The Man

A man trapped in an endless sterile subway passageway sets out to find Exit 8. The rules of his quest are simple: do not overlook anything out of the ordinary. If you discover an anomaly, turn back immediately. If you don’t, carry on. Then leave from Exit 8. But even a single oversight will send him back to the beginning. Will he ever reach his goal and escape this infinite corridor?

Atmospheric Offense is an interpretation of Ida Lupino’s 1953 Noir Thriller The Hitch-Hiker that explores how narrative both remains and disappears when exposed to avant-garde techniques, which include removing dialogue, jarring and destructive ellipses, the creation of loops to focus on certain elements, reimagining of time, exaggeration of a certain sinister aesthetic, and a push toward a certain dream like quality. Narrative remains, but with a bastardized and disoriented aftereffect, which transforms it into another way of experiencing it. The spree killings of Billy Cook (portrayed in Lupina’s film by the actor William Talman, and renamed Emmett Myers) are looked at more as a moment in time that begins and ends with vague qualities much like a dream, or an experience of weather in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.