CHARACTERS REVISITED

Characters still wander around the abandoned house to invent a story.

Characters Revisited (2016) recalls images from the making of the feature film Characters (2011), a work concerned with the conditions and time that operate before a film reaches its finished form. Rather than summarizing the feature’s narrative, it repeatedly arranges takes that were never chosen, revealing filmmaking as a structure sustained by constant adjustment, delay, and failure.

The same scenes and blocking repeat many times, but never converge on one ideal take. Each take carries small differences; the character never settles into a fixed figure, appearing differently each time. Repetition accumulates difference rather than approaching completion, sustaining the film’s unstable time. Exposed filming apparatus—slates, dolly tracks—doesn’t reinforce illusion but shows the scene being forced into being under specific rules.

Between takes, actors and crew respond continually to the script’s structure, to constraints of time and environment, and to unpredictable conditions, just to hold the scene together. The narrative doesn’t move forward; instead, the labor and tension behind filmmaking surface. Landscape images appearing later break from this repetition, presenting time and space unorganized in a single direction—cinematic time no longer as a frame for events, but as the gaps and overlaps left between scenes.

Passing through these gaps, the viewer is exposed to a cinematic time that precedes completion: one that persists, delays, and begins again. Characters Revisited is designed so that, within this ceaseless labor and uncertainty, and through stories generated and collapsed, the viewer directly experiences the arrangement and redistribution of cinematic time and sensation.