"A Film" by Hisham Bizri

This is a film poem about love. A Lebanese-American filmmaker photographs a woman in Paris: as a trapeze artist, a model, a lover, and a child. The film attempts to capture that moment between wakefulness and dream. It carries within it melancholy and loneliness, sadness and joy, adulthood and childhood. It evolves out of the metaphor that life is a circular journey whose end is "to arrive where we started / And know that place for the first time" (T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding).

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Hisham Bizri
• A Film
• Avant-Garde Cinema
• Cinema and Poetry
• Paris
• New York
• Women
• Love
• Debussy
• Claude Debussy
• Preludes
• Desire
• Fashion
• Circus
• Dreams
• The Moon
• Trees
• Childhood
• Dancing

[oohadoh]

Beautiful melange of scene!! Great choice of vintage clips!!

[erindawn22]

the dance, the body, the trapeze, the woman. a movement creating space, a space that is then re-created as the body of a city. images that return us to the body, its time and movements... allow the eye to reattach itself to the bodies sense. Oscillating between the voyeurism of the eye observing the body (reminding us fo the mediation of the camera) and a rhythmic collapse of distance, into a dance in which the eye grows legs and we swing through the air into the dreams of childhood.

[MedlyofThorns]

...a woman, captured by camera through door ajar, leans to adjust her clothing in what one might consider rooms behind a theatre stage. Magnificent. Of all life, all moments of shadow and light, this was held so perfectly. Then waves. It doesn't need reason to exist.

What a film.

[wobeeman]

A hauntingly beautiful piece of filmic art. The images rendered in positive and negative are beautifully juxtaposed against an evocative Debussy score. The city looms as a dreamscape drawing the viewer's imagination in polysemic engagement.

[wraaum]

A beautiful haunting dreamlike film that creates a powerful bond between the watcher and the watched...those that witness and those that do...and the possibilities and desires that lie within us all...a film that seems to float somewhere between the past and the future. I loved it.

[kentbares]

A beautiful poem. The music is a particularly powerful part of the film for me.

[001IMED]

While problematizing the voyeuristic gaze of the camera, the filmmaker navigates with great comfort between different genres: silent, noir,documentary, and musical. Skillfully, he escapes the conventional modes of production to offer a hybrid film that is very artistic and symbolically charged.

[001IMED]

The determination to continue the journey, persistently move forward, and renew

this vanishing curiosity and desire to find love appear to be dominant

themes in this film. Beyond the circularity of time and its constraints,

the scenes convey a straight forward movement expressed through the sky,

open space, water, birds, freefall, and dance.

[001IMED]

Clearly an existential journey that probes into the deepest layers of a

dream –like experience, imagination, emotional malaise, and impossible

reconciliation between these fragmented moments within the dream.

[moremangosteen]

Really enjoyed use of historical footage, dialectical montage and music to create mood and atmosphere and communicate something uplifting about the power of spectacle. Bravo!