Split Decision

Split Decision is a dramatic narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life in Lower Manhattan and at the same time, dramatises some questions about the nature of filmic representation. Split Decision is a boxing term used when the judges declare one fighter to be the winner by a non-unanimous vote. Here the fight is between the two heroes of the film who are seen intermittently in the bar, negotiating a ‘pick-up’, and at home, breaking up over a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional representation. That is, in the seeing, between recognising a straight image which uses conventional continuity editing, and an image abstracted by computer-grids and interrupted, intermingled temporal flow. Under-lying this is the conflict that comes from wanting to express and wanting to conceal emotional or psychological content. – B.B.
‘Bill Brand’s new films are about what makes the world recognisable. Embracing narrative, shows how far Brand has come since emerging in the early ’70s as a virtuoso of American Structural Cinema. Split Decision may go down in history as the first topological melodrama, combining a witty scenario on conversational ambivalence with a frenzy of visual ambivalence, produced by fragmentation of the image into a kind of spacio-temporal mosaic. This same device is used in the longer and more enigmatic Works in the Field, a collision between American culture (from Artforum to TV newscasts) and everyday life on an Asian rubber plantation. Two intriguing demonstrations of advanced technique in the service of advanced intelligence.’ – Ian Christie,’Time Out’, July 1979.