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Short film

The Diaries

1986 · 30 min

A hypnotic, split-screen collage of personal memories that feels like sifting through someone else's diary.

Directed by
Wheeler Dixon
Overview
"The Diaries is a split screen movie. It has two projectors running at once, at least for most of the film. I was influenced here by Warren Sonbert’s later films. What Warren did was something that infuriated everybody that knew him, and in fact still infuriates people today. He made early films like The Bad and the Beautiful (1967) and the Tenth Legion (1967), and then he would re-edit them into other films later. But he wouldn’t preserve any copies of the originals, which would then cease to exist. I did the same thing. The Diaries was an attempt to reshape material that’s in my early films; I decided to go into the cutting room and just put the stuff together. It’s really all of the key moments, I think, from all of the films that I no longer felt were individual entities or didn’t deserve to be, or weren’t strong enough, compiled into two reels. I edited it around 1976. It’s really an evocation of all of my experiences in life up until that period." - WWD
How it feels
Melancholic, earnest and eerie. Slow-burning and demanding.
About
Memory, identity, art, isolation
Content
Mild sexual content. No violence, gore or swearing.
Note
Written by AI, so it can be wrong. Full breakdown

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Directed by
Wheeler Dixon
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How it feels

Written by AI. It can be wrong.

Full breakdown
Tone
Pacing
slow-burn, 1 of 4, from slow-burn to relentless
Attention
demanding, 4 of 4, from background-friendly to demanding
Places
None
Era
contemporary
Audience
adult
Content intensity
  • Gore none
  • Language none
  • Violence none
  • Sex mild
All scales, 0 to 10
Scales, 0 to 10
ScaleValue0 to 10
Action1
Horror1
Humour2
Realism7
Romance2
Tension3
Darkness4
Complexity8
Emotional weight6

Where to watch in the US

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Streaming data from JustWatch.TMDB

Details

Directed by
Wheeler Dixon
Runtime
30 min
Country
United States of America

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