WIthin
(March 2012) 16mm 8:30
CAST: Jamaica Plain
Robert Todd

Processed and Printed at AlphaCine

An in-camera construction that sustains a complex condition: keeping the inner world alive as the camera looks "out" upon the world. The film emerges from an interior that drifts increasingly deeper into the penumbra, entering a space that lacks firm definition, where forms dissolve into the darkness, confusing both scale and distance. As the film finds its way to the light reflecting off of exterior elements, it employs real-time complications (shooting through both transparent and reflective materials) to bring the internally-directed way of feeling space along with it, filtering perception to conjure sensations of an imagined, rather than literal, outer world. In fact my aim was to entwine the two.

Rather than looking either at a figure or at what some imaginary figure might be looking AT, "Within" lives in a state that seems to resist perspectival definition, hovering somewhere between what is "out there" and an internally defined image space that is at once shallow and deep, layered and reflective, barely there and yet very much alive. It is twilight.

- RT