Hello Thomas Roberts!
I can see that your film has deep and a spiritual meaning as well. Very nice! Can you tell us more about what inspired you to create this film?
Hi! it's been an extremely busy summer for me and I have not had much time to check up on this site. I appreciate the response!
To answer your question. The film was a project for a class on comedy! The project I made was obviously not comedic in nature, but is rooted in many of the psychoanalytic thinkers we viewed comedy through during the class. Lacan's ideas of Lack and Excess were the main drivers in the project, with Todd Mcgowan's "Only a Joke Can Save Us" (
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv47w7ff) providing the connection between Lacan and comedy within film.
In it's most basic form, we become lacking upon entrance into a social order, and in order to amend this, we partake in excessive activities. Lacan puts this at the forefront of our psychological development.
As it relates to my film, I followed Lacan and his theories back to their roots, and got to larger questions about the development of our psyche. The main one of this being whether or not we as a species developed this existential lack due to humanities apparent connection to a higher power, or in a cyclically churning development of an imperfect language (we can articulate a question about a transcendent God, but we will never be able to articulate an answer). So I created a character in the painter who is completely severed from the normal social order (taken at birth). The film became a highly personal meditation on these questions, and as such, is more powerful in it's contradictions. The biggest being that of the painters motivation to leave, how could someone who has no conscious memory of an outside world build up the desire to escape? and why is this not reproduced in the other captive who decides to stay behind?
I very much like to make films in which I get to the questions I never can concretely answer myself, and trying my best to represent these in a filmic world, this sometimes can make my films a little incoherent, but nonetheless, I hope that in some form; the stream and the painting took on meaning for the audience members, or maybe there was a connection found to the painter, and the situation he was in; restricted by the most powerful of social orders.
Thanks again for the response! Hope you enjoyed the film!
