antechamber
(2008) 16mm, 11:30
Appearing: diana, a temple, rising

Help from the Bolex and Cine Labs.
thanks to First Unitarian Universalist Church of Jamaica Plain

I had it in mind to make a film in spaces that were meant to inspire spiritual reflection, not really aware that I needed to "explore" them for my own very personal reasons. The gentleness of the dark, like a place of glowing embers...that's what I found there.

I think of the film as a performance - the tracing, the drifting through the air, these things also refer to a childhood state of wandering that accompanied these churchish visits, the sense of being placed in a holding area, a carnival space that might inspire some movement to the spiritual, eventually, always later...and what will it be like when we arrive?

Those are the sentiments that overcame me as I sprawled my cameramind out among the stoney floor-tiles, murming my Bolexian incantations to my close-knit version of the heavens, knowing full well that what we create is the spirit light, the stained glass of color film projected onto another wall, far away in space and time, and to create it, we are directed to focus, waiting in our antechamber, shooting through one, and letting the process unfold through us into a future of unknowable bliss, blandness, terrors and revelations.

All rise.

- RT