NOBODY'S N O T H I N G
FORMAT: 35mm, black & white
RUNNING TIME: 4 minutes
GENRE: experimental scratch animation
YEAR: 1999

SYNOPSIS
"Jean-Paul Sartre meets Norman McLaren". Random individuals are scratched out of urban areas where non-communication has become the norm. The irony of their visual void is that the greater their elimination from the screen, the more visible they become.

CREW
Director/Producer: Bridget Farr
Director of Photography: Bridget Farr
Camera Operator: Lee Demarbre
Scratch Figure: Ian Driscoll & Casey Tourangeau
Animator: Bridget Farr
Sound/Music: Graham Collins
Editor: Bridget Farr

REVIEWS
"Bridget Farr's Nobody's Nothing presents a nightmarish vision of urban alienation in which time is uncertain and identity at risk. A ghost-like creature, his features scratched away, moves through city streets. Sometimes bustling, sometimes funereal, these streets are devoid of human exchange. In only four minutes and with the simplest of means, Farr has achieved a masterpiece of depersonalized anxiety-more powerful in its intimacy than all the disaster movies that have ever come out of Hollywood."
- Peter Harcourt - Founding Member of the Film Studies Association of Canada

"Bridget’s film Nobody’s Nothing, which will be showing in the festival's opening program, is a powerful evocation of alienated humanity, wonderfully executed with a hand-made aesthetic that comments on the very faceless conformity her film bravely faces."
- Mike Hoolboom - Artistic Director of the Images Film and Video Festival


"Ottawa based filmmaker Bridget Farr's second short is a striking, high-contrast black-and-white examination of urban alienation. Partially funded, ironically enough by the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Nobody's Nothing is a concentrated and defiant defense of individual identity in a world collapsing into high-velocity enchantments of technology and mass consumption. Eschewing dialogue, Farr prefers to allow image and sound to collide and suggest possibilities of response. Utilizing extremely high-contrast cinematography, optical tricks and a wonderfully dirty post-industrial soundscape, Farr's film observes a single figure (Ian Driscoll) wandering isolated through various streets, buildings and highways. The figure is anonymous, and his image is manipulated and obscured by a visually arresting and thematically appropriate scratch-on-film technique. Nobody's Nothing is a precise and poetic articulation of urban angst and solitude. With minimal means and maximum imagination, Bridget Farr has rendered an absorbing and daring portrait of the nation's capital at the end of the 20th century, a portrait much more relevant and memorable than a myriad of images of Mounties and Parliament buildings."
"Short Takes" by Tom McSorley - Executive Director of the Canadian Film Institute
taken from Take One: film and television magazine, Winter 2000 No. 26., pp. 51


"Nobody's Nothing is the perfect film to see after an exasperating two-hour bus trip. Using fast-forwarded, gritty, black and white footage of movement in an unknown city, Farr creates a real sense of the stress and anonymity of urban life. Images of people are scratched out, their faces unimportant in the jumble of traffic. Movement is dense and choppy and difficult to follow; there are too many people moving too quickly. Farr's images are intense and construct a short sequence of the realities of the urban scene that anyone who has experienced it (especially through commuting) can relate to."
"Not at Your Neighbourhood Theater" by Marta Bashovski
taken from The Ubyssey, November 2001

The artist would like to acknowledge the generous support of the
Ontario Arts Coucnil, The City of Ottawa and the Independent Filmmakers Cooperative of Ottawa.

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