THE SECRET LIFE OF RICHARD R

Year Released: 2006 MPAA Rating: Unrated Running Time: 5 minutes Click to Expand Credits: Created by Mark O'Connell

This video is a collage of found and original footage. The found footage includes many shots from noirish films; mostly from moments when the characters have an expression of fear, distrust, or suspicion. Other footage includes astronauts on the moon and time-lapse images of clouds. The soundtrack is slow rock music which effectively evokes an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue, blended with occasional lines of dialogue from the films. (Typically, Woman: “What are we going to do?” Man: “I don’t know.”)

The images in this video do not try to tell a story or convey an idea. Instead, they effectively evoke a sense of brooding paranoia. The repetition of images, such as a man who keeps approaching a door without ever arriving, or a plane which keeps approaching a runway without ever landing, are like images from a nightmare. Frequent interpolations of black frames, for fractions of a second, suggest a state of consciousness in which a person has repeated memory lapses.

O’Connell is highly effective here in taking stock images and reforming them into a primarily musical and mood-driven experience. This video encourages us to “feel” what we are looking at, and to “see” what we are listening to, which is a wonderful thing for a video to be able to do.

Posted on July 13, 2006 in Reviews by David Finkelstein

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