A Walk in The Forest By Johanne Chagnon – Short Film Review
A Walk in The Forest is an experimental, conceptual experience that will rock you through visuals and sound.
Johanne Chagnon has successfully created a discomforting, yet strangely beautiful experimental journey in A Walk in The Forest. This film explores the idea of walking through the forest (as the title would suggest) and the evolution of feeling around that idea. The tone progressively shifts and adapts as the atmosphere of the experience changes and grows.
Chagnon found a way to very effectively use the medium. This film is visually eye-catching, enthralling and disturbing all at the same time. But beyond that, it is the soundscape that really pulls you in. It has a dark tension, that makes you feel motionless while also fast-moving somehow. It really has an artistic, engaging quality about it that works well.
The conceptual side of this projects touches upon the taboo idea of death and the societal avoidance of it. It speaks to this point in a way true to the medium, subtly and disturbingly. The feeling of mourning comes up within the film, and it adds to this aspect of death and the great beyond.
The tone of the film has a sense of existential terror and beauty within that idea. It gets more and more surreal across the span of the experience, and that feeling of terror shifts around as the visuals and sound expand and contract. Johanne Chagnon puts it quite wonderfully in stating “The “walk” evolves to end with a serene and motionless appeasement, where dangers and constraints no longer exist. The whole video is crossed by a deep breathing, this internal breathing which allows us to cross the different types of forests that we meet on our way.”
This idea of the “forests that we meet on our way” is a very poetic way of concluding the whole film experience of A Walk in The Forest. It metaphorically captures so much, without saying too much, and that’s a pretty lovely way of describing this film as a whole. Chagnon did a profound job in making such a large, significant commentary; while still stating subtle and conceptual in execution.
We very much look forward to seeing where Johanne Chagnon goes next!