An experimental road film made by collaging translucent media onto the surface of 35mm film leader. The American road holds a place in the collective unconscious of existential angst and personal transformation. Rooted in the literary and film traditions of the highways of the American west, Stark Film explores the subjective experience of the open road. The slow evolution of the landscape and consciousness over long periods of time brings the peripheral vision and attention to the foreground. The expanse of the land is contrast by the frame of the window and the confinement of the car seat. These are visualized through a technique of collage in which bits of 16mm film, leaves, grass, dirt, paint and other translucent media are assembled onto the surface of 35mm film leader. The cramped space of the film frame is related to the cramped space of the car, while a single blade of grass becomes an expansive landscape without end. The subjective tension between the expansive and the cramped spaces leads to an ultimate collision of the physical driver and his reflections.
1999, 16mm, color/so, 5.35m, $20
A film ritual in three acts, Ablution traces a character's dissociative journey through an archetypal cleansing.
Ablution is a film ritual that observes dissociation. It is divided into three vignettes, each with its own distinct structure. In "The Fleeting," a man who becomes dissociated with temporal reality gets lodged in a world that is moving much too fast for him. His experience of his life becomes the fleeting images of days transpiring in seconds. It is shot as a traditional cinematic narrative space. "Incantation" is a shamanistic chant--a dance that exists to provide a catalyst for change.
Dissociation becomes deconstruction. If the first section is an objective view of an elusive narrative, the second would be a subjective metaphor of an internal state. The final piece to the film ("A Hundred Foot Day") is a continuous sequence of a day transpiring with the man back on his front porch where the film started. Shot as an uncut proscenium arch in the theatre, "A Hundred Foot Day" is the length of the day shot onto a hundred foot length of film. As a whole, the Ablution, or the cleansing, is a look into the magical, if not somewhat uncertain, places that each of us pass through at select times in our lives. Metaphorically, the entire piece traces the Hero's journey of departure, initiation, and return through a narrative that disintegrates into a totally subjective space. While the Hero's journey is a classic tale, the cinematic structures of the three vignettes leave trap doors and secret passageways throughout the film for individual interpretation. Ablution is a relic--a veiled glimpse at an emotional state.
2001, 16mm, color/so, 13m, $40
"Startle Pattern" is a deconstruction of spectatorship and authorship in the moving image. In the late age of film, emulsion, this essay is a call of the cinematic gaze to a state of crisis. An interior space of a puppet becomes increasingly reflective, revealing the artifice of his own creation, and leaving his form tattered and decayed. The narrative of isolation hints at the film protagonist's delicate relationship with reality, voyeurism and the apparatus.
2005, 16mm, color/so, 13, $50