Light Shaft1975

This is probably my first film to really deal with what became my obsessive attachment with visual ambiguities. The theater is a black place after all where the ritualistic ray of light's main function is to reveal other places. This idea of "showing" the reproduction of another place has become so expected that it seems only inevitable to tamper with it. Here this tampering process of recognition results in ambiguities between notions of solidity and space, the inner and outer limits of the screen, directions, movements and others which mingle into unforeseen expectations, while a small wedged screen of light probes as the impossible window into the dark. -V.G.

“Light Shaft” diagonally crosses the screen with a wedged light formation, usually on the diagonal. Its variations are rendered through arrangements of the tripod while panning the camera. Limiting the viewer's attention to a smaller screen, a point in space, allows for a certain confusion as to whether the rest of the (dark) screen blends itself into the surrounding blackness or is just a window ino it.

This is more apparent when the “wedged light” goes out of the frame. It can be felt as if crossing the room; and it reappears at the opposite end of the frame. Sometimes it just makes a turn and comes back. The form and size of the light are influenced by movements of other objects, thereby shifting the impressionof materiality between itself and its edges. (VG), CFMDC