The Passage

My video, The Passage, although created for personal reasons, can be seen as a metaphor for any or all of the transitions we are experiencing now, whether that transition is political or emotional, on a large social scale or on a smaller private scale.

The video was made along the Inside Passage (thus the title) on the ferry to Alaska and starts with the boat coming out of the wilderness area and passing scattered houses on its approach to Ketchikan. On the audio, you can hear the throb-throb-throb of the engines throughout the nearly hour-long piece.

This is another in a series of “static films” that I’ve made ever since the videotape days, films that are, in their emotional content, partly a video and partly a still photograph. (Confusingly, my project Static Films, is not a static film.)

Film scholar Justin Remes coined the term “static films” to describe this genre but he also uses another term that may make the nature of these works clearer–furniture film.

A furniture film is a film you don’t really watch in the traditional manner, sitting, facing the screen, popcorn, etc. Instead, it is just playing there on the television, not really in the background but more shaping the “vibe” of the room that it is in, much the same as the role played by furniture in a room. You play furniture films at parties, you play them when you are alone, you play them when you are reading, you play them when you are thinking. Sometimes you just play them.