- A film that is difficult to read without being driven on to the path of the biography of an individual, but becomes interesting when you wander off that path.
- THE FABELMANS is also a series of ideas about the nature of the moving image, which can then be projected back into the film itself. These are somewhat surprising given the position of this film squarely within an American commercial narrative film context.
- The ideas are pushed through a narrative of a child growing up, depicted via the practices of the characters in this narrative in relation to the moving image, and include the moving image as:
1. an irreversible intrusion into the unconscious
2. a space that allows for violent impulses to take place safely and outside of everyday life
3. a space that has nothing to do with the intentions of users
4. a space that reveals in pictures the unconscious drives and desires of its users, usually deeply disturbing them in the process, something that is placed here in the context of the social culture of the USA in the 1950s; the moving image disrupts this culture and dismantles seemingly indestructible everyday structures like the nuclear family or an idea of conventional masculinity
5. a technology that has very little to do with a sentimental idea of cinema with a capital C, or cinema seen as a historical art form (adding this here with no comment on these ideas of cinema - and these ideas are a reading too, ideas read from the film regardless of their value - where is this going...)
- The relation of these ideas of the moving image are in contrast to the film itself, which is a scripted, intentional piece of fairly conventional narrative cinema. There's a scene of dancing to join to the chain of fragments that has slowly been forming in these notes, where a sudden leap into a freedom of motion is caught in a family super 8 film; we are shown this dance in the headlights in two contexts, as staged super 8 and within the staged montage of the film itself. The characters all seem to agree that this film, based on a moment of chance, has more value than the narrative film the protagonist is also producing, but it's too scary for them, and we end up back in conventional cinema with this film as a looking-back representation of real events. Throughout the narrative control ("Everything happens for a reason") and chance square off against each other, and in the end control wins out in a simple lesson on framing from a mythologised John Ford. In the other direction is a film like Margaret Tait's PORTRAIT OF GA (1952) and Ga's transcendent, genuinely spontaneous dance with the cigarette.
- The image in the film has a treated, sheen effect which along with the decorations gives the whole work the feeling of a Norman Rockwell painting in motion. Other media and film stocks are incorporated into this montage, including sound and footage cut directly from THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952), and staged 8mm films. Always end up crying at this technique regardless of its content, thinking also of the staged family albums and super 8 films from MEAN STREETS, RAGING BULL and GOODFELLAS which shouldn't provoke such sentiment when you think about it, a strange double effect.
- As the film progresses the camera becomes more erratic, beginning with heavily structured shots and rhythms that recall musicals (especially in the movements of the family group) and an older mise en scene, then shifting into more radical techniques as the 1950s passes and the social conventions of the characters lives are gradually punctured; the cleanliness of the image and montage is punctured too and the camera begins to move more fluidly. This is maybe where cinema with a capital C comes back into the narrative, recalling Nicholas Ray in the scenes of violent racism and intimidation in the high school sequence, and ending with fluid shots with a wide angle lens, pointing toward the developments that would take place in American cinema in the later 1960s: and you end up back at the biography of an individual again!
