Sunday, June 21, 2009

The Gateway to the Soul




I made this movie freshman year of college and looking over it now I can definitely tell that I made it a while ago, but I still feel like it brings up an important topic, one that I have especially been thinking about lately, so I'd like to share it. It questions the connection between a person's actions and a person's true self. Although I too love the Batman quote, "It's not who I am underneath but what I do that defines me," I feel that this quote is limited. People do things all the time that contradict their very personhood. Having just lost my very best friend to suicide, I have become overly aware of this contradiction. I feel that my attempts to piece together what our friendship was by writing down on paper the things we did together is simply incapable of capturing who we were to each other. I also think his final action to take his life does not relate in any way to the extremely intelligent and caring friend I knew. We love other human beings not because of what they do, but because of who we know them to be within.

In contrast to the other art I make, this is all about the subject matter and less about the actual visual image. I really enjoyed writing the script. Please enjoy it for what it is.

Note: The music that plays throughout the movie is the inversion of the piano music that my sister plays towards the end of the movie. This is yet another one of my attempts to emphasize the erasure of our physical actions. What is interesting in this example is that the inversion of the music does not leave the listener with nothingness, but instead reveals an entirely new song.