Lonely Planet

Philip Gartland

The Cinema Effect: Realism

“Lonely Planet”, directed by Julian Rosefeldt

The film begins with a singular man crossing the screen. He is clearly a westerner, due to his pale skin, bandana, Che Guevara adorned pack, and Hindu inspired t-shirt. He move through the desert until he meets a few huts and a boat. The viewer is notified that this will not be a normal cinematic experience when the traveler pushing the boat moves the camera as well. The man crosses a river which is intercut with people in a movie theater watching something on screen. He moves through the crowds with the crowds seemingly mocking him. Here, the camera’s perspective is sometimes filming the traveler and sometimes from the traveler’s perspective. He continues down a road walking down the wrong side and then into a train station, which seemingly changes into a call center. We watch the call center for a few minutes until the protagonist suddenly appears from the movie screen and walks into the movie theater. He walks through the crowds and into the streets. He finds himself in a Bollywood style set, where make-up is applied to him. People start singing and dancing all around him as he joins in. He leaves, going through the scaffolding as he walks through a ghost town and into the distance as a camera appears in the shot.

This film is, first and foremost, and unbelievably beautiful film. Much of the film is in wide shot and deep focus, allowing the audience to view all the natural beauty of the scenes outdoors. It also allows the audience to see all of the hustle and bustle of life in the city. There are no close up shots as the closest one comes to that are shots with several people in them. The camera also transitions a lot from eye-level to almost and omniscient shot above all of the action. Most of the street and cinema shots are from eye-level, giving the viewer a similar perspective of the traveler. Eye-level shots are also used to show how far the horizon goes in the beginning of the film and the mountain the traveler has to climb at the end. The camera has a different perspective during the Bollywood scene where we frequently view people from on high in a classical cinematic fashion.

Overall, this film tells a compelling story of how we view films and what we consider “real.” The first few scenes seem like they could be from a multitude of different movies and even the shots of an audience watching a film are not an uncommon thing to see when you watch a movie. However, something is off in those scenes because the viewer is explicitly aware of the camera. This uneasiness is realized when we see the traveler go off the screen and into the auditorium. The filmmaker seems to be asking about our relationship with the character and how we view him. Is the traveler just a man on film or is he something more than that? When he arrives at the Bollywood set, the answer seems to be he is just an actor. But he wanders off into the distance again, creating uncertainty which is compounded by cameras coming onscreen filming the traveler, which the viewer had not seen before. The message is a difficult one to sort out, but it seems like Rosenfeldt is saying that the viewer has a relationship with a person of screen that almost qualifies the characters as real people. At the same time, this relationship is extremely limited due to the inherent falsity of the character on the screen.

At first, I was attracted to this piece due solely to its beauty. I was not terribly impressed with the first few videos but was immediately struck with the stunning shots in this production. The reason I continued to watch the film and write about it was its message. It is an extremely tough film to interpret since you have to do so with only your eye. In fact, I am still trying to fit all the pieces of it together, since I still don’t know how to fit in the call center scene in with the rest of the movie. For those reasons, I liked Lonely Planet.