Flicks, Luke Buckmaster
Watching a movie told entirely from the point-of-view of computer and smartphone screens creates an odd sensation. The opening image of director Aneesh Chaganty’s missing person thriller Searching (which plays at Sydney Film Festival and will be released nationally September 13) is an exterior shot of a bright, grassy green hill beneath a glossy blue sky. Anybody who has ever operated Microsoft Windows will probably recognise this as a generic desktop background image, but you wouldn't have seen it in this way: on a big screen at the cinema. Usually filmmakers try to avoid a stock-standard tableau; here it is the very point of the shot – to contextualise a shared visual frame of reference.
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