Synopsis
Alienation, angst, and schizophrenia are powerful themes addressed by Kearney in this forgotten masterpiece. From a story by Conrad Aiken.
1964 Directed by Gene R. Kearney
Alienation, angst, and schizophrenia are powerful themes addressed by Kearney in this forgotten masterpiece. From a story by Conrad Aiken.
i get it metaphorically but why was this lowkey one of the most disturbing shorts i’ve ever seen ?? and like did it need to be this disturbing?? shhhh secret snow
Landscapes of the mind if nothing else, this illusive short elides through familiar markers - a distracted child at school, dislocation from parents, escape into fantasy - towards something cooly distressing and impassively bleak with its feeling for cages within cages.
There’s no snowy Narnia for this lad, just the beckoning of psychiatric attention... and we thought snow made for a merry Christmas!
Utterly haunting - I’m not entirely sure I have the words for it right now. An interiority that initially feels comforting yet spirals into something so subtly sinister, how can you possibly know how to come back. I need to read the short story
To call this film chilling would make for a very appropriate pun, but this is genuinely unsettling in how it crafts an unstable world through the eyes of a child who's not yet able to understand himself yet.
My mom was telling me how this is one of her favorite short stories and she really wants me to adapt it one day seeing as I’m a film major. She didn’t know there was already a short film of it so we decided to give it a look! Very cool stuff is at play here but my mom was disappointed with the overall execution of the idea. Maybe one day I’ll have to bring her interpretation to light
A curious little short, one that in its minuscule sixteen minutes constantly and consistently puts you in the sense that just like the boy may be, that everything, including the mood the short tries and succeeds in creating, a very good atmosphere of the "off".
The narration, especially toward the latter parts contributes alot to that fact, especially when it starts to come off as not just any narrator, but inner voices to/and/or directing the boy.
In this way it approaches something on the cusp of haunting.
Beyond 'mere externality', a world of total alienation. Filtering this story through the mold of an industrial children's educational film only increases the sinister sense of uncanny attraction.
I think Aiken had a vision of Being Online. The kid just loves to log on.
studium schizofrenii lub syndromu odrzucenia rzeczywistości, Paul coraz bardziej oddala się od rzeczywistości, która go otacza, kontrolę nad nim przejmuje idea śniegu, jego bieli i czystości, swoistej nieskazitelności, rodzice, nauczyciele, dzieci w klasie, lekarz tylko pogłębiają alienację dziecka, aż w końcu mówi swojej matce, która wciąż chce do niego dotrzeć (choć nie potrafi): "nie nawidzę cię", dobry przykład wpływu ideologii na rozum, --1st-- debiut reżyserski...
“It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion.” – From Conrad Aiken’s SILENT SNOW, SECRET SNOW (1934)
Short film about a boy who begins to daydream about snow. This dreamworld slowly encloses him, making him distant from his parents…
35mm print
Part of the "Learning to be Human: The Open-Ended Educational Film" program of Sleeping Giant '19