TV Times

TV Times

Bolivian experience of split screen
The experimental Bolivian movie ‘Sexual Dependency’ which won rave reviews at a number of international Film Festivals now being screened at Rio cinema Colombo.

The film which won the International Critics Prize at Locarno film festival, Italy-2003 and screened at Telluride Film Festival, North America among a number of other festivals is from Bolivia, a country that had produced few films in its history.

It portrays the lives of five young people from different cultural and socio- economic backgrounds: a girl from a working class family, whose father dominates the family; a 15-year-old Columbian boy forced by his friends to go to a hooker; an upper- class young man goes to study at a US university and finds prejudice; a young black woman student who is gang raped by jocks while walking home alone at night on the campus, and a male model and football star, who is a repressed homosexual.

The debut film of 25-year-old director, Rodrigo Bellott has hired split screen effect throughout the film. This is the first thing that strikes one about Sexual Dependency that, except for one sequence, the entire film is shown using a split-screen technique. In a way this aesthetic choice has dominated all discussion of the film, detracting from many of its other qualities, both in style and content.

In the history of film making there have been previous attempts at splitting the screen from as way back as D. W Griffith’s epics and Abel Gance’s Napoleon, which often resorts to multiple images, through to its sporadic use in mainstream Hollywood films such as It’s Always Fair Weather and Pillow Talk, to the more recent Time Code.

But, the young Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellott has taken the courageous step of choosing to use the split screen throughout in a consistently inventive way. The split screen only enriches the portrayal of the marginalised characters. For example, the black girl has a monologue, or rather, dialogue with herself after the rape.

Each scene is shot with two cameras so that a constant split screen narrative shows different angles of the same event as well as parallel and concurrent footage. But for some this bold experimental could also fail to hang together as a watchable film, straining audience sympathies in too many directions before finally collapsing under its own strident weight.

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