24 Exposures
When it comes to American independent film, you can’t ignore the name Joe Swanberg. Since 2005, he has directed eighteen features including ‘24 Exposures,’ according to the Internet Movie Database; in addition, He has been involved in short films and television episodes. This is a guy who shares Woody Allen’s perspective of artist as pro ballplayer. The aim is not to hit a home run every time at the bat but rather get up as many times as one can and maintain a high average.
The average rating for Swanberg’s movies improves with time: his more recent works “All the Light in the Sky” and “Uncle Kent” and his segment of “V/H/S” are good even occasionally brilliant but his most recent offering about a photographer who might be a killer is like some wild pop fly that disappears into the stands.
Billy (played by filmmaker actor Adam Wingard who worked with Swanberg on “V/H/S”) whom this film revolves around has some side work taking photographs at crime scenes for detectives solving murders. It is an upscale, bohemian apartment where Alex (Caroline White) lives with her boyfriend Billy when he isn’t working. Her friends tend to be women as young and full-breasted as she is women who have no qualms about getting naked or participating in threesomes.
Billy also takes disturbing art photos of women. Some he knows well, others he picks up. They pose half naked or bound up or all spooky horror movie desecrated out for him to shoot them only later finding out how gruesome they are on camera after developing them into prints. There’s another story here that runs parallel involving one of Billy’s colleagues Det. Michael Bamfeaux (filmmaker actor Simon Barrett), searching for clues about somebody real dead person while gradually losing control over his own mind too maybe.
The shots were taken by Wingard, who unlike Barrett, is a filmmaker actor with an absolute dearth of technical skills or raw charisma that might capture our attention in a slow, moody genre flick. (This is one of Swanberg’s most debilitating faults as a director: his casting, particularly in small films, is chummy when it should be artistically ruthless.)
Swanberg has crafted a low budget homage to Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” but with all the trappings of sleaze and menace that come with indie film production values, and a synthesized score that evokes ‘Manhunter’ and other 80s crime pictures. The film’s narrative consists of different moments in which Billy’s split art begins to invade his home life more and more.
However he describes them as part of some ongoing fetish project to her, being the ‘hottest’ pic for him as Alex can only wonder about those things. It goes beyond fetishistic though; it provokes whether not disturbed even if he isn’t what makes him devote himself into “art” that portrays women bodies like meat? And so does Alex. The same goes for Helen Rogers (also from “V/H/S”), who plays a bartender with two black eyes a detail that fascinates Billy so much that he asks her if she would like to sit for him. He says this because he loves breasts.
“What’s here?” That’s the question that persists throughout “24 Exposures,” and the director intentionally leaves it unanswered by presenting both art and crime scene photographs in a way that confuses them. Like the European art films and American New Wave movies which have been its models (another touchstone is “Blow Up”), this exercise is about how difficult it can be to differentiate between what is real and what isn’t. This is a film within a film. Spectatorship and complicity, not characters or situations, are its main focus.
“24 Exposures” becomes halfway intriguing if you think about it as an instance of a significant American filmmaker letting detractors provoke him into self-reflection. Swanberg has been taken to task for showing full frontal nudity or having explicit sex scenes involving Joe Swanberg in movies that may not necessarily require such content, as well as treating actresses who make his work possible like objects.
“24 Exposures” does not answer or try to answer why these charges but it does take them into consideration. Billy (a character played by a director) might be a worst case alter ego for Swanberg. The character churns out images at an alarming rate without giving much thought to their content, with his creative impulses tied intrinsically to the desire to see women naked.
Could Swanberg be seeking to forestall criticism of his methods by making a movie about an artist who is at least creepy if not actually murderous? Perhaps, perhaps not. However, only those familiar with Swanberg’s career will find this question interesting. To everyone else “24 Exposures” would appear like some drifting thriller poorly acted but nevertheless trying to say something though ambiguously so.”
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