Tending Towards the Horizontal

The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its wings tirelessly; a figure (man, boy?) who sits on a hay bale, watching the city below; and a woman in a library who reads only what others have left behind. The filmed images are predominantly houses: houses seen in passing, along the horizontal; houses reflecting sky and trees in their windows; houses partially hidden by trees or the shadows they cast; houses and office towers simultaneously pictured in stages of demolition and construction. The images dissolve in and out of the flickering light and dark (sunlight and shadow and the emulsion of the film itself). The site of the self is home. A house is a construct and, per Heidegger, language is the house of being. “Suddenly you are here, at home, and the reality is revealed. The reality was always there, you were not there, at home, and the reality is revealed. The reality was always there, you were not there. It is not the truth which has to be sought, it is you who have to be brought home” (Rajneesh).