The Human Condition

A mini-presentation of consciousness dealing with cosmos. The world in a grain of sand. Connections between life, death, and the world are neither static nor symmetrical but flowing and intuitive. The movement of emulsion through which images are seen is like the mind trying to retrieve and put things together. C’est la vie is a positive muscular little thing

This film is about love - relations between men and women, conversations in the air. Men are heard in voice-over speaking a love-talk which is personal, though anonymous, or singular. Another voice-over reads parables, which present a context for the possibility of love or spirit in the world at large. The film ends optimistically: a smile slowly spreads on a man's face. Women addressing men in their own voices.

To get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts - Under this central trope of 'beating', with its combined negative and positive implications, the film brings together the individual personally lived and the communal, historic perspective; hatred and forgiveness; laughing and crying.

Transitions is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being in-between-between falling asleep and being awake, between here and there, between being and non-being. These metaphysical themes are evoked by the central image of a woman in white over which layers of images and sound (voices) are superimposed.

The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its wings tirelessly; a figure (man, boy?) who sits on a hay bale, watching the city below; and a woman in a library who reads only what others have left behind. The filmed images are predominantly houses: houses seen in passing along the horizontal; houses reflecting sky and trees in their windows; houses partially hidden by trees or the shadows they cast; houses and office towers simultaneously pictured in stages of demolition and construction. The images dissolve in and out of the flickering light and dark (sunlight and shadow and the emulsion of the film itself). The site of the self is home. A house is a construct and, per Heidegger, language is the house of being.

"Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses (Your life is like a candle burning). Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles.

A short video documentary by Barbara Sternberg, approximating the dual-screen approach of the titular filmmaker. Brown speaks candidly, is shown in a studio; An excerpt from his film Memory Fade (2009) follows the footage. One of many of Sternberg's interviews with fellow artists.

"Poetry, film, light, life. An excerpt from Rilke's Ninth Elegy [...] evokes the beauty and brevity of life. Images shimmer in an uncanny light. We catch glimpses only."

After Nature, after the Fall, after all - where do we go from here? Digital imagery and optically printed superimpositions combine in a cascading plunge to no(w)here – new beginnings or more of the same?

Our busy comings and goings, on the move, working at life are pictured, but layers of images and scratched emulsion make viewing through the depths an effort. If we scratch the surface, however... Glimpses of other states suggest we can surface.

A bedroom (and life) viewed from the horizontal, while wondering whether to join in the race or wake up to the illusion. The soundtrack quotes from Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans on disillusionment.

The sensual, with its beauty and possibility of decay, is set beside immutable statues of the Virgin Mary. Images from technological viewing of the body's inner invisibilities — x-ray, MRI, electronic, and tarot—-are juxtaposed with external surfaces — artist's renderings of inscrutable Mary. Skin and blood, paint and plaster hint at inner life.

Using only text-on-screen, Love Me distills the emotions of an earlier film, Beating – emotions which conflict, confuse, are difficult to reconcile. The texts ‘speak’ unsaid and unsayable thoughts, impolitic or just impolite. Suppressed exclamations from past injustices, hurts, angers surface, interrupting, erupting, demanding attention.

Constructed with repetitions and variations, in reference to the musical form of a Nocturne, “Far From” is an accumulation of layers, a density of living, the noise of existence. Ghosts of lives lived and traces of lives being lived, rising.