The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 33
A moving picture: life between birth and death
Edvin Vestergaard Kau
Poetry
First shot: a pregnant woman standing in the locker room of a public
bathhouse for women, preparing to take a swim. Last shot: an old
woman in the same locker room walking from the depth of the
picture towards the camera. Finally, her black silhouette blocks our
view, and we are left with a black screen. The end. Between these
two shots we are presented with a continuum of ages: babies, small
girls, teenagers; young, mature, middle-aged, old, and very old
women. There is not much of a plot, hardly a narrative, but a clear
structure and a theme, visualized as a picture moving, almost, from
birth to death. A cinematic poem with girls and women representing
stages of life.
Structures and symbolic qualities
Apart from the general movement between the beginning and the
end of life, different roles representing stages of the girls' and
women's development are presented in a variety of ways. Series of
shots and their characters are brought together in groups. They are
joined or contrasted through the methods of editing. For the most
part, the use of dissolves can be said to foreground the elements that
some of the shots have in common; for example, the enjoyment and
playfulness of the small girls in some of the first shots, or the teenage
moods of the red-haired girl in the showers and the girl with the