Emily – Third Party Speculation

Le Grice's Blackbird Descending the previous year signalled such witty potential for exploring narrative and perpetual time and space that this retread disappoints by its ponderousness and unrelieved seriousness. Constructed around a repeating 'neutral' domestic scene, the film examines its material elements in relation to point-of-view, first in the conventional sense of the film-maker's objectivity and subjectivity, then by an assumption of the spectator's perception. But the visual/verbal punning is so strained, and the focused narrative fragment so barren, that the opening image, of the film-maker-cum-spectator sitting blankly in front of a screen, transfers all too easily to the 'real' - and bored - viewer.