Love and Light · Music Video · Super8 transferred to digital · 2011
Premiere at Pitchfork TV – October 2011
“Love and Light” video aims to explore the relation between a musician and filmmaker and their personal reflection on memories. From Pedro Maia’s super 8 home movies archive, this video results from the work in the dark room, using analogue means of light manipulation of the film in attempted to don’t allow us to forget the materials. Here are elusive shadows, the delicate materials turning and strobing and shaking as if to emphasize the fragility of the look, the fragility of these family films compacts have come apart at last, and in their dissolution, in the dying moments of their foreclosure and abandonment, these pictures have been left behind.
Love and Light · music by Sandro Perri
Impossible Spaces · Constellation Records · 2011
www.cstrecords.com/cst085
www.sandroperri.com
“What a work of beauty here, a brilliant pairing of Toronto multi-instrumentalist and super-smooth singer Sandro Perri with Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Maia (whom you may remember from this). Together, the two explore the concept of memory, presenting us with questions we’ve all perhaps considered at one point in our lives: When we see an old photo or film, how does it make us feel and why? How do we make a memory last even longer or enhance our experience with it? And most importantly, what happens when we’re able to manipulate it?
For Maia, the physical evidence of a captured moment in time is the key to understanding our relationship to memory. So he uses super 8 film from his personal archives and exposes the footage to light using analog methods, then edits together a collage of colorful bits like the one you’re about to watch below. This kind of manipulation of the medium itself reminds me of a number of things. First, Stan Brakhage and the film from film (not necessarily a lens) approach. But also someone like DJ Shadow comes to mind, as weird as that might seem (especially considering the content of both the video and song… hang in there with me). This is yet another example of sampling. It is a reappropriation/reusing of something old and static—a cataloged “artificat” that is refigured into a new context, juxtaposed, doubled, colorized, swirled and effected to create something new. When those things are accomplished, it is revealed that in reality, nothing is as static, solid or stationary as we once thought. Rather, everything is “becoming” in a Deleuzian sort of way. “Memory” is now a living, breathing thing where moments of the past no longer exist as being-that-moment only. And though these images are delicate and their fragilities are enhanced with the strobing and the trembling… they are also forever. There is a new moment—a becoming-memory moment. A Frankesteined pastiche of the once dead, filled with the breath of new life to remind us of those things in the past while also presenting us with an obscured, totally new happening in real-time. It is a new perspective that is, while familiar, also alien and of course (especially in this case) very beautiful.
… and the music. Yeah, this song is really good. I’m a sucker for a nice samba feel, and this about the nicest of those I’ve heard in years, all painted in deep, autumnal shades. Tight drumming, lovely guitar, and of course the voice—this kid’s just got it. A gorgeous tone coupled with some cool beat-boxy types of sound effects. The total package is more than worth not even four minutes of your busy day. Click that play button. Full screen, headphones… you know the drill.”
Crawford Philleo
Tome to the Weather Machine
06/10/2011