In the flat unemotive style of delivery similar to his Birth of a Nation, (1973), Klaus Wyborny narrates (in voice over) a story set sometime after the second war. John, who realises he has five days left to live, meets Jeanine. Almost immediately her mother dies and her father vanishes! John leaves and forgets her, meeting another girl (Roxanna?) but later remembers Jeanine and searches for her, realising as he dies that he will never see her again. With his death John, Jeanine and their son, (to whom there is only one verbal reference) are forgotten.The image track has a series of actions, – John and Jeanine, their parents, the father disappearing at breakfast, John’s own death (vanishing in front of a sculpture), which partially substantiate (i.e. illustrate) this highly illusive and ‘illogical’ story. Other elements motioned on the soundtrack, such as the vision of a cornfield and a rainbow by John as he dies, are not illustrated. In addition there are other series of repeated shots (traffic, electricity pylons) which bear no relation to the narrated events. Most of the images are refilmed such that they appear flat and elongated, though there are a few (colour) sections of actions connoting art activity and story telling (a book entitled ‘Once upon a time’). The film is punctuated on the image track by fades into blue accompanied by suggestive musical accentuations.As in Birth of a Nation, after the initial narrative exposition, there is a repetition of the titles and some of the elements of the narrative. Although on first sight the film’s title appears to bear a very indirect relation to the film itself (there is no character called William or Parmagino) in the film, if one regards ‘Parmagino’ as a condensation and displacement of the elements of the word ‘Parmigianino’, the Italian mannerist noted for his use of elongated proportions in representing the human figure, this would suggest a point of entry into the complexities of the film’s system, a possibility of analysing the film in terms of the mechanisms of condensation and displacement so important in the construction of dreams. – Mark Nash.
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