Blog Prompt: Watch the 12 min silent 1929 film by Dimitri Kirsanoff called Brumes d’automne (Autumn Mists). In this experimental short there is no plot just the visualized thoughts of a woman. Describe the editing. What is she thinking? Does the montage work? Does it evoke something for you? Kirsanoff said that his intention in the film was to represent a state of mind “through drastically changed images in which nature was losing its density and unity.”
Very early on a connection is established between a shot of the woman looking blankly followed by an empty frame of a subject being what she was looking at. This is established with the paper in the fire very early on and this set, at least for me, the expectation that any shot of her face and a shot that was harder to connect must be the focus of her vision. Her looking at the papers, then the man, then the wilderness instills in me a great feeling of longing. She wants to be free of the place she in and when she finally leaves, she gets to wander in the beauty of the outside. Her face isn’t shown in focus like it was before this point anymore, with some acceptations, but for the most part her legs and feet are the focus as traveling and being outside become the forefront. During the only prolonged focus on her gaze after this, it is more of a blurry messy trip that obviously displays stress but the exact reasoning is hard to pin down and left up to interpretation. All of the shots are of very discontinuous outside images that evoke the feeling of outdoors but don’t ground you in any particular place. The piece ends up feeling very dreamy with no meaning easily parsed as everything is left to the viewer to interpret.