/The Lift
24 Min 2001
Marc Isaacs
Marc Isaacs, the director, took on a guerilla style of filmmaking mixed with beautifully shots of the lift. Three of the many distinctions I found particularly intriguing in the documentary are: elements of surprise, truthfulness and progression.
First and foremost is the very concept itself. Marc Isaacs encountered the project with just his camera, almost clueless as to how the residents would react and what sort of results would he attain. The content itself is raw and unplanned, and the narratives had to be slowly unveiled by the director through his conversations with them. It is the sheer belief that ultimately, given enough time, people are curious, willing to talk and share, has interesting stories which justified why the documentary would yield better results if unplanned.
The truthfulness and degree of realism in the documentary is also not to be missed. The fact that the director decided to use his point of view to shoot for the most part adds on to the experiential feeling. The viewers are thus put in the perspective of the director, the stranger with the camera, and feel more involved with the confrontation with the residents. We are faced with the suspicious glances and residents who reacts directly to our presence, whether by turning away or chatting with us or almost angry at our “spying” on their daily lives. However, the director’s determination with the project also touched and made some residents believed that he is genuine and also slowly open up to his questions and share their pasts and present lives. Through only the limited moments in the lift, we were already able to gather a range of personalities, characters and social issues that people face everyday.
The progression element, the continuity within the documentary is perhaps one of the strongest points of the film. It did not just show interesting characters who stay in the lift, but also show how their reactions towards him, the cameraman, stranger, changes over time. As the unfamiliarity breaks down, we began to see people in their most candid and sincere forms. The residents update on their lives, continue on their previous conversations, gradually share more of their intimate memories, these are the purest moments and probably ones which are least expected by the director.
So much information and narratives are formed through the mere capturing of video from within a lift. The filmmaker also shrewdly puts it in a very compact montage form, spacing out the progressions and intercutting with images of the mechanics of the lift itself. The lift moving up and down creates a sense of repetition, a routine, as if suggesting the monotonous lives of the people, yet at the same time we witness all the subtleties and transformations that happen within the lift itself from day to day.
You can watch the documentary short here.
