Expōnēre

Logline: A short experimental sci-fi film on presentation and conservation, ecocide and archives, hyper-objects and interconnections, and the vibrations between all. Synopsis: Exposure is to live in a system. Exposure to vibrations. Exposure to vibrating particles. We expose our atmosphere to increased emissions, and it thins and thickens in all the wrong ways, exposing us in turn. We peel back systems and expose. It connotes something missing, a lack of protection. It alludes to a burning a radiation, a fire. A structure crumbles. A structure returns. Expōnēre is Latin for exposure. Expōnēre is Part 2, from the project Come Kingdom Come, which was Part 1. This is no longer about a future apocalyptic. Exponere is the present…imperative, and passive…in a language from the past. It is about survival. It's about hanging on, to something, even in limbo. An uncanny voice tells a bit of the story, in pieces chosen from a random generator…creating, repeating, shifting, recreating. Sounds from archives of various times and places do the same, all under events of catastrophic measure…an earthquake, a tsunami, a fire, an extinction, a meltdown, a cancellation, a silencing, a sun storm. The events are woven into the story and into one Event. Complexity and interconnection, like a composition or ecology. Sound weaves into the image in sync. The character moves in reaction to the sound, affecting the image. The triptych of images of various stages in direct exposure to light morph with time, then pulses again with cicadas in a binaural beat, everything shifting to extremes…one tone to one side continues upwards endlessly, one tone to our right continues down. Our senses work to make sense of this as the story concludes. …. "It wasn’t one event, but a series of events, that sent particles vibrating faster, in strange rapidly changing patterns. Borders and frames, containers and vessels, lines and divisions, vibrated together and blurred. Exposure is inoculation, but the doses were no longer small enough to be safely taken in. So she went underground, with the insects, and the birds that learned how to fly upside down…though there weren’t many of those. There weren’t many of her, not that survival mattered, as what was still around to define her. Some tapes, some text, some partially developed photos, a lot of time. It all jumbled up together, a pile of history in her bunker to shift through and rearrange each time she decided it was a new day. She had to protect the pile, the Keeper of the pile. She couldn’t risk exposure."

Year

2019

Director

Maile Costa Colbert

Duration

13 min

Country

Portugal

Language

English