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Clip description
The man (Syd Brisbane) and the woman (Ulli Birvé) arrive in the desert outside Las Vegas, because he has always wanted to go there. She does not, so she waits overnight while he tries his luck. They jump through space-time to the outskirts of Los Angeles, where she lectures him about the stupidity of the way humans live in smog-filled cities.
Curator’s notes
The woman from Epsilon does tend to be a bit of a know-all in the first half of the film, before a growing affection for the man tempers her superiority complex. The story is about how both characters are changed by the other, although at this stage she does most of the talking. The manipulation of time (in the beginning of the clip) is a reflection of the way she views the idea of time, and it gives an effective dramatic explanation for the film’s use of time lapse photography. ‘Manipulation of time’ is also one of the definitions of what filmmaking itself is all about, since none of the other arts is so temporal. There’s also a sense in the film that time becomes different when one is confronted with an ancient wilderness like the Australian desert.
