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THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

By David Finkelstein | December 22, 2003

In this short, black and white collage film, we see a man staring, covering and uncovering his eyes, and pointing a movie camera. We see high contrast black and white stills of fences and earthenware sculptures which are “panned and scanned.” We see bare branches against a white sky. Many of these images have been hand-processed so that they are engulfed by flares of white light or criss-crossed by white lines. The soundtrack is a collage of very distinct, identifiable sounds: a typewriter, a ticking clock, a heartbeat.
As the title suggests, the film seems to be a celebration of vision itself, of how light and darkness come together to make images, which, like the film’s sounds, each have a distinct individuality which make up the texture and experience of life.

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