Starring Zhanna. Pomolusya ("I Will Pray") Ukranian Prayer performed by Zhanna, recorded and mastered by Zak May. Excepts from "Lyrical" and "Chaos" from the tribe recording of Gabrielle Roth and the Mirrors with permission from Raven Recording

Inspired by the novel FLICKER by Theodore Roszak, this film was intended to explore the images captured in the flickering light of multiple projector beams. By utilizing superimpositions within the camera, one could experience the pulsating light and explore hidden imagery through use of the "Sally Rand" that Roszak refers to.

However, once production began...the projector beams began to put both myself and my actress into a trance state due to the strobe light it presented...the resulting film turned into a trance by natural evolution and in essence the film becomes even more...

It becomes an exploration into oneself and the sense of seeing and being at the same time...both an inward journey and an outward one...

"Transient
Illusive
Soft
Flowing
Loving
Dissolving
Trusting
Focusing
Praying
Allowing
Igniting
Embodying
Burning
Disintegrating
Abandoning
Surrendering
Revealed
Taken Over
Consumed"
--Zhanna


Reviews

"Angerame's experiment with stroboscopic cinema, a kind of trance film inspired by Theodore Roszak's novel Flicker, interweaves eroticism and orientalism anew in the ecstatic performance of a dancer (Zhanna Kleiman) before the camera. Kleiman is exposed naked in the flickering light, percussive composition, and Angerame's frenetic montage, which merges its protagonist (literally from top to bottom) into a vision that flows seamlessly from the concrete to the abstract and back into the concrete. This montage layers the ritualistic movement studies of the heroine's body within each other so that they attain an artificial, graphic quality."

from an article by Stefan Grissemann

"Set mostly to a soundtrack of chant and percussion, Consume displays an idea of ritual, a concept of dance, and depicts the elusive power of the projected image."

from Flickhead review by Ray Young

This powerful, compelling film depicts a trance state from a radically subjective point of view. It is the only film I've ever seen which manages to convey so strongly what it feels like, from the inside, to enter into such a state."

from Film Threat review by David Finkelstein

"Dominic Angerame's CONSUME represents a successful example of using formal strategies. The black and white film focuses on the rhythmic movements of a female dancer. The image of the dance appears in layers, superimposed over itself, and has a soft, tactile quality. As the film progresses, the contrast in the image increases, until finally it transforms into abstract black and white shapes. The movement from legibility to abstraction and back again creates a visceral experience, one that is underscored by the percussion-based soundtrack. CONSUME captures the fickle nature of memory: concrete and clear, partial and blurred, intense and fleeting."

Dina Ciraulo

"By way on an elegant invocation of the merely probable meanings of lost histories and ethnic otherness as manifest in the hand signalings of a dancing muse rippling towards us as if to kiss the head of a king cobra, we're soon left floating and alone only to realize -- and here is the rub, that the king and not beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and this, being you, the viewer, is about to be torn apart like the yearling consorts of great antiquity.

A bloody good time is to be had for all. After setting us up at the haunted banquet of all but lost meanings, we're given just enough time to realize that we're the gypsies, the gypsies of love lost and shredded contexts. And we're drawn out of the shadowy curtains of the far east, out of Indonesia, through Sufiland and the Great Hungarian Plain, past the Ukraine and into Africa again, thrown in some Cuba and Haitian Voodoo, if you will, until you realize eventually that it is you who've become the subject of this dissembling smorgasbord down the gullible and into the belly of the beast we go, down, going down for the count of love.

Before you can scarcely catch your breath, suddenly the feast and is bleeding and you're bloody it. You're fully awake now and love's tearing you apart. Your body is becoming the Serenghetti of appetite, in savageness, the ground of being itself alive, eating itself numb into satiety, blindness, night. Just hang on. This too shall pass out. Wake up and smell the coffin. Egypt can't be that far off. The bottom line. The ground floor of the pyramid scheme. You can count on Isis in a crisis, brother. She'll have you in stitches come the Spring. Limbs rise up laughing with the disinterred perfumes of loss and renewal. But right now you'll have to chill into something Tibetan. And remember to say tanka. Tankas for everything. And Kaliuga to you too, yearling. And yes, I'm happy to have been of use. Bon appetit. And I didn't really know, it's true, that I could be a twelve course meal for you. You all, I mean. No, I promise, nothing personal. I won't take any of this personally. Let's keep it simple. Whatever it takes then, after all, to be restored to this throne of blood and light."

Ronald F. Sauer

"The film portrays really well the metamorphosis of the individual into a sort of resonating form of energy released from its body and completely unaware of its surroundings...the trance state that is induced after listening to mind-altering music for some period of time. The movements, gyrations, and expressions look as if the body is reproducing every layer of the music, and after seeing this for a while, I can almost hear the music just by watching the trance dance. The visuals of the woman in motion are perfectly in tune with the shamanic tribal music in the background. Almost as if she was a visual plug-in for some audio media player...especially when the body becomes distorted in the black/white sequence to the point that all you see is remnants of a human form, as if she had merged with the aid of the trance music into the surrounding medium and was just a vibration in the fabric of spacetime. " - Leo Goldfine

Screenings:

Cal Arts, Valencia, CA 2005
Anthology Film Archives, New York, 2005
Los Angeles Film Forum, 2005
Recontres Internationales PARIS/BERLIN, Paris 2004
14th Semana De Cine Experimental de Madrid, Madrid (Spain) and in Lima (Peru) 2004 (description)
Turino Film Festival, Italy, 2004 (description)
Impackt Film Festival, Utrecht (The Netherlands) 2003
Dokument Art, Germany 2003
European Art Media Mix, Osnabruck (Germany) 2003
XHX, Marseille (France) 2003
Video X, Zurich (Germany) 2003
Film Arts Festival, San Francisco (USA) 2003
San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco (USA) 2003
Film Arts Foundation Film Festival, San Francisco (USA) 2003
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (USA) 2003
Alternative Television Access, San Francisco (USA) 2003
303 Club, San Francisco, (USA) 2003
Robert Beck Memorial Theatre, New York City (USA) 2003
The International Experimental Cinema Exposition, Colorado Springs (USA) 2003