Using the language of classic American film noir as a template, ‘Loophole’ aims to investigate the construction of conventional narrative. Inspired by Borges' ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, it attempts to reconstruct our perception of cinematic narrative and with it, escape the inexorable demise of the femme fatale that is so typical to film noir.

Through temporal and spatial distortions, 'Loophole’ collapses a chronological sense of time, in favour of questioning time itself. I have chosen the ultimate cinematic moment, the shoot out, as the crux of the “story” and have tried to find ways of re-representing it to create a new tension of real time and cinematic time. The time of the loop serves to extend or compress time so that on the one hand it relates to events as we perceive them but eventually our perceptions are undermined as we realize that the femme fatale is caught in a sort of formal time-warp. Time conceives of several time-levels simultaneously.

The film opens with a woman in a highly stylized 1950s costume sitting in front of a heavily curtained window, smoking. A jazz tune plays on the radio. The telephone rings. We hear a gunshot shortly followed by the sound of glass breaking, somewhat later followed by the sound of footsteps mounting the stairs and again a telephone rings and we hear another gunshot, followed by the sound of glass breaking... The sound, but not the image is looped, so that this moment reoccurs, the eternal return. The woman is shot, falls out of the window, gets up, climbs back up the stairs, enters into the room, aims a gun and fires. It transpires that she is shooting herself. Time is looped, collapsed, so that all these stages of the narrative exist simultaneously.

This “narrative” is intercut with scenes of five characters, including a detective-type strolling through a wooded area. The camera moves through them in so-called “real time”. Finally a gun shot rings through the park and the various characters stare off screen suggesting a connection between the two scenarios. In a nutshell ‘Loophole’ attempts to pit real time and an impossible “cyclical” time against one another, the two intersecting nevertheless…

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