A Leaf Is the Sea Is a Theater

Potential Northwestern fellow Tess Harper lasers through her best friend's wedding planning like the star doctor she hopes to soon become. In fact, Tess puzzles through any problem - provided it's not her own. When she meets divorce lawyer and groom's best friend, Michael, Tess maneuvers around him like a gurney in the emergency room until she discovers this best man has a few moves of his own.

A visual essay about the progressive tradition of the United States as seen through grave markers and monuments.

In order to beat inflation and subsidize their alimony checks, three suburban housewives plot to steal $1 million from a large plastic ball which is displayed in a local shopping center.

Darcy Blake has the perfect job – she works for Harrington House, a successful greeting card company, in the editorial department. Writing heart-felt, meaningful copy for cards is very important to Darcy, especially at Christmas, which was important to her as a young girl. She realizes that she is a bit out of step with her fellow millennials but that is fine with Darcy. Everything is about to change when Andrew Harrington arrives at the company to take over from his grandfather and he has a very different view of the holidays.

Schwartz explores the effect of light as both mystery and revelation. Glazed water in erubescent evenings discloses the shadowed details of the streets of Istanbul.

‘With a car from 1966-1977 and a manual for violence prevention, you drive. The distance is now your compass so follow the shadows to your resting spot. Or: I was wondering if sincerity could override irony and flood out some emotions from our past. Then - all for the extension of time, follow the echo, it might disappear into the clouds.’

«Swimming or fluidly moving in pattern - like lust or love or something weird. A communication halt: cue the apes to speak or make music». - JS

Refers to Schwartz’s grandfather-in-law’s age during the making of the film–an anniversary celebrated with the gift of piloting a U.S. army light aircraft, the kind he used to maneuver in the Second World War. While he rises and falls, watched by the impassive but attentive look of a woman who could be his wife, he is the protagonist of a flight into the past. Again, there is tension emphasized by an impending sound in crescendo, this time the one of the jet engine. This jump into the void is a recurrent creative preoccupation that might refer to distance, wounds, and risks.

(Maybe) of finding neutral signs in a non-neutral place while tension sits, increases, is shared, builds, or possibly lessens–or maybe is placed elsewhere for a while. Some birds move easily across, from above. You can hear them all over and the breeze that follows feels important. It comes when it wants, breaks up a heat, pauses something, and interrupts without being seen.

A film with a hypnotizing sense of diagonal light and movement. The title refers to the 1917 Hermann Hesse short story, part of his collection of fairy tales.

Situated amid the in between of ascending and descending. It seems hard to land and when this happens something else might disappear.

Light painting and nature imagery are captured in 13 shots of different points of luminescence, on the 13th anniversary of Schwartz’s mother’s passing, and as a homage to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s personal 'In a Year with Thirteen Moons' (1978).

That fall it was not intentional to have a Galway Kinnell book on the table near where the caterpillar in the doorway, feeding on our offerings, became the butterfly, feeding on honey water, staying in our house until we let it go. Or it was not known about the deer in Putney or that the baby birds in the raspberry bushes would cry to us in summer. A beloved, old friend once visited Vermont to do some work for Galway Kinnell and she described a stone table in the field where they ate meals in the afternoon - it sounded like a song and so I looked at the book and from Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight here is that line: “The still undanced cadence of vanishing”.

“hit the slopes with colorful exaggerations, take a long sleep, and hope to wake up without an anxious yawn.” – JS

It's an ironically dark response to its title. It pictures an oversaturated, white and blue stop motion animation of the double image of a man jumping into a river, holding his nose before the final splash. A bug appears for less than a second, making an almost subliminal connection. The act of falling becomes a figurative abstraction, while the entire image gets transformed into dark blue obscurity. -Monica Savirón

An experimental short by Jonathan Schwartz, which is part of the 33 1/3 series.