I remember being really impressed with split screens in film for the first time I watched The Rules of Attraction. There's one scene in which James Vanderbeek and Shannyn Sossamon both walk down the halls of their University to see their grades posted somewhere. They meet at their destination and the screen becomes whole. (They proceed to fall in love, naturally. Getting marks back is oviously soOoOoO sexy).
This film uses the technique of split screens in many situations to show these two main characters having many "missed connections" in close quarters, but feeling the same emotions and having very similar experiences though it takes them a while to meet.
Both The Tracey Fragments and The Rules of Attraction represent something of a personal crisis, but the former uses the split screens more to portray the troubled protagonists multiple perspectives of a world in which reality and fantasy are blurred. The multiple fragmented images of the same things recall cubisms fragmentation and epistemological challenges to Western thought. In this sense, the film is pretty radical.
McDonald, the director, was inspired not only by other films that employed this technique throughout history, but also a Beastie Boys video, and Piet Mondrian's grid paintings. This is a quote from the main man himself: “By editing the film in this split screen fractured/Cubist/Pop Art kind of way, we felt that we could capture Tracey’s interior emotional state quite well”
I agree with him. The film is clearly very painterly in its influences - it's a visual jam of chaotic activity. Visually, it really is similar to a cubist painting.
I was aware of shifting my attention all over the screen - particularly when Tracey is dreaming, at the corner store, that she is a celebrity. Screens all over the place were kind of overwhelming. But that was the point, I reckon. It makes for a more active participation, a more selective participation, a more sensory experience.
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