Before it Blows (under construction)
A tourist's video camera records the long wait for the Old Faithful geyser to erupt. Just outside the frame, onlookers fill the time with their own preoccupations -- a low-key battle between obsessed mother and distracted son; a father's attempt to educate his precocious daughter; the cameraman's agony over lining up the perfect shot; and the last rites of a sad and weary couple who are splitting up. When it finally blows, some are thrilled, others blasé. A natural phenomenon has been packaged as a spectacle with different signifiers for every witness.
Short. 8 min. 35mm. Writer, Director. Premiered at Vancouver International Film Festival 1998; National Film Theatre, Washington, D.C., National Film Theatre, Ottawa; Seeing Things conference, London 2003; Pacific Cinématheque.
Patricia Gruben returns with a concise, amusing and telling examination of how we look and how we think. As the camera remains fixed in its gaze at the impending flush of the Old Faithful geyser, voices offscreen express impatience, expectation, uncertainty and awe at the power of nature unleashed before them....A deceptively simple short film, Before It Blows suggests vast thematic outlines which explore human nature in Gruben's work, the very foundations of our tenuous knowledge of the world and of ourselves.
-- Tom McSorley, Take One
Writing about Before It Blows
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"Thar She Blows," Georgia Straight October 2, 1997.
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McSorley, Tom, "Short Takes: Before It Blows," Take One Winter 1998, p. 45. T McSorley - Take One: Film & Television in Canada, 2001 - takeone.athabascau.ca
