Date of Submission

Spring 2012

Academic Program

Film and Electronic Arts

Project Advisor 1

Peggy Ahwesh

Project Advisor 2

Jacqueline Goss

Abstract/Artist's Statement

My short film "Pale Marble Movie" is an exploration of the transference of emotionally resonant memories from one person to another when two people form a relationship and share things with each other.

I began the film as a meditation on the idea of how memories of a relationship take on a dreamlike quality when filtered through the memory, and how when another person shares their memories with you, be they your mother, your lover, or your friend, they become your memories, but are altered by your perception, often becoming heightened, surreal, even dreamlike. I wanted to explore through film the fluidity between a waking and dreaming reality in relation to this idea of memory transference in a relationship.

The film follows a female protagonist over the course of one day that takes place over multiple months and seasons, playing with the way time becomes condensed and expanded upon reflection on the past. The protagonist wanders fluidly through different times and spaces the way we are able to in a dream or memory, while the unidentified narrator relates a series of memories of things another woman shared with her during their relationship. The voiceover found its genesis during a long period of collecting and recording memories from the women and men closest to me in my own life, and is therefore in itself part fiction part non, much the way I perceive memories to be.

With this film I hope to create an evocative portrait of the way it feels to take on someone else's recollections and emotions during the brief or long duration of an intense emotional connection. It is also a portrait of the Hudson river and it's valley, a place I have come to know intimately while living in the town of Tivoli, a place with a unique melancholic timbre, a feeling of holding inherited sadness and beauty, that I wanted to capture through the 16mm medium, and which was a large inspiration for the visual tone and pace of the film. The soundscape and landscape are all very intentionally grounded in those sounds and scapes that I have become intimately connected to and familiar with here. In this way the film is as much a portrait of a place as it is of the many people who have impacted me in my time here, all of them filtered through my lens and the imperfect nature of my memory and perception. Pale Marble Movie, 16mm color, 13 minutes.

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