VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

Play, download and edit the free video Vows.

Logline:

Dust settles on their bedroom floor; dishes stack up in their sink; resentment swells in their hearts.

Synopsis:

Vows depicts a deteriorating marriage using a style of filmmaking that prioritises experience and feeling rather than logic and cause-and-effect. It doesn’t provide the viewer with a specific source of conflict that sparks discontent and examine its consequences (as a traditional depiction of relationship breakdown would do). Instead, Vows pairs visual montage of banal domestic tasks with a soundtrack comprised of auditory snippets of tense conversations (along with equally tense music).

Relationships are complicated; in a way they are living things unto themselves. Sometimes they don’t make sense, but where logic and reason may be absent, emotion and feeling never is. Thus, depicting a rotting marriage using traditional cause-and-effect narrative filmmaking is in many ways inadequate – it can’t represent the chaotic, dark, messy heart of a marriage the way that more dreamlike, surrealist filmmaking can. Set a camera on actors talking in a room and you will of course see that human expression and conversation can depict the surface-level of marital collapse. But the true sadness and agony at the heart of such collapse can only be depicted in other ways: such as a simple shot of an apple slowly rotting.

Not only is surrealist filmmaking an influence on Vows but so is the philosophy of Werner Herzog as described in his famous Minnesota Declaration. Herzog makes the distinction between truth and fact, effectively arguing that documentary filmmakers should be allowed to fictionalise in their efforts to best represent the truth. Vows isn’t a documentary, but I do use my mother and father – a real married couple – to play the married couple on screen. The dialogue they say is invented and their action contrived for the camera – but perhaps, the film is able to portray certain aspects of their real-life relationship.

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