Student Film of the Week: Robin's Cage

How much control do we have over our own lives? That seems to be the central question in director Tim Aumun’s Robin’s Cage, a collaboration between five students at Juniata College and submitted by Jigar Patel. Aumun seems to be questioning how much freedom we have to script the itinerary of our existence, and whether, in fact, we’ve become such prisoners of routine that we’re as trapped as a robin in a cage, unable to soar.

The film is about a young man named Robin who awakens every morning at the sound of his alarm to undergo the same routine: school, homework, chores. He doesn’t seem to have any genuine human contact; his parents aren’t there to see him off in the morning. His only connection to his mother is through the Post-It Notes and voicemail messages she leaves to tell him what to do. Robin goes to class, and there he encounters a lecture on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which seems to directly address the imprisonment he’s feeling. Whether he understands the lecture, or whether he’s become so lost in his routine that school has just become a chore and not an enriching experience is uncertain. The latter is more likely, however. Once he leaves school for the day, his mother’s voicemail tells him to pick up some milk, which he purposefully drops on his way back from the store, an act of rebellion against this incessant routine. When he arrives back home he discovers his robin’s cage is open and that his pet is now free, even if he can’t be.

The stylistic techniques that the Juniata College students deploy for the film are unusual but deepen the film’s mysteries. The opening credits and title of the film are written on Post-It Notes, stuck to Robin’s wall. Of course, Post-It Notes are the main method of Robin’s mother decreeing what her son should do and how his routine should unfold. But this unusual approach to revealing the film’s title also recalls Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), where the title is only presented near the very end of the film written across the wall of Kurtz’s (Marlon Brando) compound.

It’s admirable that for a film about psychological frustration Aumun and his Juniata colleagues didn’t resort to cliches of psychological drama like voiceover narration, searing close-ups, or subjective shots. Instead, there is an expressionistic quality to the presentation of the narrative, where the elements of the setting (the post-it notes, the “Are You Sick?” poster at the grocery store, the lecture itself) create a symbolic collage of the factors governing Robin’s attitude and behavior. The setting itself reveals his mental state, while he in fact remains more or less passive and expressionless when we see him. This is a clever method of establishing an authorial voice, bringing a unique and fresh perspective to familiar material.

If good filmmaking should show and not tell, then Robin’s Cage succeeds by presenting its narrative in primarily visual terms. Robin himself may still be a prisoner of his circumstances, but these filmmakers from Juniata College have shown that they don’t feel constrained by the limitations of conventional cinematic technique.