Welcome to “Your Weekly Short,” a LakeFrontRow.com feature that showcases one short from a Wisconsin filmmaker each week, every week. Brace thy face.
An unassuming man sits at his desk and watches in terror as a beam of light begins to overtake his office and, eventually, him. The premise in Milwaukee-based Quinn Hester’s “Framework” sounds trippy on its face — and it is — but within its oftentimes lofty and always wordless presentation is a transcendent piece of homegrown cinema.
As a nameless tie-sporting drone, actor Jon Phillips stretches and yawn amongst the cold, exact interiors of his work space. Shuffling cards, doodling on a half-finished crossword, shuffling cards. He’s not achingly bored, but Hester uses the exactitude of measurement, probability and fact as blasé juxtaposition to interspersed blinks of a park covered in trees, crashing waves, and most importantly, a solitary bench. When a bright beam of light leaps from the wall to the table, outlining everything in its path, its jarring onslaught swallows up our man as well.
Hester’s scratched-in etches on celluloid sizzle and crack with bizarre liveliness, proof of the director’s dedication to and reverence for the physical format. Shot in black and white on 16mm, “Framework” exudes a steely ambience aided in part by composer John McLaughlin’s cold atmospherics. Were it not for its idyllic trajectory, “Framework” might seem too distant. Instead, Hester suggests an abstract and universal perspective — intellectual color inside his monochrome images.