Following Quids’s Sow and other projects, Daniel B Salas and Caleb Jud turn into another short experimental film, Quids’ EAGER (2020). The background and setting is seemingly a city called “Eager.” Its inhabitants are the characters but in flux and hardly identifiable. The camera is innovative and restless with its diverse positions and shootings. The image quality is anything but decipherable; the audience may wonder why they should watch this film? What is visually appealing and if any message could be taken even subconsciously.
The narrative structure of the film and its visual language is not to confuse the viewer. The first scene shows a character brushing teeth in a landscape. The scene leads to another, which shows continuity with the objects and symbols embedded. Then the dialogues that are hard to follow provided more information about the city that needs to be envisioned. The natural landscape with a static camera and wide-angle shots make the viewers feel the environment. The characters come to the frame, each with their unique features, dress, and speech style. It takes some time to understand if they all live under the same roof and place. They are misplaced and controlled but limitless cinematic and geographic space. Ironically, they seem disconnected and connected. The film then takes some surreal turn. The image turns green, and it seems the city of Eager is transcendental.
The image then gets blurry, dark, unrecognizable, and viscerally evocative. One may wonder why the image is so unstable. The hint is there- in cinematography, characterization, and dialogues. We hear “We must abandon the familiar and the town to slay the dragon…”, “Eager has been losing citizens…”; all these signal a flux, uncertainty portrayed by the poetical style of filmmaking. The familiar turns unfamiliar through the POV shots, and the unfamiliar become references to later scrutinizing the impending changes in “EAGER.” The argument can be made that the main film’s theme is CHANGE. The flux is interestingly both circular and absurd. At times, the image reference and symbols reappear with little to no reason; at other times, it seems that subplots and prior speech acts are lost and not reached any finale. Arguably, the surface level change at the imaginary city level is subsumed under a terrifying change that seems to have no objective and direction.
On a more abstract level, it seems EAGER problematizes the life and reality in general. This aspect is constructed through the imaginary of a city—a place that holds the polis together, one that also demands civic participation and loyalty. The revolt of the film is precisely against these notions of space and realistic depiction of it. Whose reality and whose words should the viewers trust? What is the boundary to define a place of living? Are any connections needed as EAGER takes away all the personals, and depicting the fantastic makes us crave authentic relations and rethink what it means? The marriage of form and themes are done aptly. What is only expected is a deep breath and a submersion into the film’s world and a city that it may attempts to conjure up.
Grade: A-
© 2020. UniversalCinema Mag.