Come è entrato (Within)

What is the visual bound beyond which one should not see?

I believe that cinematic space can be centrifugal.
In "Within" the screen, in terms of language, is a separation. Doors, mirrors, the dark corridor, all create a separation; extradiegetic prisms and reflective surfaces accompany the Black & White cinematography, driving the protagonist on her path through trauma. I preferred a similar linguistic choice because I was interested in the multiple nuances that the girl's perception feels after the violence, alone in her self-reclusion.

Deleuze wrote: “When virtual images proliferate like this, all together they absorb the entire actuality of the character, at the same time as the character is no more than one virtuality among others” (Deleuze 1989, 70). I intended to create a connection both conceptual and physical: the viewer observes the thoughts of the girl, being forced to interact with her mind as subjected to a disturbing telepathy; at the same time, the girl's body is almost always involved in the frame, space that surrounds her is increasingly narrow, and every time the raper returns, the memory of violence becomes more acute. This is why the unseen is not a limit, it’s an extension, a beyond; it’s a space where existence itself fades, where it’s not possible to distinguish one's identity with certainty.

The screenplay for this short was already essential and cryptic because I thought that the best way to convey these feelings was not to describe but to insinuate - and this is why the script was just the starting point: filming before and then the editing room both have been a stimulating and expansive process of rewriting. If cinema puts in place a double regime of representation: the discursive-narrative one, through which stories, characters, actions are represented; and the visual one, through which images of spaces, environments, faces and figures are created, I can affirm with certainty that in "Within" I was interested in using the visual one to ensure that spaces, faces, environments and figures were not only represented but combined, to merge and become something else - restoring the disturbing sense of infinity – in search of the sense of emptiness, which somewhere exists, even if you don't understand it, because you can't help thinking about it.

Godard once said: "He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch". This is also the real reason why I decided to make cinema: to jump into the void, to build thresholds and perimeter spaces. But only to verify their tightness, their necessity, and then violate them.

- Matteo Ciotola