Ten Minutes Older: The Cello

Producer Nicolas McClintock set a group of directors a single assignment: exactly ten minutes, on the passing of time. Two separate compilations came out of it; one is The Trumpet, and this is the other, The Cello. Eight directors appear here: Bernardo Bertolucci, Claire Denis, Mike Figgis, Jean-Luc Godard, Jiří Menzel, Michael Radford, Volker Schlöndorff and István Szabó. The answers are wildly far apart. Menzel assembles footage of Rudolf Hrušínský from his own older films and lets you watch an actor age across forty years, the most direct answer to the brief. Godard makes a collage, as usual. Figgis goes to split screen. Bertolucci shoots a section set in India. That is the real idea of the project: eight people filling the same duration with the same subject produce things that resemble each other not at all. Its value lies less in the individual pieces than in the comparison. Who it is for: viewers who like short-film anthologies and seeing directors' styles set side by side. Who it is not for: anyone expecting consistency. The gap in quality between segments is wide, and some only open up if you know the director's other work.