What I See

A friend recommended that I watch Francis Ford Coppola’s film Youth Without Youth, so I checked it out, and I think it’s a great example of a film in which its creators were able to convey a lot of the story’s thematic elements through various technical methods. It’s often said that the first five minutes of a film reveals a lot about the film as a whole, and I find this to be very true for Youth Without Youth. The opening sequence is a dream: inner gears of a small pocket watch are grinding, accompanied by rhythmic ticking. The hands on a clock move backwards as the superimposed written words “past/future” move across the screen. A woman’s face becomes a graphic match with a human skull. In the first scene, as much of the rest of the film, there is a soft yet incessant ticking. Already in the first few minutes of the film, cinematographic techniques have disoriented us, and our notion of forward linear time has been challenged. Youth Without Youth continually challenges our preconceived notions of time and consciousness. By the end of the film, the protagonist Dominic doesn’t even know if he’s awake or if he’s dreaming. The technical style of the film deliberately creates a hazy line between dream and reality, which neither the characters nor the audience can confidently distinguish between. Ultimately I think that the message or feeling that the filmmakers were trying to convey through various technical methods in Youth Without Youth is this: “Things are not as they appear.”