The narrative dimension of the video call: a study of filmic speech acts in two short films by Carlos Trujano.

Abstract

This essay will consider two short films by emerging filmmaker Carlos Trujano produced during the pandemic context. They will be highlighted for their dual value as examples of a method of developing film work during the months of confinement and for their narrative force, which involves and develops the potential of the video call as a means of narrative representation, the fictional counterpart of the practical use that this channel of communication has achieved in recent years. Thanks to an audiovisual adaptation of the theoretical framework of the theory of ‘speech acts in literary fiction’, described in some of H. Miller’s works, we will analyse the way in which the two plays Videollamada and Lucía y Luís de Trujano, in collaboration with the company Coteatro de la B.U.A.P., propose two alternative ways of employing the imaginative power of the short film and the medium of the video call, emphasising, in the first case, the imitation of everyday dynamics crudely linked to the collective hysteria related to the Coronavirus and, in the second case, the possibility of constructing a science fiction story of great emotional power around a video call. Two opposite extremes of the meaningful uses of artistic mimesis and the performative act of filmmaking generated with the same technique and with quite similar media will be identified, and these dimensions will also be linked to some considerations on the creative use of remote media.