Expanding Cinema

A young boy has developed an ability to see through walls, much to the consternation of his stuffy Victorian parents.

Based on the stage play Passages from Finnegans Wake, itself based on random passages from Finnegans Wake, Mary Ellen Bute's adaptation is a comical, avant-garde kaleidoscope about a man named Finnegan who dreams about his wake and then wakes up from his dream.

To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music's rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates and a set of many of them rises.

Parabola is a celebration of film’s ability to create new ways of seeing the forms around us. Creating juxtapositions between light/shadow, stasis/motion, and form/music, this black-and-white short invites us to see the parabolic curve, or “nature’s poetry,” as both invigorating and beguiling.

An Expanded Cinema Aktionpainting Performance at Museo Hermann Nitsch, Naples, Italy, where art, wrestling and food play important roles.