Drift and Bough

Music by Stephen Vitiello + Molly Berg
“Back Again”
from the album “Between You and the Shapes you Take”
Courtesy 12k Filmmaker Lynne Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro. Woven into this cinematic landscape, we hear sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate yet soaring musical track, which seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to the sky. “There I was disarmed by the quiet, unassuming succession of art-photo shots of snowy Central Park, which seemed pretty ordinary, but which again drifted little by little into a richer and richer collection of elements, such as the lines that did various things like scale shifting and–with the lines of duck trails through the ice-pack–lines that “drew” a kind of benign insinuation into a cold world…which seemed to help effect an insinuation into my affect in my reception of the film. By the time the film ends I have been drawn, partially consciously, into a meditative state that I wanted to resist at its beginning. The ending–with the people moving about and the bicycle taxi and camera both drifting to the right–was a slight break in that mood, perhaps because of the people moving about and doing things, but it still maintains some of the meditative mood through my realization that a barely perceptible superimposition of nothing very distinguishable has occurred mysteriously for the first and only time in the film.” Ron Green