The Sea Seeks Its Own Level
2013, 5 minutes, Color, Sound, Super 8 film mastered to HD digital video
A distillation of references to the sea in James Joyce's Ulysses, and a tangible look at the material effects of an aging Super8-mm camera.
They are coming, waves, white-maned seahorses, wind brindled.
Drowning they say is the pleasantest. Salt green death, spiked and winding cold seahorn,
music everywhere. No, that's noise . . . The earth convulses in all its glory.
Operatic vocalization: Marika Borgeson
The filmmaker seems to be asking us to examine the natural world as a kind of materialist poem, from a standpoint inflected by but radically separate from human concern. The film uses improper gate registration as its aesthetic dominant. This technique results in land, sky, and water being subjected to a permanent flutter of instability, which, combined,
with the ongoing surface flecks of the film itself, make distance into something tactile, a feeling that nevertheless entails no solicitation.