- byroniceye -
writer, poet, filmmaker, photographer.
(byronic) hero in my own mind.
documenting the inspirations and challenges
of my first novel.
~ satis est ~
(byronic) hero in my own mind.
documenting the inspirations and challenges
of my first novel.
~ satis est ~
-
Dream On
A surprisingly disturbing film, set to a moody, primal cover by Fisher.
-
I was in New Orleans. I was looking for a woman, but I wasn’t working for anyone, I was on my own. I knew her personally. I was tracking her by drops of blood on the street, which was hard, since it had rained recently. I went into a bar where some of her friends were. They seemed unnatural, watching me closely, their eyes dark and bright. They chuckled and laughed at my efforts, amused. “Do you really want to find her? Why? No, stay, have a drink.”
She: was slight of frame and had dark hair. When she looked at me I grew excited, like endlessly meeting her for the first time. My last memory of this girl was of her slitting open her finger with a razor. Her lips parted slightly as she drew in her breath, her eyes lowered as she drew the metal through her skin. “This is all there is,” she proclaimed.
I left the bar and walked around, now turning corners at random. The French Quarter was vividly real, the buildings old and ornate and comforting. It had started to rain again when I found her. She was at the end of the street, and went into a doorway. I hurried to catch up. We were inside some grand hotel. Wet and tired, I spoke with her about the future, about us. She was cool, and a little sad.
She told me I wasn’t ready.
-
A haunted looking young girl took me aside, asked me to help her brother, who was somewhere in the mansion. I wasn’t eager, but I went. It was gloomy, labyrinthine. We had split up, and I was navigating the basement. Inside some rooms I could perceive unspeakable horrors.
The boy was pursued by something. I finally caught a glimpse of him trapped in a kind of alcove, the room itself growing increasingly dim and smoky, blood seeping from the walls and forming obscene, threatening images. The boy cowered, could not speak. All color faded from the room, and then all light. I could hear low ripping sounds from within. Panicked, I left. I urged the girl to leave also. “I didn’t think it would be that bad,” I told her.
-
She seemed very frightened. Her eye and head movements were childlike, exaggerated; her expressions were infantile and she seemed barely cognizent of the questioning process. She had short cropped hair, badly done, as if no one had wanted to bother. She was crying at times, shaking, and recoiled from what appeared to be many people in the room.
At one point the questioning must have become too much for her: she started an intermittent convulsing, almost like powerful hiccups, and her face became abnormally swollen. Suddenly her cheeks puffed out, as if she were going to vomit, and the camera jerked slightly, then refocused. And then…her lips parted explosively, and a great force was unleashed into the room. Particles of moisture from her mouth froze instantly in the air, little bits of white light started zinging around her face, then upwards, and the bits of sweat in her hair and around her scalp turned to ice, making for her a little halo, glowing in the bright light of the room.
There was a high pitched noise, growing louder, and as it reached a painful intensity someone turned the camera with clumsy desperation to the other side of the room. The techs and students were recoiling in horror from a glowing white apparition in the corner; it floated about three feet off the ground, and was beautiful, radiant. There were no wings but there was no face, either. Something was too much for the camera and it instantly burned out.
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Dream On : 5:10
Music: Fisher (from “Uppers & Downers,” Rawfish Records, 2002)
Footage: Paperhouse (dir. Bernard Rose, Columbia Tri-Star, 1989)
Edit: Martin Higareda, Final Cut Pro 5, 2005
