As If Alive

by Daniele Rugo

© 2009 Daniele Rugo. All Rights Reserved.

Short film inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s Awaiting Oblivion.

Synopsis
A man and a woman are preparing to leave their hotel room, struggling against a sense of detachment and unfamiliarity as if they were not in the room together. Every approach seems to set them apart, every distancing unites them a little more. Outside the hotel room the suspension between them becomes tangible. As they walk toward the final abandonment…

Director’s statement
Controlled by an unbridgeable distance the man and woman are never more than shadowy figures, sharing an ambiguous sense of loss for something
that has never been. It is as though their being ‘together’ confirms on one side their utter exposure to each other – exposure without a middle ground and
on the other an irrevocable isolation. Only the woman speaks, her disembodied words – unspecific and familiar – wander around them punctuating
the narrative. This moves by way of a series of interruptions and is therefore maintained at an interval throughout the film.

As If Alive is inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s fragmentary recit Awaiting Oblivion. The literary material is here adopted, rather than adapted. Therefore, although the film never completely departs from the book, the narrative can’t be completely reduced to Blanchot’s work. Something is illegitimately extracted from the book and imagined beyond it. The literary element resists the image and the image works therefore independently.