Clockwise – بِاتِّجَاهَ عَقَارِبِ اَلسَّاعَةِ
Inspired by several uprisings over three years, “Clockwise” is a short film written, directed, and produced by the Egyptian visual artist and filmmaker Sameh Al Tawil in 2014. Throughout the film, the artist poses several philosophical questions for 6 minutes, using cinematic language that relies on corporal expressions and hard-cuts.
The Film Shot
With extreme shots taken from below the ground or from above his subjects, the viewer is entangled in shots that are much reminiscent of feature film classics that incorporated the narrative and the experimental, like Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, especially those scenes that involved movement without dialogue.
The artist’s choice of the use of Black and White accentuates the visual narrative and renders each scene as an exquisite photograph that tells its own story, with each frame possessing its own space and time. The outcome of this sublime visual research is an abstract narrative that transcends culture, language, dialogue, and geography.
Clockwise
As the description suggests, represents movement is in a very precise and specific direction. The clockwise movement throws resemblance to the religious circumambulatory movements practiced by pilgrims and Sufis in spiritual practices, except that all such practices are –actually—anti-clockwise.
All movement in such cases can be perceived as a sign of infinite confusion, and hence the artist also indirectly refers to the absolute obscurity through which political factions operate, moving round and round in void circles. Here, notions of the finite, the infinite, life, death, and continuity are touched upon by choreography that displays repetition of movement, frame composition that explores open space and its inhabitants, color scheme that spans the challenging hues of shadow and light, and the brilliant mystic music score that weaves all scenes together.
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