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Chase Essay

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Dichotomies in Chase

Páraic Mc Gloughlin's Chase is a beautiful exploration of interconnectivity and incongruence in the modern world.

The film was shot in both Ireland and Poland and utilizes a series of still photographs from the filmmaker's personal collection edited together at different speeds to create a mesmerizing tapestry of time and place. The film is entirely non-narrative, instead focusing on individual images—of doors, roads, railways, crowds of people, etc,—placed in progression to create a seamless flow that connects the two places showcased.

The visuals themselves, and even more so their sequence, are so essential to this beautiful film. Chase opens with a number of juxtapositions: dirt roads in countryside landscapes with a rectangular tunnel in a more urban setting, overlapping blades of grass with crowds of people. The images simultaneously point out sameness and difference. The dirt road and the subway station are aimed at getting people where they need to go; tangled blades of grass are not so different from overlapping individuals in a crowd. Chase also …show more content…

It has a fragmented quality that parallels the flickering visuals, creating unity by overlaying multiple images but also dissonance because of its disjointed quality. The film aptly uses samplings of some of the objects its showcases: sounds of trains, clanking metal, and white noise intermix with the score to give the stills a textural, immersive quality.

Chase brilliantly highlights distinctiveness while also showcasing the overall similarities of people, places, and technology. The interchangeableness it highlights could be seen as a disempowering notion—yet the beauty Chase finds within that suggests otherwise. In many ways, the images of rail road tracks within Chase are emblematic of the film as a whole—like the parallel tracks, Chase illuminates people and places on parallel courses that come close together but never

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