Another Girl, Another Planet

Without a producer, but with unlimited artistic freedom, Michael Almereyda had the idea in 1992 of using a PixelVision camera costing less than fifty dollars from a toy store for a mid-length feature film. He used the lack of depth and focus to ‘paint’ abstract-looking, black & white surfaces with his camera. That is especially effective in the close-ups. Also unusual are the blurred and slowly moving images when cigarettes are lit and we see various other human activities in sparsely lit rooms. The film also has a plot: a tormented man reminisces about lost loves that have torn his romantic soul apart for ever. Pumping rock song by Nick Cave fits in very well with that. The film even made it into cinemas, and in doing so, Almereyda proved how you can make a virtue of necessity. In his later mainstream production Hamlet (2000), he was again to make use of PixelVision.

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