I once was asked what kind of films I would like to make. I made some dramatic stupid response that I wanted to make films that felt like an open wound. Well I a couple of weeks ago I saw a film that is pretty much that.
During the Chicago Underground Film Festival I got a drunken call in the middle of the night telling me that I really needed to see "A Body without Organs". Oh boy what a ride it was. I've never seen anything like it. It's as outsider you get. I'm not sure if its released yet but here is the blurb from CUFF.
A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS
Stephen Graves, 81 min., Video, 2012, USA
A Body without Organs speaks in a continual present tense, unfolding as a day in the lives of my parents. This tense is a supple present, allowing space for all of the dreams and all of the pasts, real and imagined, which together inform our experience of any present moment. How does one conceive of the present in a body steeped in dreams, when the dream worlds refuse to lift, refuse to dissipate upon waking, but instead cling on as a veneer? And what is the present to a body undergoing an eternal, internally imposed incarceration, whose friends are all ghosts in dreams, whom nobody visits, who sleeps all day and paints all night?
Thirteen years had passed since the operation in which my father's colon was removed. Thirteen years since he had shuttered his practice as a physician, and the start of the pain caused by conditions resulting from and exacerbated by the surgery. I was eight years old at the time of that operation, and twenty-one when we started to film together.
My mother also stopped working, instead devoting herself full-time to taking care of her crippled partner and growing son. As years passed, once-vibrant relationships outside of the marriage faded away. Faced as we were by a tragedy we could neither properly perceive nor articulate, there was a general turning inward. This film seeks to reverse that process. (SG)
