Foreground

There are certain characteristics that my work shares with the work of other artists, not all of them in film. One is a concern with perceptual ambiguity, with subjects whose presence has more than one explanation. Finding the point at which content is both unstable and balanced led me to the use of multiple images laid over one another. This was not new, of course, even at the time, but it is not an area many filmmakers have chosen to pursue, perhaps because doing so tends to hamper the flow of montage. My interest in relationships between elements in static shots has led me to make films that either have no cuts, or that have pauses between shots. It comes from my background with the still image. I am satisfied with a static camera and minimal movement. Combining imagery is also something that is difficult to do without re-photographing the original elements. The means of doing this have been largely unavailable to filmmakers, and that has tended to make it seem needlessly technical. Nowadays, combined imagery is all over the place: music videos, network promotional graphics, commercials, God knows what. Some of it very well done, beautiful even, but, of course, all of it sponsored by some corporate entity or other. Did I have anything to do with that? Perhaps, indirectly. What can you do that won't eventually be redigested in that way? At this stage I just look at what I'm doing and try to forget everything else. All you can do is keep on.