Polished obsidian mirrors, tezcatl, were once used in ancient Mexico for divination, to traverse into the worlds of the gods and ancestors.
Through the obsidian mirror, the solar and lunar ritual used to be a celestial dance. In Ritual, suns and moons whirl around, glowing brighter as their paths cross.
Reeves explores his personal journey to seek the center of existence through the teachings of Eastern religions. India is the source of images for his message about the eternal wheel of existence—life and its continuous process of change.
“Reeves uses a digital imaging technique… in which images seem to be composed of a series of almost fragmented yet fluid stills, and all movement becomes a procession of shadows.... This gives a powerfully ethereal quality to the piece, one that underscores the theme of human existence.”
This is the contained power of the sacred seeds, the vibration of the ancient seeds of corn and their passage through an ocean of pulsating luminosity. A germinal liturgy of holy seeds.
This tape addresses spiritual closure. Video gave me a chance to examine, see, and celebrate the seven spiritual venues, paths, and journeys that I have made: 1) Catholic life, 2) nun's life, 3) yoga life, 4) Buddhist life, 5) feminist life, 6) natural life, 7) life. Publicly, I am admitting that I am a spiritual materialist—been there, done that—but I am also saying that all of my spiritual experiences have worked together to prepare me for even deeper journeys combining all of the sacred technologies I have learned so that I can re-invent my own way.
In 1991 Montano met a Hindu couple at Ananda Ashram, the meditation center she attends in upstate New York. Since then, the three have become friends. Mr. and Mrs. Mehta are Ayruvedic doctors; both physically resemble another Indian couple—saints Sharada and Ramakrishna, who lived in Calcutta in the 1800s—and are both known for their incredible devotion to the mystical life. Montano made this postmodern documentary to honor the Mehtas, to present an idealized model for a spiritual relationship and to hold out the possibility for spiritual ecstasy in everyday life.
A call from the beginning, the ancestral water, the everlasting belly from where life cries out.
Some Ghosts incorporates embroidery and stop-motion animation techniques to create a colorful dreamscape in which an unwitting spaceman releases angry spirits from a haunted medicine cabinet.
Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice.
Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice.
Prophecies of doom, disaster and political catastrophe envisioned by some of the world’s most famous psychics between the 1960’s and the year 2001 are conjured up through 3D-animation, industrial films, text and historical footage -- the sum of which combine to form a visually stunning meditation on the forces that are driving us into a dark, paranoid and uncertain future. Soothsayer reconsiders yesterday’s daunting and sometimes whimsical predictions for the future after they’ve been outpaced by time.
Strip / Musrara is part of Assor's ongoing “Strip” series, set in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood. It is an attempt to create a living map that is both collective and subjective – a plurality of combined perspectives. Not a map of the exact measurements of the neighborhood, but of the experience of moving through it, together and alone, locals and strangers, intersecting and drifting apart.
This suite is a set of circular and fragmented compositions, in which a rhythmic and haunted dance hides an eroded lunar landscape. The microscopic rubble of our contemporary civilization. Part of the Lunar Films series.
The violent overreaction to 9/11 and to the revolutions of the 1960s cannot be explained only with fear and politics. Franz Hinkelammert, a German-born liberation theologian, economist and philosopher, brings religion front and center to the discussion in a unique way. The emptiness and senselessness felt by those at the margins of a free-market utopian ideology has been filled by an extreme millenarian Christianity and other religious fundamentalisms that justify murder and torture as preemptive self-defense.
Taste the delicious colors of "SWEET NOTHINGS" and observe the dice of desire being tossed on a gambler’s bed like yesterday’s candy. See tomorrow’s chocolate bunny melt into a brown puddle and feel a sticky, rainbow colored lolly-pop thats stuck to six feet of skin that secrets pent up passions... It’s all here for you to eat and is guaranteed to fatten your eyes!!
A documentation of a performance/installation. Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes created a fictional religion based on inter-cultural confessions. Exhibiting themselves in Plexiglas boxes as "end-of-the-century saints", the two performers hear the confessions of audience members willing to reveal their intercultural fears and desires to the saints.
A collage piece. Oppositions of agony and ecstasy are explored. Morticia trims yet another rose stem, while Bugs Bunny takes up Zen. Guilt-wracked, a nun tries furtively to cleans herself of imagined sin. Or attain spiritual release. Various divas flail to no avail. Lips, lipstick, frozen lips. Shakuhachi music by Chris Moran sets the mood, when there isn’t a thunderstorm raging.
Behind the yellow gates is a realm that sparkles like diamonds under a desert sun. It is a realm ablaze with outrageous flowers, fragrant and poisonous… A realm populated by bare skin scared by flashing swords and marked with stone idols… It is that subterranean consciousness; a land of Mind-in-Time that sends unholy incense up toward Heaven.
These are the dancing bodies in an agitated rapture: prelude to trance, invocation of the gods, consecration of intermittence. Here our point of view sparkles under the spell and trance of things gathered, fallen, yielding, pluvial, Mesoamerican wind, goddess breath, breeze of sticks. percussive woods.
Time Bomb tells the story of a young girl's experience at a Baptist retreat, where she is called upon to accept Jesus into her life after a coercive game of terror. This piece explores memory, the power of crowds, rituals of conversion, and the isolation of a child lost in the world of adults. Fear and family values motivate action and create an empty arena for escape. Visually, Time Bomb proceeds through a sequence of images that figure the "light" of memory as simultaneously revelatory and obscuring, constructive and destructive.
Time Bomb tells the story of a young girl's experience at a Baptist retreat, where she is called upon to accept Jesus into her life after a coercive game of terror. This piece explores memory, the power of crowds, rituals of conversion, and the isolation of a child lost in the world of adults. Fear and family values motivate action and create an empty arena for escape. Visually, Time Bomb proceeds through a sequence of images that figure the "light" of memory as simultaneously revelatory and obscuring, constructive and destructive.
Tlecáxitl is the sacred furnace where the new fire begins. This is the place where the sun, the moon and fire coincide in their cosmic dance to unleash vital irradiation. Part of Tonalli.
“Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.” NYFF59
Tortillas are an ancestral and sacred food, our transmuted corn. The circular nourishment that represents the luminous and colorful side of the moon on which our life is nourished. This is the cosmic dance of the colorful Tortilla with the hyperkinetic fire that sustain our bodies and souls. Part of the Lunar Films series.