Gravitational Pull: A Filmmaker in the Orbit of the Modernist Sun

Abstract

The massive, still-burning modernist sun exerts a powerful gravitational pull on my filmmaking, setting me in orbit around the modernists in its core. Arcing solar flares of filmic and poetic modernism burst out at me: Maya Deren’s cine-poems, rhythmic editing, elisions of time/space; Ezra Pound’s imagism, T.S. Eliot’s objective correlatives. The form-expanding classical reception of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) in Helen in Egypt sparks my imagination and experimentation in my film grounded in the Homeric view of Penelope.As I continue my orbit, there are more modernists pulling on me: Alain Resnais with his enigmatic editing structures and entanglements of memory; Michelangelo Antonioni’s emotional color and form present as objective correlatives, which lead me back full circle. One bright solar flare draws me repeatedly to Chris Marker’s La Jetée, in which a powerful image of the past fractures history. As I continue making films informed by and incorporating my receptions of the past, I remain warmed by the modernist sun’s force of attraction