Bill Brown's Essay Film The Other Side

Bill Brown’s essay film, The Other Side, focuses on his trip to the US-Mexico border. Most of the audio is his own narration, which he uses to provide his discoveries and experiences during that trip, contextual historical facts, and his opinions on what he’s shared. Most of the video, on the other hand, consists of wide, stationary shots of landscapes (with people sometimes entering the shots). In short, there is hardly any action in this film, for scene-establishing shots and voice-over narration make up a large majority of it. However, every shot is relevant to the current lines of narration. For example, when Brown mentions “visiting Border Monument #1 out in El Paso”, the film cuts to a shot of that very monument, and this shot lasts for a long while. Specifically, it doesn’t change until after he’s done recounting his incident with the Border Patrol, which only happened because he was visiting that monument. In other words, the Border Monument was the focus of the video when it played an important role in the narrative. There is no action in this scene, because that

The photos are like corpses, the remains of a time that existed long ago; the remains of young Frampton’s artistic life, which died when he decided that he “shall never dare to make another photograph”. The narration is the equivalent of a eulogy (which is given before the burial/cremation of the deceased), and after the photo is cremated, the narrator stops to bring a moment of silence. During the cremation, the narrator delivers the eulogy for the next corpse, and this process continues until all of them become ash. In short, Nostalgia gives the impression that the artist is mourning his own past, for he has grown up and moved on, and this impression would not have been present throughout the whole film if not for the structure of the action (video) and narration