Dimensions

Went to the movies last night at the Ogstoun Theatre Gordonstoun (great theatre, wish they had designed it with more comfortable seats.. I had forgotten the agony.) 

Lots of noisy meeting and greeting first, with champagne and cheese straws to celebrate the Scottish premier of a film made by a young couple who sold their house to finance it. Even after that sacrifice, by film standards it was made on a micro budget and had to cost ‘less than Batman’s cape,’ to quote Ant. They’ve both worked on big budget movies as art director and set designer (Sloane U’ren) and script writer/composer (Ant Neely) but wanted to do something of their own

’Dimensions’ premiered at the Cambridge Film festival in 2011 and won an award, then went on to win Best Film at the London Independent Film Festival 2012. Ant wrote the script and composed music to accompany it which I think went a long way toward creating the success of the piece. It wasn’t obtrusive, but it was always present, carrying the desired atmosphere, haunting, and wistful.  Sloane U’ren, his partner, directed and produced. Altogether it comes across (I’m no cinema critic) as a very professional work. Ant and Sloane are now house-sitting locally and hoping for their next break so they can start saving up for a house again!

They managed to find actors from the general release world,

 Camilla Rutherford (Gosford Park, Rome) and Henry Lloyd-Hughes (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Inbetweeners) and others who have been in TV series, or played at the Old Vic. This helps with the distribution I imagine.

The reason I got off my butt to go was the promise of time travel; I’m always fascinated by the idea of time travel. I think the first time I realised it wasn’t just a subject for B movies and comics was when I read ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ by Mark Twain. Wikipedia tells me that time travel features in the Talmud, in Hindu mythology and a Japanese tale written in 720AD, just for a start, so there is nothing new in the theme but the fact that it has endured indicates there is something in us humans that would love to straddle the centuries. Perhaps, more poignantly, we would love to be able to right wrongs we have committed, be reunited with people who have vanished from our lives, or see what the future will be like for our children. Our personal story enthralls us; the story of creation enthralls us. We want to know the beginning and the end as we would if we were reading a great novel.

Although time travel is the obsession of the young scientist  in the drama, it’s also the possibility of ‘many dimensions’ that he has in mind, as he reaches for a dimension in which his childhood love did not fall down a well and drown.

Quantum physics seems to me, the lay person, to have taken us  so much closer to the possibility of touching other dimensions that it’s hard to believe that we can’t. It sounds as if it should be a formula or two away. Human ingenuity will get us there, I’ll bet (safe enough because there’ll never be a moment when someone taking me up on that bet can claim their winnings, scientists will go on striving until our race becomes extinct!) I read yesterday that it is, or will very soon be possible to be ‘beamed up’ and down again into another country; so far the beaming will only get us into a robot or ‘avatar’ but one that can see and feel, (perhaps smell?) 

That’s going to create some interesting legal problems, so more work for the lawyers among other excitements.

It’s a Brave New World every day.