A Man Watering His Lawn

Okay. So here we are again.

A Man Watering His Lawn is not a film.

Directed, or rather I should use the word shot, by Evan Snyder what he is trying to force us to do is sit down for an hour and fifty minutes to watch some footage that he has taken from out his front window as well as elsewhere. That’s it. That’s the entire premise. That’s everything there is to it. Like I say it’s not a film.

From out his window, Evan can see the birds sitting on the wires, there’s some electricity workers up in cherry pickers fiddling about with the wires too, then there’s some roofers across the way fitting some tiles to the roof of a building, and of course the piece de resistance of Evan’s lengthy footage, the aftermath of two car crashes which he has decided to film the entirety of despite the intense boredom and lack of anything interesting happening in either of these scenes.

So far you might think that what Evan has here is the basis of a half-decent art project that he could submit for his course at the local community college, but then you’d be forgetting that Evan wants you to watch this crap for an hour and fifty minutes. Being that he has shut himself up indoors there is no audio to the visuals which are being presented, just background ambient noise from inside Evan’s house or wherever it is he has set himself up to watch proceedings.

Car crashes, you may suppose, could at least be an interesting subject but what Evan has caught on camera is what happens afterwards once the first responders have done their thing and it’s left to the clean-up crews and the leftover emergency services to deal with the scene, mostly by standing about talking and huddling together in groups. In other words what Evan has shot footage of is all the boring stuff.

A Man Watering His Lawn doesn’t have any narrative, doesn’t offer any commentary, as previously stated doesn’t have any outside audio, and only contains any sort of progression in the fact that after an hour and forty-five minutes the cars are removed from the road. The longer it all goes on the more people turn up to ogle at the carnage but this can hardly be called thematic. Evan has at least edited his clips together so that each boring scene is interspersed with the other boring scenes to give the viewer some relief before coming back to the same boring scene again. This, however, does not build any narrative and as Evan is actually only presenting footage what he has cannot be called a documentary. A Man Watering His Lawn is not a film.

If Evan was ever to try to get people into a cinema to watch what he has captured on camera most people would probably start to get up to leave after the first ten minutes, most likely with a cry of, “Is that it?” If he was to present it at an art gallery as part of some sort of installation, people might last fifteen minutes before getting bored and moving onto the next exhibit. If he was to offer it as journalism to a news outlet he would rightly be asked for context and commentary, neither of which he provides, as well as of course needing to cut it down by about an hour and a half. If what Evan has got can never be viewed in its entirety by any audience in any circumstance – if it doesn’t contain any of the markers which would hold it up as any form of film – then it cannot be classed as such.

A Man Watering His Lawn is not a film.