The Quiet Floor
The programmer's note
Arriving on the twenty-fifth of September. We have watched a near-final cut twice and are programming it on the strength of one sequence, around minute six, involving a charger and about nine feet of aisle. Abergel-Kaplan made Hothouse, which had no people in it at all. This one has four, still no dialogue, and it is funnier and sadder than that combination has any right to be.
The film
The fourth floor of the library is the silent floor. No talking, no phones, no group tables. Between eleven at night and the six o'clock closing there are usually four or five people up there, and over a term they see each other more often than they see most of their friends. Abergel-Kaplan animates one such night in ink and digital paint, with no dialogue, on a floor plan drawn from a real building. The drama is entirely negotiation without speech: who takes the carrel by the window, what happens when somebody's charger has to reach across an aisle, how a person signals that they are leaving and intend to come back. The only sound is the building. What the film is finally about is the particular intimacy of people who have agreed not to speak to one another, and what it costs one of them to break the agreement.
Credits
- Sol Abergel-Kaplan
- Sol Abergel-Kaplan
- Estelle Doiron
- Frédérique Nadeau
- Yannick Prevost
- Ariane Tessier
Stills
Discussion
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