Claustrophilia

This is an important note for my art and film work, please feel free to provide more in depth commentary which might help me get an impression of how to stage things that have certain affects.

Oh yeah! Very true! Excellent example.

Unlike more agoric situations, where a movie, play or novel is set in an entire world, cross country, or even intergalactic settings (although the latter was great in the BBC series Red Dwarf – another great claustrophilic situation), claustrophilia lets its boundaries be known ex ante and this physical limitation has mental and spiritual implications. Agoraphilic settings always have a beyond and unknown region, which subconsciously eases the audience knowing there is more beyond the selected area of appearances of each scene.

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis has enclosure written all over it, not only within the confines of the paddock of insecurity, shame and resentment given with the enclosure of its occupants, we also feel the alienation of Gregor as he is pushed aside, abused and misunderstood, tentatively connected to his sister until his image of human-ness is unrecognisable due to how others have treated him/it. There is no escape and the relief that follows the grief is a most welcome, yet uncomfortable ambivalence. We feel freedom from his enclosed body as it departs the living and the freedom of the bodies of his parents and sister.

Abigail’s Party crushes us like a vice. Before Lawrence holds his chest and departs the cringe-a-minute prison that is his marriage to Beverley, enclosed by the party upstairs that puts unseen forces to work on the middle class occupants still rigid from modernity, we can’t help but breath easy when Susan retreats to the bathroom to attempt to recuperate from the ping pong game of spite, envy, competition and rigidity of the failure of each person in the room to achieve anything other than a set of repeated scripts under the influence of alcohol. He dies of embarrassment, and emasculation, trying desperately to express himself, even if it means it will kill him. Beethoven plays out his last few breaths of Beverley’s cigarette smoke and failure and the sobering reality of their monotony crushes them under the weight of their ineptness and denial, passive aggressiveness and dishonesty.  

Docktor Faustus as portrayed by Christopher Staines was an hour and a half one man show, brilliantly conveying the refusal to accept limitations and as Mephistopheles provides him with frivolity after frivolity once he is bored with his new super powers, Faustus becomes ever more grateful for the closed space he rejected for his soul.

Well, I’d like to mention and recommend not well known British psychological thriller ” the exam ” from 2009.