ARISE! WALK DOG EAT DONUT

"Very simply the piece is about going on... going on in the face of It. And about winding up where one began. We begin with a sort of reminiscence, projecting film footage from twenty years ago. We end by revisiting the landscape of that earlier footage, suggesting, I suppose, that over the years we often don’t come very far from where we begin. The principal imagery is an urban landscape study; the vaguely glimpsed public-transit riders of the New York subway and the Berlin S-Bahn. Here another crossing and connecting; a familiar landscape but in distant locales, alike and distinct at the same time. One leaves, one travels, but finds its always the same images one is drawn to. The text (the subtitles), the banal meditation on lifes transcience and loss, are the possible translation of the ballad’s lyrics; while each time the same song plays its text is different and so perhaps the question of texts authenticity. Finally the film borrows a piece of the soundtrack from Fellini’s 8 1/2, the critics scathing critique of self-indulgent art. (But what else is art?) And in the end the landscapes merge, the cottages parade and the subways dance by... Beyond all this, or beside it, it’s the rhythms and the pure beauty of the images, the ghosts in the trains and the symphony of these machines, their layers of reflections and framings, the way they merge and diverge, and the orchestration of their sounds, and how much like trains the trails of thoughts are, and how our lives pass by like the landscapes." (Ken Kobland) “Footage shot from the New York IRT and the Berlin S-Bahn are shifted and shuffled, interpenetrating in space and time with enthralling dexterity, leaving us “a drift between the familiar and the strange,” while personal diary entries, a Russian ballad and dubbed dialogue from 8 ½ are rehearsed to conjure a sense of futility and impasse in the mundane rituals of daily life.” (New York Video Festival 1999)