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Fragments

Fragments was originally inspired by Julio Cortazar’s Latin American magical realism novel, Hopscotch (1963). It can be read linearly in 155 chapters, or by hop-scotching, using an instruction manual provided by the author. The novel deals with multiple narratives in a prosaic, mystical manner. The sensuous and complex stylistic nonlinearity influenced our choice of constructing a similar story for our Korsakow film. We imagined each SNU, smallest narrative unit, as surrealist prose in which each micro-narrative exists on its own or can be part of a larger ensemble. The city was the metaphor for the neurological system of sensorial memory pathways.

As our story unfolded, we decided that, in the manner of the Korsakow Syndrome, an illness that causes amnesia, our characters would physically disappear from the film. In our research we consulted a neurologist, Eric Lalumière, and through a neurology book, we discovered that sensorial memory is only temporary. Thus, the protagonist slowly falls into the abyss of a blank slate. The film became an allegorical map of sensorial memory with the urban landscape as a canvas that holds the stills of a love affair. The filmic style was inspired by La Jetée, a 1962 science fiction film by Chris Marker. The story is told by a voice-over narrator, and is a construction of photomontage at varied paces. We used mixed media: video and stop-motion animation to convey an aesthetic of dreamy sensuality, and innocence. The impressionist original soundtrack composed for the piano is meant to phonetically convey a sense of the Flâneur around the city.

Fragments was created in 2009 by Amy Ball, Myriam Descormiers, Saulo Madrid, and Saba Shahsiah as an assignment for COMS374 Intermedia II, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University. (Instructor: Matt Soar; TA: Katja Philipp.)