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The Touch (2006)
2:58 minutes | b&w | sound | 16mm film released on video
The Touch is a meditation on Anne Sexton's poem of the same name. The film examines melodies within spoken, written and visual language and how they can interact. By juxtaposing text, image and sound, the viewer is asked to contemplate disparate forms of human response and emotion regarding language and imagery. In The Touch, the text from the poem is first given life through single-frame animation, then through layered audio recording and finally through visuals that reinterpret it. Language and image investigate feelings of disembodiment, isolation and absence punctuated by sound and silence. Because the subject of the poem deals specifically with the idea of touch, the film sustains a highly tactile, textural quality wherein the filmmaker's hand is an overt presence.
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52 Bis (2006)
2:05 minutes | b&w | sound | 16mm film released on video
Filmed at my grandmother's house in Paris, France, 52 Bis explores the unraveling recesses of space and memory through the idea of light and dark, or the negative and positive image. Circular forms and sequences in the film's cuts and shots serve to reference "the circle of life"--the continual flux of breath, moving through a cyclical beginning, middle and end, only to begin again. The circle is referenced in the film through the use of a circular matt, a spiral staircase, and the recurrent circular spin of rooms, photos and a re-emerging chandelier. The film leads the viewer through a house of memories, empty rooms, photographs that have been left behind and one light illuminating and obscuring what's inside. The continual shift between the positive and negative image serve to exploit the idea of presence and absence, or alternately the internal and external. The negative images become the bones of the house, or the bones of memory within its continually shifting spaces.
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On Alzheimer's (2005)
7:14 minutes | b&w | silent | 16mm film released on video
On Alzheimer's is an experimental animation piece that explores my grandmother's diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease. The film was created by animating photographic stills taken in my grandmother's apartment in Corsica, in combination with old family photographs, her physical objects (pearls and gloves), my diary text, and various other collected imagery (brain diagrams, etc.). The film is sustained by two melodies-text and imagery-that repeat themselves, unfolding in alternate rhythms to emulate the mental obfuscation and confusion of Alzheimer's.
Throughout the film there are two running tropes: pearls that symbolize my physical connection to my grandmother, and water that signifies a "river of time," or fleeting memories and the ultimate drowning of those memories. Both tropes serve to visually articulate my grandmother's descent into literal and figurative darkness. Part 2 of On Alzheimer's moves frenetically, employing shorter cuts, giving the viewer a sense of the rapid state of deterioration, and the subject's consequent frustration, anger and reeling sense of loss in coping with Alzheimer's Disease.
