"…Canadian director Bruce McDonald reinvented the cinema with his remarkable "The Tracey Fragments", adapted by Maureen Medved from her stream-of-consciousness novel about a 15-year-old Winnipeg girl (Ellen Page) suffering dramatically from the slings and arrows of adolescence. McDonald undertakes to break the screen into an array of panels, of ever-changing quantity and attributes, each containing an independent image.
Many of Tracey’s formal ideas are elaborations of the kind of cutting that’s commonly known as “intellectual montage,” in which the collision of different images creates a new idea that wasn’t intrinsic to either image. (I’m not sure that Eisenstein, who coined the term, intended for it to be applied to this simple schema; but I’ll use the phrase for lack of a better.) I’ve never enjoyed intellectual montage (even Eisenstein thought it was too literary an effect without additional qualities): it’s so easy for me to hang a concept on the process on that my mind registers only the concept, and is blocked from any appreciation of texture or mood. So I was surprised to discover that the extra dimensions that McDonald adds to montage in Tracey totally transform it.
"The Tracey Fragments" is not the first film to use paneled images, but it’s the first feature-length narrative that I know of that relies on paneling as its basic method of visual communication, that dispenses with the safety net of the full-frame image. To give some idea of the degrees of freedom in this system, here’s a partial, not terribly rigorous taxonomy of the effects I noted in Tracey:Subjective panel creation: Tracey imagines Billy Zero saying “I love you, Tracey Berkowitz” before her act of violence.
Motivated panel creation: small panels appear and disappear with the sound of Tracey’s breathing.
Lyrical panel creation: as noted above, a thousand quiet slamming doors create a fluttering vibration; or, the screen converts over, one panel at a time, to an array of images of buzzing street lamps at twilight.
Non-diegetic panel creation: Some panels of Tracey running are replaced by running horses, to reference the Patti Smith song on the soundtrack.
Drama tied to panel creation: increase in quantity and frequency of panels when Tracey’s mom won’t speak to her on the phone.
Drama tied to new effect concepts: non-rectangular panels appear for the first time after the film’s most violent scene.
Drama tied to removal of effects: natural sound and color are restored as Billy Zero penetrates Tracey.
Drama tied to end of paneling: there are no panels at all a few times in the film, most powerfully at the ending.
Suspense cross-cutting: simultaneous panels show Tracey shoplifting and a suspicious store clerk watching.
Cause/effect cross-cutting: simultaneous panels show Tracey in a photo booth and the pictures she takes.
Point-of-view cross-cutting: simultaneous panels show Tracey reading a comic and frames from the comic.
Space-preserving panels: a widescreen panel at the top of the screen shows a panorama of the space where Tracey talks to Billy Zero, with the rest of the screen showing details.
Space-restoring effects: panels gradually reassemble a full-screen image after Tracey is pushed out of the car.
Time shift: Panels assemble a contiguous space, but some panels are time-delayed, in the scene where Tracey stands up after Billy Zero leaves in his car.
Unmotivated geometry play: panels are layered horizontally; or, panels are arranged in a checkerboard pattern.
Motivated geometry play: the top horizontal panel of the screen shows the ceiling above Tracey.
Text interpolations: Billy Zero’s first appearance at school is accompanied by a panel containing the words “New Boy.”
Meta-effects: After echo has been associated with frames of the same action staggered in time, echo is used even with no time-staggered frames. Or: after the use of panels with white and black backgrounds depicting unreal settings, the therapist’s office is depicted abstractly, with white and black backgrounds in a whole frame".Source: notebook.theauteurs.com
