God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him, The

This film of single-strand photography begins with the “fire” of reflective light on water and on the barest inference of a ship. Throughout, the interwoven play of light and water tell the inferred “tale” of the film through rhythm and tempo, through visible textures and forms in gradual evolution, through resultant “moods” generated by these modes of making, and then, by the increasingly distant boat images, birds, animals, fleeting silhouettes of people and their artifacts, flotsam and jetsam of the sea-dead, as well as (near end, and almost as at a funeral) flowers in bloom, swallowed by darkness midst the crumbling of the sand castles. Those nameable objects (sometimes, at first, quite enigmatic) are the frets of symbol; but always the symbolic content is swept back into the weave of the sea and light and seen, as is the merry-go-round near the beginning of the film, or the horizontally photographed fountain mimicking incoming ocean waves, to be as if spawned in the mind during oceanic contemplation. (SB)