In 2003, Julie released PRETEND, her multichannel drama. PRETEND’s innovative storytelling techniques impressed New Yorkers and film festivals all over the world.

Preview Clips From Pretend
PRETEND Clip 1 (4MB .mov)
PRETEND Clip 2 (9MB .mov)

Here are some links to articles about PRETEND, followed by elements from PRETEND’s press kit:

Ithaca Times piece by Jessica del Mundo
Julie on the Brian Lehrer Show
PRETEND in the Independent (AIVF members only)
“Poem by Gibbons Ruark plays a role in ‘Pretend’” (U Delaware)
Ethics, Ambiguity, and Multi-Frame Narrative in Julie Talen’s “Pretend” by Cara O’connor

PRETEND SYNOPSIS
Pretend uses an array of multiple frames and complex graphics to tell the story of a troubled family living in upstate New York. Dad (Karl Herlinger) is an unemployed poet and Mom (Joan Jubett) supports the entire family by working at the local convenience store. Their two young daughters escape into a world of make-believe. The highly imaginative Sophie (Nora Stewart) spins stories for her little sister, Ellie (Danielle Freid) to believe — or not. One night, the girls overhear the parents’ fight that seems to spell the end of the family. Sophie comes up with a daring plan to keep Dad from leaving the next day, which involves hiding her sister all night in the woods. Ellie obligingly hides the next night, while Sophie’s brazen lie is bought by her parents, the neighbors, the local news and the cops. While Ellie cowers in the forest, Sophie congratulates herself on the success of her scheme. How and why this plan works, and doesn’t, takes us beyond their childhoods into consequences that affect their entire adult lives, as the grown Sophie (Marin Gazzaniga) reveals to a random lover (Derek Cecil, of Push, Nevada). Pretend’s “new graphic vocabulary” (Village Voice) has been highly praised by the New York Times’ A.O. Scott as a “harrowing, dazzling” feature. A crucial pioneer in the new frontier of digital cinema, Pretend was shot entirely on miniDv cameras in 14 days and edited on two G4s using Final Cut Pro and 14 hard drives.

PRETEND CONTACT INFORMATION: JULIE TALEN, Director and Producer hot butter thru knife productions jtalen@nyc.rr.com

PRETEND REVIEWS

The New York Times Weds. July 23, 2003: July 23, 2003
Video Artists Escape Hollywood Sensibility By A. O. SCOTT
“The ways that children perceive, and confuse, fantasy, reality and causality are explored in Julie Talen’s “Pretend,” a harrowing, dazzling feature that will be shown on Saturday. A girl named Sophie decides that she can prevent her parents’ separation by pretending that her younger sister, Ellie, has been kidnapped. The plan goes terribly awry, but it also succeeds, and Ms. Talen uses multiple screens to dramatize the sometimes contradictory implications and possible results of Sophie’s act.The divided screen has occasionally been deployed by filmmakers to show events unfolding simultaneously. (Mike Figgis’s “Timecode” is arguably the most successful and at any rate the most compulsively sustained use of this technique.) Ms. Talen goes further; in “Pretend” the collage of images evokes the memories, fantasies and fears of the characters, bridging the distance between the objective reality of what the camera sees and the inner worlds that are ordinarily left to actors to convey.”

From Ed Halter, The Village Voice, Weds. July 23, 2003:
“Despite the ascendancy of DV narratives, the Video Festival has historically avoided feature filmmaking. An exception this year is Julie Talen’s Pretend an ambitious experiment in visual storytelling employing multiple image windows. A kidnapping caper told with fairy-tale surrealism– a remarkable achievement in editing. Though similar attempts have been made before Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler, Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, Mike Figgis’s Time Code, and Ang Lee’s The Hulk, not to mention Abel Gance’s Napoleon none of these examples push the possibilities as far. Talen edits a dizzying storm of screens within screens, creating a new graphic vocabulary of flashbacks, flash-forwards, fantasy sequences, and parallel actions. She showcases the best possibilities of experimenting with video.Variety Tue., Oct. 21, 2003 Pretend A hot butter thru knife presentation. Produced by Ajae Clearway, Craig Robillard. Directed, written, edited by Julie Talen. With: Joan Jubett, Karl Herlinger, Danielle Freid, Nora Stewart, Marin Gazzaniga, Derek Cecil.By DENNIS HARVEY

An experimental video feature with unusual narrative heft, Julie Talen’s “Pretend” uses elaborate split-screen devices to poke around the ambiguities and emotions surrounding a child’s disappearance in upstate N.Y. Too idiosyncratic for commercial exposure, pic nonetheless reps a notable directorial debut of interest to fest and avant-garde programmers. (Talen has hitherto worked as a scenarist, including on proposed Robert Altman project “Mata Hari.”)Basic girl-who-cried-wolf story is simple: Afraid their unemployed father (Karl Herlinger) is about to leave after too many arguments with fed-up mom (Joan Jubett), 9-year-old Sophie (Nora Stewart) hatches a plan sure to make him stay –leaving reluctant younger sis Ellie (Danielle Freid) deep in the forest overnight, then telling parents the tot was abducted by a stranger. Of course this provokes hysteria, in part because a little boy really was abducted in the area recently. Situation reels further out of control the next day, when Sophie finds Ellie is no longer at her hiding place — her fate unknown even up through a surprise coda that shows now-adult Sophie (Marin Gazzaniga) still wracked by guilt.
As many as 50 multichannel images (shot by up to nine simultaneous cameras) are on screen at once, repping not just different p.o.v.’s but also flashbacks, flash-forwards, imaginary scenarios, dreams, etc. For once, such technical gimmickry really does evoke by sheer accumulation the ultimate instability of subjective truth, lending pic a resonant dimensionality.There’s an occasional overemphasis on high-pitch histrionics among the actors, but imagination deployed in visual (and equally arresting audio) designs provides enough intellectual distance from the melodrama. Microbudgeted feature’s nonstandard tech aspects are in tune with offbeat overall package. Camera (color, DV), Samantha Schutz; music, Charles Peirce; production designer, Debra Sugerman; multichannel supervisor, Ajae Clearway; sound, Eric Strausser; assistant director, Craig Robillard. Reviewed at Mill Valley Film Festival, Oct. 5, 2003. Running time: 75 MIN.

The Seattle Times
Friday, November 14, 2003
At a Theater Near You Split screens lift ‘Pretend’ to a new dimension
By Moira Macdonald Seattle Times movie criticSometimes a movie comes along that’s so dazzlingly different from anything else you’ve seen, all you can do is watch, mesmerized. “Pretend,” from director Julie Talen, is just such a movie. The story of a young girl who tries to mend her parents’ troubled marriage by staging a faked kidnapping of her sister, “Pretend” was made with unknown actors and no budget. But Talen gives her story added dimension by dividing the screen into multiple frames — some grid-like, sometimes a stray rectangle floating within the main image, taking us out of one character’s story and into another, dividing our loyalties and our attention, taking our breath away. “Pretend,” directed by Julie Talen, opens tonight at ConWorks. Her split-screen technique adds tension to the film.Though Talen is hardly the first to use split-screen images (most recently, Ang Lee did it in “The Hulk”), her film is unique in the way her technique adds tension, making an already harrowing story even more so and creating a freewheeling collage that contributes its own beauty. See it on the big screen at ConWorks tonight through Sunday. Talen will be on hand tonight and Saturday to discuss her film. 500 Boren Ave.,Seattle; call 206-381-3218 for more information. All screenings begin at 8 p.m.; tickets are $7.
Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com
Copyright 2003 The Seattle Times Company

New York Post
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
By V.A. MUSETTO
Nora Stewart (left) and Danielle reid on the set of “Pretend.”January 11, 2004 — It’ll be a long time before you’ll see a movie as visually adventurous as Julie Talen’s “Pretend.”The New York director uses elaborate split-screen editing to tell the story of two young sisters who fake a kidnapping to keep their battling parents from breaking up. The use of a divided screen to show multiple perspectives on the same incident goes as far back as Abel Gance’s 1927 silent biopic, “Napoleon.”More recently, Mike Figgis used a four-quadrant screen to track the crisscrossing lives of several characters in “Timecode.” And Duncan Roy split the screen into three frames in “AKA,” the portrait of a working-class Brit who fakes his way into high society. (It’s at the Cinema Village.) Talen takes the idea even further in “Pretend,” her first feature, dividing the screen into as many as 16 panels at a time.Shot over two weeks, using up to nine digital-video cameras, “Pretend” attracted attention at the New York Video Festival last July. Now it’s getting a reprise, tomorrow at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Modern Art’s Gramercy Theater, 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue; www.moma.org.Talen, who supports her video work with screenwriting - including scripts for Paul Verhoeven, Robert Altman and Gillian Armstrong - will be at the showing. V.A. Musetto is film editor of The Post. He can be e-mailed at vam@nypost.com

Film Threat
PRETEND by Stina Chyn (2004-01-09)
2003, Un-rated, 80 Minutes, Hot Butter Thru Knife
Presented in multiple sets of picture-in-picture windows, Julie Talen’s film “Pretend” gives you the feeling that you have multiple sets of eyes, and you’ll wish you had a god-like focus to keep track of all the images. “Pretend” is the story of two young sisters, parents who won’t stop arguing with each other, and a “harmless” game of make-believe. Sophie (Nora Stewart), Ellie (Danielle Freid) and their mom (Joan Jubett) and dad (Karl Herlinger) live in a small house surrounded by trees. One night, after witnessing their parents fighting, Sophie thinks up the perfect way to prevent her father from leaving. Inspired from a news story that they saw on TV earlier that day, the girls pretend that Ellie gets kidnapped.“Pretend” touches on the way children see the world, but it’s also an examination of the cinematic apparatus. The picture-in-picture has a mosaic quality to it, but not always to fragment an individual image. Frequently, what you see on screen is comprised of various images, which in turn often differ in color, lighting, film speed, and “texture.” Talen’s incorporation of multi-screen viewing isn’t completely novel in terms of filmmaking. Ang Lee utilized it in Hulk (2003) to recreate the comic-book aesthetic and Mike Figgis employed it as a storytelling device in Timecode (2000). For Talen, it’s as if she’s stumbled upon a new toy and won’t let go of it for a moment. She experiments with colors, textures, and lighting, but she doesn’t do it haphazardly. Talen divides the screen into quadrants in order to present a substantial amount of information in a short period of time.On a practical level, multi-angle shots leaves you with the impression that the film itself is multi-tasking. They’re good tools for capturing reaction shots, transitioning between scenes, and for emphasizing certain emotional aspects of specific moments. For example, when Ellie, Sophie, and their parents are having a meal together, one of the girls draws everyone’s attention to something outside the window. The screen is divided into four squares; an eye from each family member occupies a region. In the next shot, we see what each person sees. One of them is looking at a caterpillar on the window; another person is looking somewhere else. To maximize the effectiveness of these techniques, though, picture-in-picture should be used sparingly.“Pretend” is somewhat of an exception. With no more than a few seconds devoted to a single image in its entirety on screen, the disorientation you experience is an intended side-effect. You may be able to see the same thing from different angles or a variety of things from several perspectives, but as the film reveals near its end, you cannot completely trust all that you see. Sophie and Ellie meant for the “kidnapping” to be a game, one that you’re not sure they win.