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Clip description
While spending the day sick at home, Julie Fry (Rebecca Stewart) develops a theory about paper and tissue boxes.
Curator’s notes
This very funny and sweet glimpse of young Julie’s imagination is the last of the vignettes. While it has a slightly melancholic tone of isolation and boredom it also seems to celebrate the passionless moments and incidental flights of fancy that traditional drama may overlook.
The opening and closing statements of the film imply it is an observational documentary, a wonderfully absurd notion. The final statement – 'There are one million moments in your neighbourhood but, as the filmmakers discovered, each has a fragile presence…’ – paired with the opening claim that the moments were ‘recorded in Sydney, Australia, Sunday October 2nd’ – links them in time and space to emphasise both their ordinariness and universality.
The boardroom scene provides an example of the kind of play with depth of field and extremes of focus and framing that Campion continued in feature films like Sweetie (1989). A tissue box pushed across the table prompts an interaction between the extreme foreground and extreme background of the shot.
