by Joe Zabel
'Moving' is a sweet, simple story made more interesting by the way it's told.
A young man named Kevin is waiting for a bus, and has reasons for thinking back and remember a childhood friend.
She was sweet on him, but he was too young to be interested. Then his family moved to another neighborhood, and he's never seen her since.
The story returns to the present, and we learn that Kevin's childhood friend has now moved to his town, and he's taking the bus to go to her. The
story
leaves it to us to imagine the subsequent reunion.
What sets this anecdote apart are the three bravura sequences of which
it
consists.
In the opening scene, Kevin leaves the moving company's headquarters
and
crosses the street to catch a bus. He has a near miss with a moving
van
coming down the road, and when it passes he sees the bus is pulling
out. He
chases it, but to no avail. This wordless scene establishes a rather
cold
and threatening context-- the moving van becomes a potential menace.
The transition back in time is another unusual wordless sequence. It
begins
by panning from Kevin's figure to the back of the moving van. Then it zooms out from the moving van, and the zoom changes into an aerial shot of the city. The scene shifts to another aerial shot of a suburb, and the camera slowly closes in on a house, where another moving van is busy loading. Within the house, it transpires, is Kevin as a boy.
It's magnificent, this feat of soaring into the heavens and shooting back five years. It suggests the magnitude of a life lived, the sheer wonder of our existence, the grandeur of friendship and love.
The third sequence is a conversation between Kevin and his childhood
friend.
It delicately captures the affection these two children have for each
other.
She comes across as a tomboy, and he in turn is rather shy, and too
fussy to
take kindly to her poking him and attempting to hug him. The scene
leaves
hanging the question of a gift he wants to give her, and when we return
to
the present day, we understand that Kevin is thinking of it.
'Moving' is one of the artist's early works. As such, the rendering is awkward, the storytelling at times clumsy. Hernandez has greatly improved since, and his ongoing series 'Penny Dreadful' is developing into a colorful visual treat-- if occasionally punctuation-challenged. But 'Moving', in spite of its shortcomings, is worth celebrating as a work that stretches the boundaries of what can be said and shown.
