My obsession with obscured sightlines continues.

Our eyes are a primary meeting ground between the audience and a piece of visual-based art. As such, conventionally speaking, creators try to ensure unencumbered access between our retinas and the action. But throwing a blockade between the two fundamentally alters our relationship to — and thus conception of — the whole, figuratively through the literal.

A recent movie and play experiment with how a permanent blockage interacts with the audience’s connection to the art, through a forced ocular disconnect.

Damn near every shot in Blackberry either places a blurry part of an object in the foreground, or we’re made to watch scenes through a window. Reminding us that we’re looking at this world through a screen, a screen that changes our view, definitely feels thematically relevant to a story about how the BlackBerry upended, well, worldviews.

But that’s just one interpretation of this cinematographic approach, with many others open for consideration, on a macro level or on a shot-by-shot basis.

And the New Group’s off-Broadway production of Bernarda’s Daughters shows that you don’t need a camera to achieve this effect. Too many plays are set inside houses, yet their walls are almost always removed, offering the audience an unencumbered aperture. Bernarda’s Daughters, however, retains hints of its central home’s structure ON ALL SIDES, impeding vision no matter the seat location. We see the solid boards comprising the architectural bones of their casa, surrounded by a darkly translucent fabric, broken only by pane-less windows, all acting as constant barriers to our unfettered tableaus.

Why?

Well, that’s for us to mull.

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2023 has been a Forget About Dre year for Cary Elwes: BlackBerry, Sweetwater, and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. Still to come: the new Mission Impossible, Zach Snyder’s next Netflix joint, and must I mention his impending Sonic-adjacent TV series?

Speaking of the man, what will his legacy be? The Princess Bride‘s Man in Tights Sawing off his own leg?