Time Echoing on the Water, Mirror, and The Straight Man re-edit

Chris Painter 12/1/14 Artist Statement for Mirror, Time Echoing on the Water, and The Straight Man re-edit “If people find out certain things about how something was done, or how this means this or that means that, the next time they see the film, these things enter into the experience. And then the film becomes different. I think it’s so precious and important to maintain that world and not say certain things that could break the experience…People sometimes say they have trouble understanding a film, but I think they understand much more than they realize. Because we’re all blessed with intuition—we really have the gift of intuiting things.” -David Lynch, Excerpt From “Catching the Big Fish.” There are a few important themes which my films have been generally preoccupied with: time, memory, subjectivity, anonymity, and the automatic, mechanical side of human nature. Both of the films I have completed for my senior project as well as The Straight Man[1] are fairly representative in this way. In Mirror[2], the man vacuuming the beach coupled with the last shot of the waves implies eternity, as does the end of The Straight Man and the loop in Time Echoing on the Water. In Mirror, the man’s disregard for the sharpness of the mirrors, as well as the transformation of settings from sand filled room to beach, could be thought of as implying a certain distortion of memory towards objects in this entirely subjective world. I think the medium of Mirror and The Straight Man also have a connection to memory and subjectivity, not because it recalls a different time in film history but because the grain and lack of color recalls for me something more akin to a memory or a dream than something you see in objective, waking life. Complete anonymity of characters and settings has been of central importance in almost every film I have created-anonymous lake, anonymous children, anonymous room, anonymous man, etc. In this way, characters and settings take on a somewhat, but not entirely, “symbolic” meaning. In Mirror and The ...