Inside/Out

The French artist Jean Hammett tries to escape from a small old American psychiatric clinic. His taciturn nature – but in that regard he is no different from the other characters in the film – does not make it any more obvious why his escape attempt is so half-hearted. Monica Phillips (played by Godard actress Bérangère Allaux) however regards him as an obsessive symbol of freedom. She has been transferred to this institute after a failed attempt to break out of another hospital. Jean meanwhile befriends Roger Freeman, a former jazz star. Then there is the priest David Sheppard, a traumatised war veteran who thinks he can find his salvation, his passport to normality, with the organist Grace Patterson.Inside/out was shot in harsh black & white Cinemascope. The pale mid-winter light in the prolonged scenes stress the oppressive mood. Tregenza is less interested in characters and stories than in the picture and the silence in this obsessed, dark, metaphorical and modernist film. Tregenza is in many regards a real independent in the United States who retains control of production, screening and distribution. Jean-Luc Godard was eventually not willing to attach his name to the production, but is a great admirer of Tregenza’s work. The central questions in Inside/out, namely what freedom really means and who is free, could have something to do with that.