Share
Clip description
Surfer Daisuke (Toshiyuki Chiba) is about to return to Japan to work for his father, a butcher. He captures the people and places around him on camcorder, including his housemates Hana (Mikiko Ooka) and Tetsu (Jun Iwasaki).
Curator’s notes
Daisuke’s point of view, through his camcorder – in particular the way he sees Hana, the object of his unrequited love – is fundamental to Flowergirl. Daisuke, unable to express his feelings, settles for looking – his recordings of Hana become a kind of helpless one-way conversation. There are also darker themes of voyeurism that develop through the film. Despite Daisuke’s objectification of her, Hana seems the more powerful character. He seems in her thrall in part because she is less reserved and constrained than he is. Daisuke’s videotaped perception of his environment and details like the red bricks also evoke particular feelings of travel and transience: the heightened awareness of a place he is about to leave, the sudden significance of details and the desire to commit them to memory.
Flowergirl’s distinctive visual focus on the way characters perceive their environment and frame the world for themselves has echoes in Somersault (2004). Speaking with australianscreen in June 2009, Cate Shortland says the sense of point of view she began to develop in her short films has had a continuing importance in her work, with the positioning of the camera becoming a ‘psychological choice’. Rather than a separate observer of the scenes taking place, she says 'the camera almost becomes a character’.
Unlike Shortland and producer Anthony Anderson’s previous short Pentuphouse (1998), which was shot on 35mm, the lower-budget Flowergirl was shot on 16mm. For the video scenes, digital was used – then a relatively new media. Anderson, speaking with australianscreen in June 2009, says the video footage came out ‘so crisp and clean that we had to dirty it up’ to get the home-movie style contrast they wanted with the 16mm film. To achieve this, they edited the video footage then filmed it as it played back on a video monitor. The new film negative was then brought back into the Avid editing system to edit with the rest of the film.
