inaugural Dialogues series in Toronto, Godard selected "Talking to Strangers" as a favorite and their bond as artists is strong: moviegoers who have graduated to Godard and are in search of like-minded fare are urged to partake of Tregenza's art and the cinematic riches he's collected at Cinema Parallel.

POSITIF, June 1997

"....Le film envoute par son etrange jeu d'indices, ses lents mouvements d'appareil, ses soudaines fulgurances, son message de desespoir feutre, un peu a la maniere des premiers opus de Phillipe Garrel. Une reussite certaine qui merite d'etre distribuee. Une oeuvre d'auteur totale puisque, outre le senario, Tregenza signe egalement la photo, le montage et l'egalement de son film, faisant ainsi honneur au cinema independent americain qui sait si bien fondre dans un meme movie la culture la plus pointue d'outre Atlantique et les styles les plus audacieux du Vieux Continent....Un beau renvoi d'ascenseur original et autonome." M. C

VARIETY, Friday May 9, 1997. Brendan Kelly

"A starkly minimalist offering, INSIDE/OUT is an ultra-slow-moving portrait of life inside a psychiatric institution, and it takes almost two hours to make the not-so-original point that the folks not locked up in the hospital are likely to be just as wacko as the strait-jacket cases. There is very little dialogue in the pic, and virtually every scene seems to drag on way too long....

.....There is almost no plot to grasp on to and the absence of character development makes it tough for the viewer to feel much sympathy for the highly alienatied patients. With so little talking, it is difficult for many of the thesps to distinguish themselves, although Allaux and Rocca at least manage to convey some non-verbal intensity.

Tregenza's camera work is self-consciously arty, and the odd photography further detracts from the drama. The pic does have a suitable bleak mid-winter look that perfectly suits the subject matter. The score is anchored by a number of ethereal harp instrumentals."

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