Vapor Drama

(2000)

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16mm film (b/w) 7 minutes, 2000

Music: Gavin Bryars  (excerpt from “Farewell to Philosophy”)

A disembodied woman wanders, trance-like, through an impossible landscape of paper-thin buildings.  Her cyclical approach and retreat is echoed in the film’s cirdadian rhythms, as her figure doubles and redoubles in an atmospheric world of  zero gravity.  Shot in grainy black and white (16mm), and conjuring elements of 1920’s film vocabulary, Vapor Drama explores presence and negation through its emphasis on the emphemerality of film itself.  At times, through many generations of rephotography, the image of the performer (New York performance artist Salley May) becomes difficult to decipher; she appears to disappear, willingly, into the fabric of the cinematic space.

Selected Screening history:
Museum of Modern Art “Premieres” (2004)
Chicago Filmmakers (2004)
First Person cinema, Boulder, CO (2006)
Redcat (2005)