Beyond Clueless (2014)

“High school is hypnotic. It ticks and tocks, drawing us into a world we know all too well. From memories, dreams, and most of all, from the movies.” — Fairuza Balk, Narrator

What if all those American teen movies from the ’90s and early 2000s took place in the same universe? What if Crash Override and Cher Horowitz and Laura Palmer all went to the same high school? In the cleverly cut opening to director Charlie Lyne’s essay film Beyond Clueless, their worlds are brought together in one long hallway of jeers and sneers, smug smiles, and adolescent longing.

Made entirely of clips, Beyond Clueless does with editing for film what the album Endtroducing… did with sampling for music. Shepherded by the voice of Fairuza Balk, the film is a bricolage of footage meticulously collected from over 200 films, weaving together an era of cliques and hierarchies, baggy pants and chokers, beepers and laptops, with a dash of apple pie and occultism.

For the title sequence, Charlie Lyne splices these teenage hells into one world and unites them with the help of composing team Summer Camp (Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey) and illustrator Hattie Stewart. Summer Camp’s theme is light and dynamic, finely straddling that space between nostalgic shoegaze and modern pop, while Stewart’s small but energetic white scrawls plant the sequence firmly in its world.

A conversation with director CHARLIE LYNE and illustrator HATTIE STEWART.

So, Charlie. Warm us up with a little background on yourself. How did you start out in film, and how did you get here?

Charlie: I started a movie blog called Ultra Culture when I was 16, and through that I slowly managed to get freelance work as a film critic.

Now I write a weekly column for The Guardian and also write for Sight & Sound, Little White Lies, and a few other outlets, though most of my time is now taken up with filmmaking. I'm making another essay film…

RSS & Email Subscribers: Check out the full Beyond Clueless article at Art of the Title.

from Art of the Title http://ift.tt/1FMaol4