The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 103
always going to be like that after that – but it hasn't been so much
since [laughter].
I noticed that in one of the descriptions of Kitchen Sink, the film was
described as a "minefield of metaphors," which I thought was quite appropriate.
I'm usually reluctant to interpret films in Freudian terms but in
this case, it's simply unmistakable. That there is birth symbolism seems
fairly clear: a little creature is pulled up out of a hole, with what resembles
an umbilical cord coiled up beside him. Do you see it that way?
But to me the story was about metamorphosis, so it was like a meta-
phor that kept changing – it was birth, and garbage... It just kept
changing through all the different stages of that creature's evolution,
and of her relationship with him. That's what I was having fun with.
And I kept thinking about it as a strange, Pygmalion kind of story.
That was the main idea I had.
O.K. So not so much the birth part...
Oh that's absolutely there, of course. That's definitely part of it but
it's not the only part of it. It goes from a birth thing to a lover thing,
so it totally changes.
Hair is of course very central. The story starts with hair in the drain, then
the woman shaves off the creature's hair, and he touches her hair, and she
pulls at hair on his neck at the end. Does hair in this story represent the
animal part of human nature?
Maybe. I wouldn't have described it that way. It's funny. Hair seems
to come up for me quite a bit. I'm not quite sure why that is. I
honestly couldn't say. Because the first image I had was of a hair,
and so everything came from that. And then it just seemed to be
about continuing that image throughout and having it evolve. One
of the visual references I had and thought about a lot as I was