We Are Twins Born in the Sign of Gemini

For a while, I described Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World as the six-minute answer to the question of why I love cinema. In the past nine months or so, though, it's been displaced by the above clip from Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort. The film ran on one of our HD channels for a while, and I can't for the life of me figure out why they don't market hi-def televisions by showing excerpts of Rochefort rather than bits of those interminable Caribbean pirates movies. I suppose this will tell you exactly why I'll never pull down a paycheck marketing products for Best Buy, but I'm serious. The film's bright and vivid colors and the elaborate contrasts in the production design come alive in hi-def, so the cropping of the above video is only part of its infirmity.

There's a game I play with my daughters. I'll quietly whistle the first few notes of the song in the clip and then stop. I never have to wait more than a few seconds before one of the older girls starts humming or whistling the rest of the song, often without knowing it. The song lasts two minutes and forty-two seconds, more or less. In those one hundred and sixty-two seconds, there are fifteen different shots, with an average length of over ten seconds per shot, or a glacial pace by Baz Luhrmann standards. The shots alternate between the full-length shots of the sisters, medium shots of them and the close-ups for particular lines to be sung. I can't get enough of it.