A film about friendship; two women visit their old meeting place to exchange their goodbyes as they move on in life. Starring Victoria Balsom and Maria Calleja, music by Victoria Balsom.
Filter Films
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“The Eye of the Beholder” is a stream-of-consciousness montage of images created from light and shadow. It was made in conjunction with LIFT’s Second Annual $99 No Excuses Film Festival. Segments of the film are hand-processed.
Eye of the Beholder, The
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“This film is an entirely hand-painted film composed of a combination of highly complex step-printed super-impositions of hand-painting (at variable speeds), and raw and highly textured strips of hand-painted original film run at speed (24 distinct frames every second). It can be considered the fourth part of what had been called the “Vancouver Island Trilogy” (A CHILD’S GARDEN and THE SERIOUS SEA, THE MAMMALS OF VICTORIA, and THE GOD OF DAY HAD GONE DOWN UPON HIM), making the entire work now the ‘Vancouver Island Quartet.’ “Purple flashes are followed by a curtain of purple and blues, first seemingly static and then in motion. Close-ups of textures of paint evolve into flashes of jewel-like red, then more cascading blues and purples and white – ‘falling,’ seemingly, down from the top of the screen, at other times multi-directional bursts of rolling colors. Red, blue and yellow course through in an up-down motion, then blues and yellows enter from left and right in a complex medley of not solidly formed, but very vibrant pulsations of color, at times only slightly hinting at a solidity of “wallness” upon which the paint might exist. But it is a ‘wall’ suffused with light. Suggestions of fire and water, textures of paint on wall, sparkling jewels, and chunks of blue-white ice arise, as the textures of paint at times become a riotous rainbow of tumbling hues flowing in a river of light, creating the paradoxical experience of a fully substantial insubstantiality “The film clearly echoes back to earlier Brakhage films, including ‘A Child’s Garden’ and the ‘seriousness’ of the sea, as well as hand-painted works such as ‘Spring Cycle’ and ‘Stellar.’ The image holds briefly on a vision of depth of black with jewel-colored edges, followed by a wash of yellow, more ‘panels’ of color, then sheets of ice-like blues joined by red and finally turning to dark green. There is a seeming movement into the details of the paint itself. Curtains of black web-like lines explode once again into tumbling yellows and mauves, slowing, then becoming faster again, going into a step-like movement, frame to frame, of views of walls that are not walls, showing an increasing tactility, with occasional apparent ‘holes,’ and then resuming a multi-directional flow, and moving on into a recapitulation of some earlier forms: greens, reds, blues, red/black, greens and yellows, with sparkling blacks and swatches of red, loosening up once again on a whiter ground, with forms reminiscent of swimming spermatazoa and ending finally on a cumulative repetition of earlier visual themes.”-Marilyn Brakhage
Panels for the Walls of Heaven
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A young boy spending the afternoon at the beach with his parents wanders off on his own to explore. In the isolated dunes, he spies two gay lovers.
Lucky Bugger
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“Dear Mom” is a story of the formation of a girl’s identity in relation to her powerful mother, her matriarchal family, and domestic fantasies created by melodramas of the 40s and 50s. When the young girl’s fantasy of matricide comes true with the untimely death of her Mother, she finds herself at a crossroads. She is left to reconstruct her own identity and find out that her Mother is more complex than she imagines.
Dear Mom
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Using the weather as a metaphor for the stages of grief, “Closer to Heaven” is a good-bye poem and homage to my Dad. Shot on Super 8 and optically printed. “Who can really distinguish between the sea and what’s reflected in it, or tell the difference between falling rain and loneliness?” – Haruki Murakami
Closer to Heaven
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“If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now” is about the divisiveness over land, the relationship of public and private space in small-town America, and the concept of home. Using documentary strategies, landscape stills are juxtaposed to stories “ripped from the headlines” of a small-town newspaper. The struggle over public space described in the stories reflects universal concepts of space, privacy and property ownership.
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now
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“If” is a story of longing and loss, taking place within the confines of a room whose objects represent the emotional perceptions of space, and the missing lovers presence. The reality of the outside world encroaches on the inner-space of daydreaming.
If
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“Resurrectus Est.” is a hand-painted film which suggests, from the first, a spread of fragments of plants and flowers, individual petals and bits of twig with multiple colors, with much green “leafiness.” This gives way to solid yellows and browns of, or suggesting, dried grass and earth (the decay, as it were, of the above mentioned fragments); but then again, and so spaced with clear light whites as to appear airy, wind-blown, somesuch, miniscule fragments of plant life, gradually enlarging to fill-the-frame. Amidst the many floral and earthen tones, there is a particular ethereal pale, almost phosphorescent, blue which so dominates the scenes of its appearance as to cause the darker earthen yellows to lighten into a mixture with the blue that suggest abstract Easter: these tones finally take over to such an extent that the flower-fragments can no longer be seen clearly as such. The whole work turns upon the dominance of yellow-and-blue to such an extent that, by end, the film can only be seen as “visual music,” completely (or predominantly) “abstract” and as if composed of air itself (quite distinct, say, from “blue sky” “yellow sun” somesuch). (Stan Brakhage)
Resurrectus Est.
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A lovely and spare animated film illustrating the poem, “The Term,” by William Carlos Williams. The film is an homage to the work of Williams and to the school of Imagist Poetry, which he founded and best exemplifies. The filmmaker chose this particular poem because of the power of the imagery, the constant metamorphosis, the musicality of the words and the gentle humanistic quality of the message. All these things lend themselves well to film: particularly to the style of animation she has developed. The animation is hand-drawn pencil on paper, fully animated twelve drawings per second. The drawings illustrate the poem as it is being read in voice-over. The poem describes an image of a “rumpled sheet of brown paper” which, as it rolls along the street, resembles the form of a man. It is run over and crushed by a car but, unlike a man, rises again, rolling with the wind, assuming its original shape.
Term, The
