Response: Sidney Peterson's The Cage

Sidney Peterson's film The Cage has an intriguing though sometimes distressing rhythm. The narrative itself, thinking back upon it, is relatively straightforward compared to some of its avant-garde brothers. A young artist with a crazed look about him ends up removing his own eye, and his lady, a doctor, and a few others set about trying to find this offending object as it rolls through San Francisco. Using a quietly absurdist humour, The Cage creates the 'bohemian artist' world, the setting being a shabby apartment in disarray, with the artist painting bread and eating it, or staring into a mirror (both before and after he loses his eye.)

The film emphasizes the act of seeing and unique vision through the use of repetition of shots and imagery (such as the nude woman running down a hall with her back to the camera, and the image of the young man with his head in a birdcage.) This repetition helps to build the rhythm of the film, as does the dream-like quality of the crowds shot walking backwards. My interpretation of these sequences along the streets of San Francisco was that these crowds might represent the backwardness of conventional society. I could be way off, though.

The eyeball's point-of-view shots use distortions of the lens, conveying a feeling of disjunction and overall madness. The point-of-view shots in which the eye crazily spins, revolving the world it sees at a breakneck speed, were a little too much for me and made me feel a bit motion-sick, and I usually have a strong stomach while viewing films with odd camera movements.

Overall, I'd like to see more by Peterson, and my favourite image in the film is the quiet moment when the split-artist wearing his eyepatch ponders his dual reflection in the mirror, and though each face is different, the two actors give off a feeling of satisfied, inevilitable dread, if that makes any sense.