HERE - A STUDY ON FILM

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the local film ‘Here’, written and directed by local film maker, Ho Tzu Nyen. Through investigating the illusionary nature of spaces embedded within the film, the paper endeavors to draw a critical discussion around the writer’s theme ‘Here’ and attempt to identify and interpret spaces that are formed. It is through this interpretation of spaces in film, which transcends both dimensions of space and time, can we begin to understand the logic and mechanisms behind the fabrication of these fictional as well as real spaces. In the film ‘Here’, Ho has implemented his own logic of framework in film‐making which differs from the typical, through various techniques of arousing the sensations and disrupting the mind, in order to evoke the spectator’s self‐consciousness. This ‘increases the layers of interpretation of spaces’1 in the film’s narrative according to Ho, which now, not only involves the film as an art piece viewed on its own but includes the spectator and director as part of the artistic construct. This interaction and imagination required from the spectator allows one to walk away from the cinema in a trance, with the fascination of translating the intellectual into the physical and the sensual unlike the ordinary immersive environments laid out in cinema space. The paper explores what the filmic experience entails for the notions of logic of space that governs architecture and the psychologies of sense and consciousness with respect to these spaces, by relating theories of perception and phenomenology by various philosophers as a vital mode of reference in interpreting these spaces created, imagined or proposed.