Film Categories: Architecture

A group of Muslim women cross a dirt road in an oasis on the Sahara Desert. The camera scans the frosting-like architecture of Venice. “We do not always choose to live where we do, and if we are so lucky as to choose the abode we can not often choose the locale.” A personal history of relations with various environments is the voice-over for a series of optically printed images which were originally shot in Venice and Tunisia.

The “Truths” of this film, which the title prompts, are slightly recognizable patterns of fish and animal biology, plant and flower shapes, and human anatomy which are interwoven with pastel cubes and other geometries – pastels as if “hung” in a white light interwoven with straight and diagonally bent black lines, eventually clear architectural forms. The recognizable patterns are literally etched on black leader (primarily) and interspersed with very organic painted forms on white. There is often an intended sense of hair and mucous membrane amidst these forms and interwoven with the electric “x-ray” sense of bones. The interplay between…

A meneral memory movie, “Blue Venice / Red Hotel” consists of seven loops of B&W film projected at various speeds and re-filmed off the wall; magnified, superimposed, filtered red and blue. The loops were built from “The Red Hotel,” an earlier film and one which was shot at high velocity frame by frame. This new film came out of a desire to explode seconds of Venice that appear in “The Red Hotel.”

Usually studies of faces, objects, machines or abstractions carry a sense of heightening montage. In this case the filmmaker, preferring dramatic effects to anecdotes, is preoccupied less with situating the action in time and space than producing malleable visual material and the aesthetics of montage. The space created in the film presents a neutral architecture, utilitarian and mechanistic, where the protagonists ponder the torrid universe which has been created in their image.