A way through...
October 2016
Rites of Resistance - a way through.... is a contemplative film based on a collection of poems. These poems are triggered by the seemingly simple obligation of the artist to create – an idea explored in Samuel Beckett’s writing Textes pour rien, which has accompanied me while developing this film.
Image after image, word after word, this obligation manifests. The film is relentless flow of words (thinking, speaking, script) and the simultaneous perception of things seen and unseen in the world (intuition, colour, texture, body). Through a typographic approach, poetic compositions emerge with word as image, word as sound, word as texture. Image, sound, texture are living a quiet life of meaning.
The words in the film resist a fixed position: literally and metaphorically. The reality-based images are abstractions of the everyday, of light and dark, concrete and mystic, now and then. Beautiful in their diligent effort to just be.
Concept & Form
The film explores the image as a site of resistance, oscillating between the thinking mind and intuitive knowing. Resistance, for me, is intimate: we do it every time our natural sensibility responds to a flesh and blood encounter, beyond the noise of networked media and capitalist assumptions of wellbeing. Resistance - just like acceptance - is our own time of living, which permeates everything in the present. To resist is to refuse total ideologies, in the everyday, and to accept that ideologies remain.
The film uses the classical techniques of double exposure, Rayogram and radical continuity. It’s an experiment for finding a place for all the parameters of 16mm handmade cinema in the space and time of a short projection.