Circular Origin Story: I'M A VIRGO
When a character decides to reveal a key aspect of their past, narrative will often use three techniques, alone or in combination: exposition, ‘flashback’ shots, and montage.
As Flora (Olivia Washington) thinks about her childhood, I’m a Virgo uses all three . . . with a few spins.
Director Boots Riley uses all sorts of practical camera tricks in I’m a Virgo, the series, and this scene works as a short film-within-a-film especially because of how those tricks and techniques take us through an unusual coming-of-age story.
Flashback, Exposition, and Montage
The whole sequence is a type of montage, a series of flashbacks detailing Flora’s childhood, including her unusual power and her relationship with her parents.
Instead of using distinct and obvious edits to separate time, the story all ‘runs together’ using movement, speed-ramping, cross-fades, and repeating framings to give the feeling of one continuous story while still jumping through time.
Typical exposition would involve Flora talking / voiceover-ing the actions, but the spin here is occasional, indirect exposition, when her dad reads her letter, her mom sums up their divorce, or they leave her a message on a whiteboard.
Meanwhile the sound mix and music exposits Flora’s feelings; it’s non-verbal, but still incredibly unsubtle [complimentary].
Movement and Direction
Flora can never feel ‘still’ because everything around her moves agonisingly slowly relative to her. Meanwhile the camera travels in circles because that’s how she feels her life has been going.
Though it ends up making a few ‘full circles’ the camera doesn’t stay going any one direction (eg left-to-right / counter-clockwise); moving sometimes in and out, or making a mini-arc and then reversing the arc.
This back-and-forth movement is especially effective in the mini-sequence where Flora is shown writing the same letter her parents are reading, the camera going back-and-forth demonstrating her experiment as it happens.
Speed Ramping and Crossfades
Because Flora’s power is manipulating the speed at which everything moves around her, this isn’t just a way to move through her story, but a method which gives the audience a peek at how things feel to her.
Some of these are more obvious than others. The first speedramp (0:08-0:15) is quite obvious; it doesn’t change the scene, but shows Baby Flora’s head moving, and establishes this is a technique which will occur.
The crossfade from 1:20-1:33 (excerpted below) resets the tableau, showing Flora reading a book and napping as her parents draw her a message; clearly finding writing an easier way to communicate because of their [relative] time difference.
These techniques aren’t subtle, they’re drawing attention to themselves, the better to demonstrate Flora’s experience.
Repeating Framing
We’ve looked at the importance of setting up mini-tableaus within oners; though this isn’t a true oner, it’s a continually moving self-contained story, and the principles of effective mini-tableaus apply.
In this case the mini-shots often repeat framing, the repetition continually reminding us we’re in this story to find out Flora’s history, and get in her frame of mind.
Framing Flora (or her letters / representations of herself) ‘between’ her parents isn’t just a visually pleasing shot neatly diving the frame into thirds, but demonstrates how Flora feels she’s coming between them and causing conflict, and how all that makes her feel trapped.
Transitioning Out
There are a couple ‘straight cuts’ through the sequence, but near the end, right before it breaks out of Flora’s reverie, it makes several in a row, becoming jerkier and more detached just as her parents did, and her memories are now.
Takeaways
How you present a flashback — the kind of shots you use, camera movements and transitions between those shots, and repeating certain framings — can tell us a lot about the character within that flashback, and their feelings about the story.