Review: 45365
My favourite part of this film is the scene where two men are sitting in a decrepit (yet well lit with natural sunlight) room filled with parts of old wooden furniture. One is playing a guitar, the other using a kazoo while occasionally tapping on an empty glass. A single fixed long take which ends with a slow pan out the window, this scene is both visually and acoustically stunning as it activates spectator senses to hold our attention. It is a beautiful scene, tinged with the sadness of nostalgia, and evokes that impossible time when life was much simpler. In fact, it is such a beautiful film that I have been reluctant to taint it with words.
In 45365, Bill and Turner Ross, two men born in Sidney, Ohio, return to their hometown (from whose postcode, the title is derived) to record footage for their documentary. They become comfortable amongst the people who live there, develop trust —it is through their privileged relationship with Sidney that we, in turn, are drawn so close to it. The camera flows through the town from place to place, through everyday occurrences, seeing things that perhaps we can see in any town, but that belong most intimately to this particular landscape. Opening at the Shelby County Fair, we see a trailer announcing the presence of the World’s Smallest Woman! As well as this, the Ross brothers have captured some excellent mullet-moustache combinations on camera. The banal spectacular. Returning to the Shelby County Fair, an evening sequence focused on carnival rides is truly mesmerising. Here, neon lights capture our attention and the faint sounds of childhood joy are perfectly attuned to the town’s unhurried pace, as the camera turns a popular dime-store experience into a beautiful one for the spectator. Even the adolescent event of toilet paper strewn on somebody’s home and garden is momentarily glamourised, as an abstracted shot creates a pretty toilet-paper streamer.
People living in Sidney float in and out of the Ross brothers’ film, and we begin to feel that we know some of them without really being given a chance to get close. But in 45365, like all those great urban films noir when the metropolis has such prominence and substance, it is the city that is the main character of this film. Bill and Turner film Sidney in a similarly devoted way to how Walther Ruttman did Berlin, but instead of being defined by cuts and juxtapositions to an external object, it is purely a symphony of the city. Ruttman, in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1928), mimics the rhythm of the city in his editing, but at the same time substitutes the city’s form and affective power with fast editing and impersonal symbols that interrupt its flow. The Ross’s film adopts a pure aesthetic, driven only by an appreciation for Sidney, and a pure cinematic path dictated by spectacle and a sense of universal community.
The aesthetic of 45365 is spectacular, yet at the same time genuine and sincere. It belongs on a list of recent films which adopt a cinéma vérité approach, most notably Kelly Reichardt’s superb Wendy and Lucy, which is driven not so much by dialogue or plot but by a desire to capture a sense of place. All those years ago, a cameraman who worked for the Lumiere Brothers’ said, about cinema: “Its lens opens the world.” Wendy and Lucy does this by showing us a small and very intimate part of the American landscape. 45365 does the same thing. The film ends with The Flamingos’ I Only Have Eyes For You playing over a landscape of fresh fallen snow, and then we really have seen it all; sunshine, rain, snow. We have seen the inside of a football huddle. Attended weddings, participated in conversations. In fact, by the end of the film I felt as though I could visit Sidney and know my way around. I could engage in conversation with the policeman. I felt as though Hits 105.5 was my own local radio station (and Lawrence Everson’s sound editing deserves a special mention). Bill and Turner Ross just want to show Sidney to the world, and they have made it a wonderful sight.
46365 is showing at ACMI from June 3 – 6.
Kimj
20/05/10 - 2:48 AM
I really want to see this film. It sounds as though the town and its inhabitants have been given ample room to exist and be recognised on their own terms. I really like this approach. To me it’s a more reflexive approach to documentary filmmaking, as opposed to, say, the narratives disingenuously affixed to the characters in American Teen, which had a preconceived idea of the types of student they wished to portray.