"The Tenants" “The Tenants“ tells a five-minute story of a New England family. In the story, the son, an aspiring writer, who has just returned home from graduation, shows an unpublished manuscript to each member of his family. While his sisters and father gain insight through the book, the mother rejects the work as an offense to her way of life and pushes the son out the door. This drama portraying a common miscommunication that takes place within domestic settings is retold five times, each from the perspective of a different bedroom. The simultaneity of these separate point-of-views is accentuated through common sound cues. Every time a new family member is introduced, the audience immediately gains some understanding of the character’s personality through his or her confines. At the same time, a previously heard sound cue is paired with visual information that further completes the textual narrative of the film. Previously made deductions are elucidated and corrected through each relation. At the end of the film, a sense of separation between the characters is conveyed through the narrative structure. With “The Tenants,” I utilize the uniqueness of film’s relationship to time to build a new environment, where the concept of time is redefined through sound. Instead of expecting the narrative to traverse through time in one continuum, the audience becomes aware of the simultaneity of each subplot and the common space within which they occupy. The purpose of this reconstruction of perspective is two-fold: one, I want to externalize the separation and confinement defined the modern family through the medium, two, this new structure enables a new sequential arrangement of the plot, where the narrative arc examines the relationships between each character. |