When dealing with certain conditions of the soul, messages that focus on positivity and improvement are often a well-intentioned but escapist route. This is a film about staying within depression: an attempt to look at how it speaks, at how body and mind behave when gripped by it, at the meaning and value of suffering. Made with material gathered across three years, this film pursues a train of thought by overlaying the movements of daily life with the stasis of an overpowering affect.
Category: My Films & Photographs
This category presents my experiments in photography and filmmaking. It includes either collections of images (mostly overlays), or my little (and not so little) films—often accompanied by introductory texts.
‘Lift’
Filmed inside the most exciting attraction of my little town: a cubicle of one square metre. This film will give you a lift: up and down, up and down. An anti-touristic movie of landscapes, vistas, disseminated reflections, glass and metal. An experiment combining one, two and three screens; a geometrical puzzle of horizontal and vertical lines. Lurches, bumps, pans, and tilts: all to the rhythm of a Kraftwerk medley.
Self-portraits: Veiled
This is a collection of composite photographs. They are done mixing some of my self-portraits with pictures of all kinds of patterns found in different places.
‘A House That A Guest Has Entered’
I guess one makes films with what one has. Some people have ideas, money, ambitions, heroes, well-meaning intentions, a positive message, virtuosity, a voice, friends to call forth, stories to tell or to steal, attachment to a genre, striking images, charms and spells, subterfuges. I have none of these things. This film is made with my suffering, with words that came to land in my heart, with music and images that rose from the pool of my tears.
‘Wetlands’
This film is a reverie entirely composed (except for two twinkles of a shot) of images reflected in water. Images are not just the result of the film, they are its very raw material. My images were already images, even before I shot them. And they were already images overlaid in water, even before I overlaid them in my editing screen...
A Window of One’s Own
This window is a natural collager: a magnet coalescing the reflections of a double-sided mirror into a new, often chaotic, aesthetically challenging, and pictorially fascinating (albeit probably just to me) whole. This is the only screen in the world that grants me a place in its universe for, when I look at it, I am in it. And, when I photograph it, I am—again, imaginatively speaking—with the world and in the picture...
Three Tiny Films: ‘Enjoy the Rain’, ‘Astral Body’, ‘Echo’
Lately, I've been doing some tiny films that are experiments with overlays. I've become quite fascinated by this kind of layer-work. But, sometimes, it just feels redundant to put into words what I'm trying to make in sounds & images. So I'll just introduce my latest three miniatures with stolen quotes. These quotes are not about me, or about my films, obviously; but such is life… Some people inspire others to write; some people inspire others to quote them; some people just put themselves in the quotation's place…
‘Birth’
This is the first film I've made using, entirely, digital superimpositions. I guess you could say that this is a film about my birth. My mother told me once that my father became another person the moment I was born. I believe her because, if I try to remember a time when I might have felt any connection with my father, I can't: it's as if there was never any. I've heard details about that period before, but I've never had a full-on narration by her to which I could re-listen...
‘Playing’
It's a little known fact that Adrian Martin enjoys playing the keyboard and that, sometimes, I enjoy filming him. Normally, what I'll do is listen from another room because our house has great acoustics and, when he plays, the music spreads across the space beautifully. But, occasionally, I get inspired and flutter around with my phone—or, as some people like to say (especially of women): I dabble...