Last night I rented The Tracey Fragments (2007), a film by Canadian director Bruce McDonald (of Hard Core Logo fame).

The film follows Tracey Berkowitz through two or three days of her troubled teenage life. McDonald offers the viewer touching and troubling insight into Tracey’s reality, crafting the story by overlaying screen atop one another to give the film a mosaic quality (like the photo I included here). The effect is beautiful and, at times, rightly overwhelming.

The Tracey Fragments blends form and content powerfully. Tracey’s story is told in fragments that the viewer pieces together as the film progresses. Unlike bad modernist poetry, each fragments engages and involves the viewer; you don’t feel like you’re watching an experimental art film that obessess on form and forgets content. The interaction between the various frames added to the power of an already emotionally charged plot. I wish I had not missed this movie on the big screen—it would have been an even better experience. I loved the play between the multiple frames on screen.

Lastly, Broken Social Scene did the score for the movie. Their layered style of music compliments the cinematic style of The Tracey Fragments. I’m hoping to pick up the soundtrack, although I’m avoiding downloading it from iTunes because I’m not impressed with their bitrate encoding.