Skip to main content

Watch This Year’s Oscar-Winning Short The Neighbor’s Window, a Surprising Tale of Urban Voyeurism

As the last couple of generations to come of age have rediscovered, urban living has its benefits. One of those benefits is the ability to keep an eye on your neighbors — quite literally, given a situation of buildings in close proximity, sufficiently large windows, and minimal usage of drapes. Fortysomething Brooklyn couple Alli and Jacob find themselves turned into voyeurs by just such a situation in Marshall Curry's The Neighbor's Window, the Best Live Action Short Film at this year's Academy Awards. "Do they have jobs, or clothes?" asks Alli, overcome by the frustration of looking after her and Jacob's three young children. "All they do is host dance parties and sleep 'till noon and screw."

You may recognize Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller, who play Alli and Jacob, from their appearances in Noah Baumbach's While We're Young. That film, too, dealt with the envy New York Gen-Xers feel for seemingly more freewheeling New York Millennials, but The Neighbor's Window takes it in a different direction.

Curry based it on "The Living Room," an episode of the storytelling interview podcast Love and Radio in which writer and filmmaker Diana Weipert tells of all she saw when she enjoyed a similarly clear view into the life of her own younger neighbors. "Am I supposed to have maybe respected their privacy and just looked away?" Weipert asks, rhetorically. "But it's impossible because that's the way the chairs face. They face the window! I couldn't have not seen them if I wanted to."

Then again, she adds, "I guess I could've not gotten the binoculars." That irresistible detail makes it into The Neighbor's Window as a symbol of Alli and Jacob's surrender to their fascination with the couple across the street. "They're like a car crash that you can't look away from," as Alli puts it. "Okay, a beautiful, sexy, young car crash." Yet both she and her husband, like any human beings with a partial view of other human beings, can't help but compare their circumstances unfavorably with those seen from afar. Eventually, as in "The Living Room," the twentysomethings experience a reversal of fortune, changing Alli and Jacob's view of them. They also regain the view of themselves they'd lost amid all their voyeurism — enough of it to make them forget that the observers can also be observed.

The Neighbor's Window will be added to our collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..

Related Content:

Watch 66 Oscar-Nominated-and-Award-Winning Animated Shorts Online, Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

Father and Daughter: An Oscar-Winning Animated Short Film

The Last Farm: An Oscar Nominated Short Film

Watch A Single Life: An Oscar-Nominated Short About How Vinyl Records Can Take Us Magically Through Time

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Watch This Year’s Oscar-Winning Short The Neighbor’s Window, a Surprising Tale of Urban Voyeurism is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/31R8DCu
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more