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GreenCine Daily - ”The first time I saw The Tracey Fragments, I felt as if I was seeing a revolution in film form, a new visual concept that made us process images in a fundamentally different way,” writes Dan Sallitt in the Auteurs’ Notebook. “And the second time I saw it, I realized that you could play the soundtrack in your living room and enjoy the film without ever looking at it. I wonder whether these seemingly contradictory impressions are related…. The Tracey Fragments is not the first film to use paneled images, but it’s the first feature-length narrative that I know of that relies on paneling as its basic method of visual communication, that dispenses with the safety net of the full-frame image.” And he offers “a partial, not terribly rigorous taxonomy of the effects I noted in Tracey.”
“Unlike the frustrating gimmickry of Mike Figgis’s Timecode and Hotel, [Bruce] McDonald’s bedazzling multi-frame experiment poeticizes and enhances an otherwise slender story (forgivable at only 77 minutes long), as planes of different sizes and shapes materialize - fading, sliding, distorting, and overlapping to convey the rage and anxiety of damaged adolescence,” writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.
“Lukas Moodysson’s currently undistributed Container, too, is a schizophrenic movie about a schizophrenic protagonist,” notes Mark Asch in the L Magazine, “a scratchy black-and-white effort featuring multiple narratives seeping in and out of each other and a disjunctive voiceover - though unlike Container, which wormed its way inside personal trauma towards a warped sense of transcendence, there’s a sense, with Tracey, that director Bruce McDonald is using sensory overload and a some-assembly-required narrative to cover up for the fact that there’s not much of a there here.”… [Full Story]
