How would you classify Tom DiCillo's film Living in Oblivion, metafilm? The narrative of a film within a film dissects the difficulties experienced during the process of creating an independent motion picture, set with a focus upon cinema's dichotomy between the director as the creative author and film being a collective effort spilt between many hands. While the narrative's structure (conflict/climax/resolution) is paced and moved by the soap opera-esquire exchanges amongst the cast and crew of the project, it is still unsure if DiCillo believes that cinema's nature is either of the aforementioned, but rather a synergy of the two. He makes arguments for both cases, showing how the multi-faceted approach to film-making can slow/change the intended vision and that the director can also not understand how to portray his own vision. As a conclusion Dicillo posits the idea that the ends, more or less, justifies the means. That a film can be made in many different ways, in many different hands and the same juvenile disputes, short comings, technical problems will be met along the way. This is not to suggest that these means are not important, Dicillo's makes them the entire plot of Living in Oblivion, but he rather he wants to give a window for an audience to view (while dramatized) into the world of film production. While this is a seemingly contradictory statement, Living in Oblivion is a contradictory movie, and DiCillo leaves the audience with the feeling that a film has been made and the future of that film will in no way reflect the journey the cast/crew took to get it there.
Review of Living in Oblivion
