In Absentia
2000 · 20 MIN · IMDB 7.0 · 825 VOTES · DIR. Timothy Quay, Stephen Quay
Overview
A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under her fingers' force. She places broken points outside the window on the sill. A satanic figure is somewhere nearby, animated but of straw or clay, not flesh. She finishes her writing, tears the paper from the pad, folds it, places it in an envelope, and slips it through a slot. Is she writing to her husband? "Sweetheart, come." Written by
Dialogue Timeline — 258 lines
A SAMPLE ACROSS THE RUNTIME — EVERY LINE IS SEARCHABLE
00:00:05 Not to our surprise, the BBC asked for a script or an idea
00:00:57 by a woman called EH
00:01:56 I should also say, on top of this
00:02:50 it was something that I think we initially threw down as a gopher.
00:03:39 This was our last 35mm film.
00:04:24 So, ifwe set our brief to animate every five seconds
00:05:09 dressed up in this costume
00:05:54 I think it was a kind of approximation of her psychosis.
00:06:38 You know, moving in one millimetre at a time, like that, and then shooting a frame
00:07:29 which has these...
00:08:12 ...by focusing on, right here, for instance, the lead of a pencil.
00:09:05 And here we've emphasised the sequence
00:10:12 it's a kind of light cadenza
00:10:58 with just this window
00:11:47 or some other...
00:12:39 Here again, my brother's face leaned into the frame.
00:13:28 ...parallel... correspondence of her emotional realm
00:14:15 of the wife and the invisible husband being the pair.
00:15:16 But here you see that it's a whole landscape of shaved sharpenings of a pencil, of the...
00:16:12 And yet there's this sense of chaos inside her, but in order to control that chaos
00:17:03 It's a clock that we have in our studio
00:17:51 of just one of the caretakers in the museum - in the asylum!
00:18:35 Timothy and I were standing in the background
00:19:13 he had written the images and that we had created the music.
Cast & Characters
Dialogue Record
Lines indexed258
Dialogue density12.9 lines / min
First line00:00:05
Final line00:19:13
Production Record
DirectorTimothy Quay, Stephen Quay
LanguageEnglish
IMDb votes825