experimental film maker
currently living on earth
INSTALLATION
( sun , burn )
dilation
refracting
FILM + VIDEO
overture
bodyleak
info
overture (2025)
6 minutes 36 seconds
Hand-processed Super 8 film, black and white, with sound
featuring movement by Lynnea Holland-Weiss
This film features text from "How Fossils Form" by the National Park Service.
Marking the beginning of a sustained practice with the bodily materiality of analog film, and held by sustained, kinesthetic research into interspecies relationships with death and decay, OVERTURE is an open(ing) inquiry into how organisms (photo)synthesize and (de)compose time.
The film opens with a single sentence, a proposal:
other times, all that remains is a trace of that organism,
like a fossil footprint in wet sand
This opening – itself a kind of overture – alludes to the ways in which organisms sometimes leave no physical residue during decay. The film overlays movements of a human figure — indexed by the presence of hands — with the bodies of trees, moss, rocks, and sky. There is interspecies touch, marked by the human hand touching the skin surfaces of other life forms, and through the touching of images suggested by the layering of images. Images are superimposed onto one another, invoking layers of sedimentation over time. These layered images are chronological inversions of one another; one layer moves in a forward orientation, and one moves in reverse; yet, the ‘correct’ directionality is indiscernible. Much of the film is presented as the negative, calling forth the ways in which we make meaning through absence and residue.
OVERTURE is (also) a meditation on interspecies relationships; on how we touch and move (with) one another. It is a reflection on disintegration and loss. As images are layered, they become less legible, even when their original form is retained underneath.
Here I am thinking about sedimentation, and the way bodily impressions, like fossils, are both lost and preserved through processes of decay and decomposition.
It begins with one loop, moving forward, shown as positive images. In the next round, there is a second layer superimposed, but parts are cut off; lost. With sedimentation comes loss of information, missing time, gaps in the record. With every cycle, there is repetition and recall, but there is decay. Gradually, the composite image becomes more and more distorted: harder to see, contradicting the idea that repetition induces familiarity. Sometimes matter decomposes beyond recognition, becomes something new.
Images are interspersed with more text about fossilization. The text posits that individual organisms are relatively unlikely to be preserved as fossils, but the collective fossils of life that is preserved is important for creating a record of life on Earth. Through the film, the text moves. It oscillates forwards and backwards. It appears, disappears, and reappears. It moves from the center of the image - itself becoming an overlay - to sitting below the images. Arhythmic in pace, and with the occasional error, the text appears to be written by a person, offering a sense of intimacy and subjectivity embedded within what is taken to be scientific information.
How is movement fossilized? Can movement be fossilized? Fossilization suggests fixedness, but it is actually a process of transformation, ever changing.
OVERTURE contends with the material, ecological, and alchemical processes of fossilization and sedimentation. It considers the way images both harden and degrades over time, as new materials are layered.
There is touch. The film is imperfect. The cuts are abrupt. There are evident light leaks. The materiality of the film is important to the work. The image is diminished, brought down in scale, to reflect the ways in which the odds of an individual organism becoming a fossil are quite small. to reflect the relative smallness of a single life.
But small does not mean insignificant.
The film is hand processed, in a condition that is unpredictable and not without imprecision. The film is vulnerable, subject to conditions that weather and mark it; conditions that reduce the fidelity of the images and forms they hold. Paralleling fossilization, the film is exposed to elements that change its appearance, its materiality, and the way it is perceived and experienced. Within the process of preservation, there is loss.