Rohan Quine - New York - "A Sublime and Atrocious Spectacle" (extract for demo reel)

A Sublime and Atrocious Spectacle [extract for demo reel]

As despairer Bartleby, in the short film A Sublime and Atrocious Spectacle directed by Ray Mia and Tiziana Blancato.

In a moody piece of black-and-white noirishness, this is me as a mysteriously enclosed character who seems as imprisoned in himself as he is by the window bars of his New York City apartment, and who was inspired by the character in Herman Melville’s iconic short story Bartleby, the Scrivener.

The film’s dramatic title stems from when it was being developed as a feature-length project, instead of the enticingly dark but quieter short film that it ended up as when its talented directors Ray Mia and Tiziana Blancato didn’t quite attain feature-sized funding. That claustrophobic, scungy, vertical light-well between dense-packed apartment buildings, so flavoursomely characteristic of Manhattan, was just outside their sitting-room window, somewhere in a far-west block on the Upper West Side; and of course they had to make a unique, clambering trip out through the window into said light-well, for those dramatic horror-flashing shots facing in at me from outside.

Then when they shot me from behind while I stood at the window, in order to make it look as if the opposite wall of the claustrophobic light-shaft was coming nearer to me, they physically dollied the camera further away from me while simultaneously having the camera zoom in towards me by an identical amount, so as to effect a subtle progressive “shrinking” of the apparent distance between me and that opposite wall. (The cast just took it easy in that shot, I confess.)

This video is part of Those New York ’Nineties, a frisky little soufflé of a screen-acting demo reel from a movie semi-career-ette by Rohan Quine.

General info and an insufficient apology for Those New York ’Nineties are at https://www.rohanquine.com/those-new-york-nineties

This video is at https://www.rohanquine.com/ny-film-and-tv/15-a-sublime-and-atrocious-spectacle

within the section “Film & TV” https://www.rohanquine.com/those-new-york-nineties/film-tv

and stills from it are at https://www.rohanquine.com/those-new-york-nineties/ny-stills

and the photos in Those New York ’Nineties are at https://www.rohanquine.com/those-new-york-nineties/photos

Duration 4’22”

Vimeo’s permission for this presentation of brief demo reel extracts is stated in its Uploading Guidelines at https://vimeo.com/help/guidelines: “Directors, DPs, editors, musicians, graphic effects artists, and actors may upload works to which they have contributed significantly.” In this presentation there are therefore no extracts that do not feature Rohan prominently, as professionally hired for the projects shown.

Harvard and Stanford advice on Fair Use of materials online for demo reel purposes, as this video is used here, is at

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Podcasting_Legal_Guide