Sam

With this short video, I aim to use the commanding technique of voice-over as parallel to the narration of Fedor Dostoevsky's "The Meek One."

In lieu of Dostoevsky's skaz, I shot most of the film point-of-view. My goal is to realize the tension between narrator and reader in the original story through the dissonance between voice-over and screen-picture in my video.

I was inspired by the way the story ends, when the narrator blames the narrow miss of saving his wife on intertia:

The main thing, it's a pity that it all comes down to chance – simple, barbaric inertia, chance. That's the pity of it! All of five minutes, I was only five minutes late!

In my film, instead of narrating the events that lead up to my wife committing suicide, I narrate the events leading up to a similarly distressing event: my physics midterm exam, which was supposed to happen one week before the project was due. In the style of Dostoevsky's narrator, I narrate the events in a way that introduces tension between my own sin and virtue. I include a sort of nadryv [break, rupture], and overlay the footage with my own voice.

The idea behind this project was to explore the act of creating a verisimilar experience (in Roman Jakobson's sense) for my viewers through the film medium. I hope that the film will raise questions of what it means to curate an experience for an audience, and I hope the viewers will question the truthfulness the narrator in the film makes about his experience.