The elevator film
Neither here nor there
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21783348 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Murray Pomerance (0000-0002-6233-4503, Film Independent, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 74-87 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Review of Film and Television Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1740-0309 • E-ISSN: 1740-7923 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17400309.2021.1981710 |
| OpenAlex | W4214594095 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
One must always know the place and accept it as believable. But in most films the design conceit is that when characters are in a place, there is nowhere else they can be found at the moment. This article posits an exception: the ‘elevator’ plot device, in which every place may be multiplied in layers. Many films of the late 1990s and early 21st century recount a story of dimension-shifting or reality substitution. These ‘Elevator films’ invoke a connection between discrete spheres sharing a single space or a single moment. A character ‘shifts’, ‘jumps’, or ‘ports’ to a ‘higher level’, slipping through some highly technologized gateway to the hitherto unlocated. Distinct within the broader category of sci-fi, where travel is generally from one point to another point in this same, single universe, films, such as eXistenZ (1999) and The Matrix (1999) invoke evanescent worlds: a presence and placement unavailable to the waking senses (actual or extended by imagination from the actual). The elevator film suggests that dream domains exist as parts of waking reality, coterminous, and coextensive with the everyday albeit separated by a kind of organizational membrane of definition and containment penetrable through the sacred aperture
Aesthetics · Art · Dream · Elevator · Epistemology · Geometry · Linguistics · Physics · Sociology · Spectacle · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Engineering · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
|---|