From Food Photography

A couple months ago, my mother convinced me to watch Dancer in the Dark. I was hesitant at first – she’d told me it was a sad movie, and I was in no mood to cry. But I acquiesced.

It turns out that Dancer in the Dark is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever watched.

Such simple, unadorned editing makes the film remarkably realistic. There’s no background music save for when Selma (the main character) daydreams, no Hollywood style filming or cuts to different angles. It’s as if I’m filming Selma myself, camera set to video mode and presence kept secret. And because of that sense of intimacy, the film is all the more powerful.

Selma’s dream sequences reveal the way she perceives her world and its people –with too much faith and so much more credit than they deserve that she never quite seems connected to the same blunt reality the filming captures. Her earnestness and unfailing honesty instill a sense of resigned desperation, of repressed outrage at how ruthlessly she is wronged.

Simplicity left me stunned. It made my emotions painfully stark, painfully raw. Sometimes, it is most effective.