Pine Flat

Pine flat starts with a breathtaking image in the winter of rolling hills with snow covered pines. The snow is falling very fast and compiling quickly. In the background you can hear a small girl yelling “Ethan! Where are you!” “Ethan come back!”. This image is so powerful combined with the drone of the little girl made it so I could look at the shot for an hour and be completely satisfied. I did not get to look at it for an hour but I did get to look at it for ten minutes until it went to the next locked shot which was of a girl reading a book in a green grassy field. The contrast of this shot to the first shot was amazing. I felt as if I was watching the discovery channel and they were showing my the variant seasons. The girl is reading a book in the high weeds and doesn’t look completely comfortable so this was a tough sell to me. It was tough to believe she does something like this often. This shot also lasts ten minutes long before moving on to the next. The next shot is a great show of a small stream with moss covered rocks. Sitting on a log stump right in the middle of the stream is a small shirtless boy playing harmonica, the only time he stops is to slap the bugs off of him. It was about half way through this scene that I realized this whole film was going to be comprised of ten minute shots with a ten minute intermission in the middle. I then realized that for me the images very vivid enough to remember after only a couple minutes. I became really bored with the film and questioned how it took her three years to make. I came to the conclusion that the variant seasons would be the only thing allowing this film to take such a long period of time. The most memorably image to me was the last shot from part one of the viewing. It was a small boy waiting with his backpack, in the distance there is a gorgeous winding road that travels up and around the hills. You see a small speck that is a car or truck that travels along the road and after it leaves the frame there is about four minutes of silence before you hear the rumbling of a school bus pull up. You never see the bus close up you just see the kid walk out of frame and hear the doors open then close. Then you hear the bus drive away. This was easily the single most powerful image; this told a story to me more than most of the other shots combined.

I think Lockhart did a great job of capturing a small community like that, but with the choreography of her previously viewed film it only made me wonder how choreographed this film was. If these are activities that these kids actually take place in then it is a great way to show it. I think that the ten minute shots were very extreme and could have been five minutes or less. It has a great contrast quality and the colors are amazing. Even though I despised the fact each shot was ten minutes I can still remember each image with striking detail and I am sure it is due to that technique.