Everything Everywhere Again Alive

“Everything Everywhere Again Alive” is a nature film with a difference. It is about a concept of nature which is communicated by a series of very simple images. These very simple images are used like building blocks of ideas to build a complex representation of nature as well as diaristic events taking place in the film. “Everything…” is an elaboration of two films by painters Jack Chambers (Circle) and Joyce Wieland (Solidarity) and in another sense, Michael Snow (La Region Centrale). “Everything…” is about space and the meaning of the infinite as it is used in Chinese painting. The shape of nature is like a circle, the circle can also represent space as in the mathematical symbol of zero which represents an empty space rather than a numerical quantity. The zero is a “mystic” bound between reason and imagination, the concrete and the abstract. Some film historians have traced the idea of cinema back to its prehistoric firelight shadow plays. Although conjecture, this is part of the rationale for using primitive poetry in place of the usual spoken narration. In view of the fact that “Everything…” also chronicles a practical attempt to get back to the purity of nature, this form of narration is the total expression of the experience as it was understood by the filmmaker.