AFTER THE PAINT HAS DRIED is about storytelling as a personal communication process, both overt and subtextual. The film concerns itself less with the actual stories than with the function of getting and giving attention and the nature of people’s interest in each other.
Everyday New York street scenes are used repetitively to suggest fragments of a dramatic narrative. Interrupted stories; casual sounds that suggest something has happened or will happen; crowd noise that reflects rising and falling interest; and a rhythmic text read by three voices compose the soundtrack.
The sound and image merge to create the sense of attempting to capture attention. This process serves to both control the listener as well as reveal the storyteller. Yet its outcome is ambiguous, reflecting the less than final understanding that knowing someone through their stories involves.
Winner, Director’s Citation Award, Black Maria Film Festival, 1987
15:00 minutes © 1986
black&white/optical sound 16mm film; 3/4", VHS (NTSC)
Distribution:
Filmmakers' Coop (USA)
Lux Centre for Film, Video and Digital Arts (UK)
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Please view: 16-second excerpt in which a man begins telling the story of how he dialed a wrong number and, getting someone’s answering service “Couldn’t simply say ‘Oh, I’ve dialed the wrong number’...” (860 K) | |
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Please view: 20-second excerpt in which the man who dialed the wrong number continues to tell how he decided to cover his mistake by leaving a message for Ernest Borgnine—only to discover he was in fact speaking to Ernest Borgnine’s answering service. (1 MB) |
What People Have Said about AFTER THE PAINT HAS DRIED...
“Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe’s After The Paint Has Dried, a mesmerizing film of richly tactile black and white images in constant states of transition. The attempt to grasp and name these elusive points of transition is one of the primary subjects of the film. We hear a male voice-over telling a story of meeting a woman at a party. She gives him her phone number. He calls. At the same moment he admits to himself that he doesn’t want to deal with rejection. An answering service picks up. In a panic, he decides to leave a message for Ernest Borgnine; only to find that it is in fact, Ernest Borgnine’s service. The story trails off...
There is a double edge to After The Paint Has Dried. Though it is successful at sustaining an undulating, and at times even poetic tone, equally it is a work that demands constant assimilation of highly intuitive properties. At the same moment one allows oneself to be taken in or enjoy the passive pleasure of its soft voice, it taps into our fragmented and abstracted recollections to ask us for a set of revised perceptions. There is a wide shot of an older woman walking to the corner in the rain, holding an umbrella. There is a sense we’re watching her from the window, and a sense that we’ve seen her outside of our own windows. These images seem to have a heartbeat: a collective unconscious.”
- Sharon Greytak
Signs of Fiction, essay accompanying exhibition at Artists Space,
New York, 1989
“AFTER THE PAINT HAS DRIED is by a transplanted [New Zealander] who has lived in New York for a few years. This is relevant because this work appears to be a recreation of that individual experience. The callous city, the brash people, the intensity and hyperactivity are all layered in this affecting work.”
- John Columbus
Director, Black
Maria Film and Video Festival
Credits:
Writer/Director/Producer: Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe
Voiceovers:
Carole Buggé
Anthony Moore
Terry Sommer
| Cast: Catherine Beall Bob Beswick Kay Blassingame Cynthia Bullock Ruth Deutsch Russell Dumas Les Forshey |
Victoria Ginn Ted Jacobs Adrianna Keathley Kathleen MacKenzie Anthony Moore Matt Mundinger Kate Shepherd |
personal and experimental film
narrative and non-narrative aspects of film
film about New York City