Will and Wallace

A poetic and anthropological investigation into the linguistic interrogation of an opponent that often accompanies competitive behavior. The film centers on the playful harassment of two individuals - Wallace Franklin and William Patrick Shaffer - who are engaged in a game of pool. The film highlights their ludic use of aggressive and violent phrases/terms. Except for the closing sequence which incorporates real-time audio for the first time, the film's overall silence strips these aggressive utterances of their audible context, making a viewer concentrate on the narrative visually, read lips, and search for the subliminal circles which are inscribed just for an instant around the mouths of the players. These isolate the uses of metonymic expression, drawing our attention to words, phrases, and sentences whose content is in total discord with their literal meaning.