Living in Oblivion

A low-budget independent film is being shot and nothing goes right. There is a refrigerator hum on the sound recording, the actor forgets the line, the camera assistant walks into frame. The director tries to stay calm. Then the scene starts again and something else breaks. The subject is not making a film but everyone on a set living inside their own film. The actor is thinking about her performance, the cinematographer about the light, the producer about the money; nobody believes they are doing the same job, and the comedy comes out of that mismatch. The form is in three parts, each of which changes what the previous one was. Dream, rehearsal and actual shooting fold into each other; there are shifts between black and white and colour, and the viewer only works out afterwards which layer they were in. The source is Tom DiCillo's own experience. He carried the problems of making his first film into this one and took aim at independent cinema's clichés about itself. The section in which the dwarf actor refuses the dream scene is precisely a criticism of those clichés. Steve Buscemi plays the director, Catherine Keener the actor and Dermot Mulroney the cinematographer. James Le Gros is also in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like films about filmmaking and nineties American independent cinema. Who it is not for: anyone unfamiliar with the industry; some of the jokes are written for people who know set life.