THE BLINDMAN’S BALL

A Matte Project
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This document aims to analyze the structure and objectives of blindman's ball explaining the reasons
behind aesthetic-stylistic choices.

The “laws” that dictate the assembly of Blinman's Ball are essentially two. Repetition ; and the
contrast of two opposing physical forces: upward thrust and Gravity.
To analyze both these aspects it is necessary to describe a minimum the narrative context of BMB (given
the essentially abstract nature of the project):

This is the timeless history of two souls seeking each other endlessly.
In a perpetual, inexorable way.
Our hero is also the owner of the Manor. He is the host at the party.
A Masquearde designed with the sole intent and hope that SHE can
be there among the guests.
But, she lives in the abstract. A memory and nothing more.
He keeps looking for her every time, over the years, over the centuries,
dreaming of the moment when he would finally see the sinuous shape
of her back in the crowd and throw himself on her
like an incandescent star against a motionless planet.
The entire universe would have disappeared
and even the stars would have fallen from the sky.

It is nothing but a ritual of perpetual courtship; a never improvised dance hat repeats itself
identical in time and space. For example, the jump cut at 1.24.00 also marked by a clear cut in
music, indicates that between one moment and another may have passed millennia.
So in this context, the repetition of shots becomes a way of accentuating this inflexible circular,
nauseating motion, which actually concentrates 3 neuralgic moments (stanzas) in it (an eclectic circu-
lar triangle paradox): I. The stillness before the storm; II. The Research; III. The flash of intu-
ition, the orgasm, the final catharsis that will always actually be in his head only ! In fact, we never
see her face in the final shot, we only see her back. We will never know if it's her or someone else.
she remains a ghost in the red light.
The repetition is not to be found exclusively in the use of the same take several times, but also and
above all in the composition of the shots and in the actions performed by the actors:
At 02.08.18 the young man returns to the opening position of the film. Here, however, we also show
the initial part of the take, or how he gets there to curl up on that chair: crawling on the ground. This
choice is not accidental, and the reson here is precisely to create a moment of confusion: In the frame
that precedes this one shot in fact, we see the man outdoors trying to get up from the ground after a
long delay. Now at 03:08:03 it crawls back to the ground.
Here, in the combination of very similar images are concentrated both of the "laws" we mentioned
before :
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I. the almost redundant repetition of actions that are repeated indefinitely in time and space; and
the attempt to visualize two contrasting movements: The thrust towards the sky (the will to rise
from the ground) that collides with this terrible and brutal force of gravity;

Therefore, we act in a universe in which the sky is a ceiling that crushes and compresses (see:
01.55.12; 02.43.02; 02.25.10; 03. 01. 19; 03.14.08; 03. 32.31).

Each frame is designed to visualize this sense of suffocation (see: 03.21.19; 03.26.23): the perspective
is always either lowered or raised, even when we see the stairs, the POV is a very low angle as if we were
crawling (see 02.45.16; 03.39.17). The entire STANZA III is a game of glances between man and the
universe in a desperate prayer of freedom from this gravity that crushes the skull (03.32.11) until
the sight is blackened.
A dream of weightlessness: (see from 03.18.22 to 03.20.15).

New York, January 2018

Gianluigi Carella